It took me over thirty hours and a few weeks, but I’ve finally fed the bomb to the second episode in the Xenosaga series.

For those new to the Xenosaga franchise, a quick history: In 1998 Square released Xenogears for the original PlayStation. Xenogears featured an adult storyline that revolved around controversial religious elements (that almost nixed its American release). After a dispute, the Xenogears creator left Square and took a few developers with him to Namco. Because of copyright and trademark issues, the franchise was renamed “Xenosaga”. The first Xenosaga episode premiered on the PlayStation 2 in 2001. The game was marketed as the first of six episodes and it is renowned for its long cut-scenes and strong storytelling. The second game is pretty similar to the first, using the same graphics engines, storytelling structure, and so on.

Depending how you involved and detailed you like your gaming universe, you’re either going to love or hate this game. The latest episode’s title is “Xenosaga II: Jenseits von Gut und Böse”, continuing in the tradition of using Nietzsche-inspired titles to reflect the game’s themes. In addition to Nietzsche, the game throws all sorts of background material at players: Jungian psychology, Gnosticism, Buddhism, Catholicism, existentialism, and a touch of Freud. Xenosaga has been the first game that I’ve felt compelled to play with a laptop at my side opened up to Wikipedia so that I could look up all the new unfamiliar references.

In addition to the torrent of ideas and themes, Xenosaga features the most expansive cast of characters that I’ve seen attempted in a video game. Throughout the game, you work with a core group of eight, each with their own backstory and motivations. Throughout the game, you encounter many other key characters that push the story along. There is a ton of backstory told, and the second episode focuses heavily on the last twenty years leading to current events in the game. Each of these characters has an individual arc and it’s clear that their present roles in the game are not at the end of the arcs, but somewhere in the middle.

So far, each game has taken roughly thirty hours to complete. Take that thirty hours and multiply it by six, and there’ll probably be anywhere from 180 to 200 hours worth of gaming and storytelling before it’s all over. With such a large canvas, the plot is as ambitious as the characterization. The Xenosaga universe is set over four thousand years in the future, where humanity has colonized space. After a mysterious catastrophe, alien beings called the Gnosis appear in regular space and start annihilating humans. The Gnosis are attracted to powerful religious artifacts called the Zohar, which humanity is trying to exploit. The main character in the series is a female engineer working for a large corporation building an anti-Gnosis warrior android called KOS-MOS. After the initial skirmishes, the conflict crystallizes as being a struggle between the Federation government, a breakaway U-TIC organization, the Ormus religion, the Vector corporation, and the government of a planet called Second Miltia. On a micro level, the characters interact as expected, and on the macro level, these giant organizations likewise collaborate, fight, and attempt to outmaneuver each other to win the endgame.

As I’ve said before, if you get into this stuff, Xenosaga is great. If you’re a gamer that likes to get down to the actual gameplay, the storytelling probably overwhelms the gameplay experience. It’s not uncommon to experience fifteen-minute cut scenes, interspersed with five or ten minutes of interactive player time.

The actual gameplay mechanics doesn’t stray far from traditional turn-based RPG combat. You can fight as your main characters and in some areas, your characters pilot giant mecha to fight against other giant robots. There is a traditional set of magic spells (called “ether”) that characters learn while advancing levels. Characters earn general experience points that raise strength and hit points, and they also earn skill points that can be selectively used to gain special abilities such as increased strength, spells, and status immunities.

The combat system breaks from traditional systems by using something called the “boost system”. When characters fight, they build up boost points. Players (and enemies) can use their boost points to circumvent the turn system and move to the front of the line. Furthermore, players can inflict greater damage on enemies by discovering “break points”. Break points are combinations of attacks that stun the enemies and leave them vulnerable. For example, if you attack the enemy’s head then their torso, you may stun them and allow your party members to hammer them while stunned. A large part of winning the game is learning this system and breaking enemies, then boosting to chain together attacks to achieve maximum damage. This injects a bit of real-time thinking into turn-based combat that doesn’t become a twitch contest.

Episode two spans two disks, but it’s relatively short for an RPG. Players can spend twenty to thirty hours from the start to the final boss battle and the game provides players with an optional side quest after the completion of the main game. It’s useful to think of this individual game as disks two and three of a larger set since players will be lost if they haven’t gone through the first episode. If you don’t feel like keeping track of a ton of characters and plot points, you will want to pass on this game. Personally, I really enjoy intricate drawn-out epic stories, so Xenosaga has hit a sweet spot for me.