Be prepared to love Xenogears, and there’s a lot to love. At 70+ hours, you’ll be playing for a long time. But I warn you: not everyone will be “wowed” by the look of this game. And let’s be honest, if you don’t like polygons, you’re probably not even reading this. All polygons aside, Xenogears looks great. You’ll see bright, colorful backgrounds that change with the story, awesome magic effects, anime cut-scenes, and creative animation, all handled with style. The only true problem is in towns and close-up areas. Even with the ability to spin the surroundings, there are times when characters get lost behind a pile of something or down a hole.

The music and sound is done right, but there’s not enough. I loved some of the main themes, but the battle music began to bug me after the 200th monster. Hey Square! A little variety, please?!!

The gameplay is extraordinary. As if building characters, adding on armor, weapons, and magic weren’t enough, each main character controls a giant Gear, or battle robot. Battles are fought in human or Gear form, and each character can summon his or her Gear to finish off a particularly nasty enemy. A Gear really just mirrors its owner’s attributes. In other words, because Fei doesn’t use weapons, Fei’s Gears can only fight hand-to-hand. Human-magic relates to Gear-magic in a similar fashion. As you might expect, there’s a slew of armor and weapons to outfit the Gears, separate from the people stuff. And of course, you have to equip new engines and keep each Gear filled up with gas. Think NASCAR 99 meets Tekken…

Mini-games? There are more than a few. Highlights include a battle arena for the Gears, a card game that plays like “War,” rounding up stray chickens, and a fishing challenge.

Exploration plays a big part in the game, and Square got creative with design. Often, the story requires that characters split up, and each separate party can be controlled, both for exploration and battle purposes. This could have been confusing, but Xenogears pulls it off nicely.

On a difficulty scale of 1-10, I give Xenogears a seven. The most important part of staying in the game is managing the characters’ levels. The challenge comes when you split into teams, and there are many opportunities to do so. Obviously, if one character gets continually left out, there’s no coming back. Several of the battles (especially the Gear battles) are quite difficult, and will require heavy strategy. Also, even with smart management, some of the characters have inherent weaknesses that have to be considered when selecting teams. But, any savvy RPGer will feel right at home and adequately challenged.

All controls are fairly intuitive, and the only tricky part of moving around is being able to see. There’s a fair amount of jumping skill required to navigate certain areas, and I found the control generally lacking. I mean, nobody’s expecting a platformer, but if there’s gonna be jumping, let’s do it right! Unlike the typical battle format of “Fight/Defend/Magic,” Xenogears makes use of a quasi-fighting engine to manipulate the type of attack each character makes. This allows some interesting strategy in fighting, makes every battle fresh, and if that weren’t cool enough, the typical “gain-a-level/gain-a-skill” format is gone. Instead, as an attack combination is used over and over, the chance of learning special “Deathblow” skills increases. It’s kind of hard to understand until you see it, but certain attacks have to be programmed into each character. And the only way to get there is to keep experimenting. The Gears follow a more traditional route, but also have “learned” skills.

The bottom line: If you ever liked an RPG, get emotional when little animated people live, love, and die, get a little hot at the thought of a female robot, and have about 70 hours to spend transfixed in front of the TV, you absolutely must go buy Xenogears.