Xenogears is an RPG released by Squaresoft (who is now Square Enix) on February 11, 1998. Stating your partiality towards it nowadays will make people angry at you, but back then when censorship laws were only just relaxed (and we were young), it felt so rebellious and deep and awesome to be fighting against organized religion and God and angels and to hear things like sex in your videogame. (Now it's just really trite.) But more importantly, Xenogears was also cool because it had giant robots (called 'Gears'), and it allowed you to fight with or without them. One of my most fulfilling moments was when I was able to fight 'gear battles' (where enemies normally required the use of Gears to defeat) without using Gears.
Xenogears is also well-remembered for its notorious 2nd disc. Due to deadlines and lack of funds, the 2nd disc was horribly rushed by the developers, and it turned into with two-hour borefest of slow-moving text that cannot be fast-forwarded. The developers who would later form MonolithSoft vowed to fix this with Xenosaga but alas, that seems to have failed as well.
If you haven't played Xenogears, maybe now is a good time. Or not, if you have a short attention span and/or you have been spoiled by today's graphical standards. Still, you should; otherwise you'd be missing out on one of the more important games of the PSOne era. A PSP would be handy for this cause, you can leave good ol' Disc 2 running while you are in a meeting, and you wouldn't miss anything. Just the story.
I still find it hard to believe that it's been 10 years. I feel so old. :(
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