The story of Xenosaga III picks up one year after concluding events of episode II. The threat posed by Albedo is over and the original Zohar has disappeared, snatched away by the gnosis' cathedral ship, Abel's Ark. Shion and her friends' lives, however, haven't been uneventful during the intervening months. Six months ago the Gnosis started attacking planets throughout the Federation, sent out via the U.M.N. by a man called Grimoire who was somehow capable of controlling them. While the heroes were able to hunt down and defeat him, Shion found disturbing evidence about Grimoire's affiliation with Vector Industries, her employer, as well as about connections between Vector, U-TIC and Ormus. She also discovered name of a person who had been assisting U-TIC during the Miltian conflict: Suou Uzuki, her father.

After this discovery, Shion felt she could no longer work at Vector and left, starting to investigate her former employer's buried secrets with the assistance of an underground organization called Scientia. This leads us to the opening scenario of Episode III, Shion and her allies raiding a Vector database through U.M.N. in order to obtain some of its secrets.

Attention given to graphics is once again top-notch. The character models - especially those used during movie cutscenes - are very detailed and fluidly animated. Enemies come in wide variety from hostile soldiers to robots and the fantastic Gnosis, though there is some palette swapping evident to increase the amount of enemy "models." Maps and overworld views range from the peaceful Pedea island shore through futuristic cities and technological marvels like Merkabah to the otherworldly realms of the Gnosis.

Little details jump out everywhere, scenery involves lots of animated content with heavy traffic on city streets, waterfalls, energy conduits, gnosis worlds' phenomena and rotating crystalline structures. For the most part, terrain remains interesting and pleasant to look at with only an occasional dull stretch of corridor or repeat use of building blocks. Playstation 2's hardware may be aging but Xenosaga III manages to pull some spectacular feats with it, resulting in some of the best and most beautifully realized environments I've seen in a while.

Attacks, spells and special moves also deserve a mention for their cinematic and graphical effects. They're flashy, some of the specials particularly so, and don't tend to overstay their welcome just to show off.

Unfortunately you are still not given any control over the game's camera. While this allows for the designers to present scenery in interesting pans and sequences, it can make exploration problematic. Some items are simply hidden by camera angles, making you unaware of their existence even if they stand in characters' plain view. In narrow corridors where camera zooms in very close and you move towards the screen you can't see very far ahead, allowing enemies that should be in clear view get a surprise jump on you.

The scenery again contains objects that can be destroyed to open new paths or reveal hidden treasure chests. Chatting with NPCs has been spruced up a bit. Upon approach they automatically pop up their first dialogue box, and you have the option of either ignoring them and moving away or striking up a chat. Sometimes their dialogue contains cue words that can be further queried upon by the press of the square button.

The game's interface is clean and easy to use. The main menu gives quick access to all the relevant information and each page describes actions attached to controller buttons. Character, skill tree and equipment screens list all the relevant data a player needs to do his decisions. The shop interface gives full descriptions of items and offers direct links to character and E.S. equipment screens. The fact that one hardly pays attention to the interface tells how uncomplicated and transparent it is. About the only complaint I could raise is there's no clear way to tell about a character's possible resistances beyond looking at individual equipped items, or checking their onscreen data during combat.

The familiar Xenosaga combat system makes its return in episode III, albeit with some tweaks. Whereas in earlier episodes you had to rely on traps preset on maps, now they can deployed and activated at your discretion to immobilize enemies, either to bypass them without a fight or gain first strike advantage in battle.

In addition to familiar health points, Xenosaga III introduces break points. The character or enemy's break meter fills slowly from normal damage - or more quickly from break attacks - and upon reaching its limit causes the person to go down for two rounds, unable to act and greatly increasing chances of receiving critical damage. As it represents resistance against knockouts, humanoid targets are much more susceptible to break damage than machines. Break damage can be an important part of boss battle strategy. Some are much easier to defeat by breaking them while others will be dishing out very strong break attacks, making break damage mitigation as important as checking party's health levels.

Your party consists of seven characters at most, three of which are in battle at one time. Characters may be swapped in and out freely by sacrificing a combat turn. As characters' abilities develop into different directions, it is sometimes necessary to swap characters to be efficient in battle. Certain boss battles may require this as well, either to bring in fresh reinforcements or to respond to shifts in their strategy. Since every character acquires experience and skill points from victory, it is not necessary to rotate them in and out just for the sake of having them keep up with each other.

