Xenosaga One or Two?

The Xenosaga series are great, great games. The gameplay is your standard RPG fare with dungeon crawling (although most are pretty interesting and directly story-related), turn-by-turn battle system with a few tweaks such a a bonus point system, "boosts" that allow you to take turns between characters at will and other things. Only thing, I hope you don't mind watching a lot (I do mean a LOT) of cutcenes and FMVs and things. There's a truckload of them, but the good side is that they let the characters develop very well. They're all rather interesting, by the way. Some are not what they seem, believe me. I can't say more without giving anything away.

The story is seemingly rather simple when you play through 1 and 2... but it gets very in-depth and complex as you go in. It's hard to say much about it without giving anything away... but mainly, it's in the future where mankind are looking for a new Earth to replace the current one which is basically nearly inhabitable (they call the new Earth "New Jerusalem"). As you can tell by the last sentence, yes the story is very closely tied to religious symbolism (mostly Jewish and Catholic, can't stay more again without giving anything away) but please, don't let that scare you off. It's a complex story indeed, but don't let that symbolism draw you off. It's very much worth it, I promise. It's my favorite RPG series now. Through the game, you go through all specs of emotions.

All that means of course that you have to play them in order to follow the story. It's worth it, though. Keep in mind that if the battles and things look rather primitive in Vol.1, it gets much better in two and especially 3, where they really nailed it. By the way, there's basically no reference to Xenogears in Xenosaga, so don't go in expecting the new Xenogears. There's only a couple of slight mentions but nothing else.

As for difficulty, I'd say it's average. Some of the optional stuff can be very hard (one optional boss comes to mind right now... 100 000 HP, to give you an idea). But through the main game i's well-balanced; you shouldn't have to power-level if you play well but you can power-level if you want to, if you're that kind of gamer. I tend to be myself, honestly.

Oh, by the way, music wise... it's gorgeous. Especially the sung ones with lyrics and all, by Johanne Hegg, which also sang on Xenogears, if you've played it. Only drawback is that in Vol1 they kept the same battle music through the entire game except for the last boss. Thankfully it's not bad but anyway, that sucked still but got corrected in the other ones.

Well, that's about it. If you have anything else you'd like me to precise, let me know. Either way, all three are essential RPGs if you have a PS2 and are an RPG fan like me. :))

the storyline is exremely diffucult, they make up so much new vocabulary its difficult to understand. Definetely get 1 before u get the second one. Oh and Don't buy it if u dont like confusing games