When Namco first announced Xenosaga for DS quite a few people wondered what exactly the point was. The two PS2 Xenosaga games were mainly known for their finely directed highly cinematic cutscenes that made up about 1/5th of the actual game time and the story they told. Yet on a system such as the DS, having a cutscene/story filled Xenosaga was just impossible due to technical restraints. So what did the DS game become? A remake of Xenosaga Ep1 and Xenosaga ep2 packed together…but without cutscenes/most-of-the-story, and downgrades in almost every category.

The first major problem with XS ep1+2 is that by removing all the cutscenes from the story and cutting the dialogue down to 1/50th of what the original script was you’re left with a shallow empty story that’s not explained well, not particularly interesting, and just sort of bad. This is made even worse because the game seems to have been based on the Xenosaga TV anime, which was very, very bad. The character designs and plot have been made closer in tune to the TV series than the original games and the question that should be asked is why? Did they really hope that the few people who watched the anime would be interested in picking up a DS game that looked and played the same? Did they think that people who own DS systems are big anime fans? Because whatever their justification was, it’s just lost them a large audience of people who thought the anime was dreadful and don’t want a game that has anything to do with it. Maybe they thought the anime was going to turn out excellent and gather a wide audience back when they started production on the XS ep1+2 game? We’ll never know why, but because they chose to make it more like the TV anime the end result is a story that has been dumbed down and changed around to be much worse than the original games.

The next set of problems comes from the presentation. XS ep1+2 seems to have been a Gameboy Advance game moved to the DS as GBA sales died and DS sales rose. Besides the very below DS-standard visuals, this is mostly apparent as the game uses none of the DS features at all. While normally not using touch features is not a big deal since some games just aren’t made for touching, XS ep1+2 has a menu screen that needs to be accessed frequently sitting on the bottom touch screen…but you can’t touch it. Instead you have to hit a button to bring a cursor to the screen and use the d-pad to navigate through the menus. How hard would it have been for them to make the menu screen touch activated? The end result just feels sloppy and seems like they hardly cared about the game they were making. But hey, considering the quality of the title maybe you can’t really blame them.

Graphically the game looks awful. You’d normally think that even if XS ep1+2 was originally destined to be a GBA game that it’d still have nice SNES 16-bit rpg level of visuals. You’d expect great backgrounds and sprites like those of Final Fantasy VI or Chrono Trigger. But no, the graphics look closer in tone to a cell-phone rpg. Tiny non-detailed sprites with very little animation move around boring non-detailed backgrounds. While the game does indeed take you through most of the locations from XS Ep1 and XS Ep2, you’d hardly be able to tell that’s the case if not for the place names since they look nothing like the richly detailed environments of the 3d version.