Episode II picks up soon after the first one left off, which is to say some 4,000 years after our time. Earth is long gone. Humanity's locked in a brutal war for survival against the alien creatures known as Gnosis, and is staking its survival on a mysterious artifact known as the Zohar. The only problem? No one has any idea where the thing is. Our intrepid heroes, though, might be on the right track, and you'll rejoin them as they continue their interstellar search for the Zohar in Xenosaga II.
Xenobattlin'
Because the cutscenes got so much attention, many people don't remember that Xenosaga Episode I had a pretty good battle system. It looks like Episode II will be following suit with a very solid, complex battle engine of its own.
One new idea is stocks, a type of energy the characters can store to unleash different attacks. Each character can have up to three stock units at once, and these are gained by spending turns on a special power-up command. Once one or more stocks are gained, the character can use them to add additional hits to attack combos. Another important new element is the zone system, which lets you attack each foe with either low, medium or high attacks. Each enemy has a specific weakness to exploit. Say it's medium-high; if you execute those two attacks in that order, the enemy will go into the "break" state, where they're susceptible to 1.5x normal damage.
