Game-Art-HQ

Xenogears Battle System illustrated by EdgeKagami

The big challenge for our April/May Challenge on Game-Art-HQ was to pick one of around 20 available old and new video games and try to illustrate a part of their gameplay.

Xenogears, one of the big JRPGs on the Sony Playstation, was one of the available games and EdgeKagami took the challenge to illustrate its unusual Battle System.

Instead of only choosing an action like “Attack”, you had to press a couple of buttons to perform a “combo” similar to a fighting game. This not only added a bit more action to the system, but also made the sprite-based characters look especially stylish for a home console in 1998.

EdgeKagami did an excellent job illustrating how a battle usually looked!

Xenogears was developed by Squaresoft’s Development Division 3 before their merger with Enix. They released the game in February 1998 in Japan and in October of the same year in the USA. Europe and Australia did not get the game on CD and is also the reason it was never released on the European/Australian PSN stores.

The game is a JRPG similar in size to games like Final Fantasy or Chrono Trigger. It was one of the best looking games of its time and received an amazing soundtrack by Yasunori Mitsuda. While it received mostly very positive reviews and sold over a million copies in 2003, it never received a sequel. Some of the developers later founded Monolith Soft and created the Xenosaga and Xenoblade games which used a couple of symbols, names and battle system features, but have little in common with Xenogears.

Xenogears was first released almost 20 years ago and continues to be named as one of the games that should get a remake or a true sequel.