denouement's Xenogears review

"While we oooh and aaah and pat ourselves on the back for catching a covert reference to the life of Jesus, we neglect to realize that if director Tetsuya Takahashi and producer Hiromichi Tanaka were really of the same cerebral pedigree as Immanuel Kant, they'd be writing the Critique of Pure Reason not making a fucking video game."

Bwa ha ha ha ha! I needed that, thanks.

Huh, I guess the original feedback topic for this review was purged like the rest, so I'll say it again: This review sucks. Dismissing Xenogears as overly preachy is a fair point but I'm sure there better ways of doing so than accusing its fans of being shallow idiots who pretend to enjoy it because they don't actually understand it.

That's kind of a 32-bit Square trademark, though. Discover their game plots are half-baked so inject healthy doses of overly-pretentious hyperbole and, when people complain, the defensive fanbase can just insult their intelligence. See: FFt, FFVII, Chrono Cross and, yes, very much Xenogears.

As far as I'm concerned, so long as these attacks are commonplace, then there's no problem turning that around and firing it right back.

'Gears is a fine game, but that apsect about it's plot is right there, open for multiple interipation. I'm middle ground on this; I think some of it was great and some it was utter dick-waving bollocks.

But did Denouement really want to sink to their level, though? It feels like he's reviewing the fanbase more than the game.

He opens and closes with shots at the fanbase, but that's hardly the focus of the review. As I see it, he takes what is meant to be Gears' biggest highlight, the plot, then does what we all do when we bash, tears it to shreds. But he does so better than a lot of us in how he displays a confident, assured tone and a high degree of knowledge on what he feels the game is ripping off.

Fanbase bashing isn't anything new. It was seemingly the cornerstone of ths reviewing community post-EmP and it's still something that goes on. When I said on my Chrono Cross review that its popularity was akin to throwing up a mutated sheep then belitting people who didn;t see it as art, I made the same point as this. I'm sure there's something along the same lines in your FFVII bash, too.

I disagree with your stance that this is the focus of this review, just as I would disagree it was the focus of either of ours. I actually really like this review because it sets out to do what it intended to: to discredit the material it set about discrediting.