E.S. (giant robot) combat is again an important part of Xenosaga III. An E.S. gains no experience or levels, instead relying on parts upgrades like weapons, chassis, reactor and programs for increased performance. For the most part, same rules that apply to character combat are effective in E.S. combat. However there is no boost, break or ether spells here.

Because hit and damage systems are somewhat simpler than in episode II, combat is quite fast-paced. If the party has enough levels to challenge a map, random encounters can be handled in relatively quick manner. This makes traversing maps of low to average challenge feel much less of a combat grind. Speaking of grind, there's no great need to do it at all. I found that the game is exceptionally well paced. If you take care of opponents that story-related areas present, party's levels are never too low to challenge the next set of enemies. There shouldn't be any need to turn around and harvest more experience and skill points, unless you are a perfectionist who wants to open all the skills before the end. Boss battles, as I've implied before, are entirely a separate matter, requiring strategy in addition to just raw statistics, sometimes even proper type of equipment to deal with their most powerful attacks.

Characters acquire both experience and skill points from victories in battle. Experience points go directly to raising character's level, increasing statistics and opening level-dependent abilities. Skill points are used to purchase extra abilities from a skill tree.

Each character has a unique skill tree with two paths to follow. Both paths offer statistic boosts, techniques, ether spells and special attacks tuned to the path's theme. There are a number of stops along the path with four purchasable skills per stop. Only when all four skills have been opened can the next stop be accessed. Once all skills have been bought on a path, a powerful master skill will become available.

In addition to the two skill paths, it is possible to find hidden items that open extra nodes around the skill tree. These can be accessed at any time without having to proceed along the skill tree's paths. They flesh out the skills available on the skill tree and offer additional skills. For example, most of KOS-MOS' ethers spells can only be gained through these extra skill nodes.

Xenosaga III delivers a pleasantly improved soundtrack compared to previous episode's somewhat lacklustre one. Part of the reason is composer Yuki Kajiura now being in charge of whole soundtrack, not merely the cinematic scenes' pieces. Although she still doesn't reach the towering heights of Yasunori Mitsuda's compositions to Xenogears and Xenosaga I, it is an overall improvement to her work on episode II and a good listen.

I was very pleased to note that Xenosaga III pays tribute to the original Xenogears on at least three occasions. They are obvious to any fan of the game that started it all, so I won't spoil the pleasure of discovering them - I'll just say that it is good to see the Xenosaga developers acknowledging their roots. Each of the homages was greeted by a round of applause by me.

The game offers a host of secondary activities like side quests, hunt for characters' swimsuits (and a few extra suits), the return of segment addresses and the special loot they contain, a range of collectable Erde Kaiser summons, and a mini-game called HaKox, a three-dimensional Lemmings-style platform game. The space cruiser Elsa once again sports an encephalon dive device that can be used to revisit previously visited locations. As the game's narrative allows for no returns to earlier stages, a dive is the only means to pick up items or check locations forgotten during initial visit.

Like its predecessors, Xenosaga III features an extensive in-game database. It fills up as the game progresses, with certain extra updates having to be discovered from around the world. The database contains synopses of earlier episodes as well as character biographies, explanations of technical and game terminology, plus extensive historical, cultural and planetary notes for those who seek the deepest immersion.

Load times are nearly nonexistent. Transitions in and out of battle are very quick. Loading new parts of the map is likewise fast, the load times are hardly noticeable. Even movie scenes, with their high-detail character models and lots of voice acting, come up pretty quickly.

As to be expected of a game in Xenosaga series, the story takes the center stage again. Cinematic scenes come in two varieties: a good number of lengthy, fully cinematic scenes using high-polygon character models and mouth movements synched to English dialogue, and even greater number of scenes that use in-game models and maps to act out story sequences. While former play out automatically like movie scenes, latter need a press of the button after each paragraph to proceed. Both, though, are fully voice acted.

While the massive number of story scenes is what fans of the series know to expect, the sheer amount of exposition may feel somewhat daunting to newcomers. Personally I feel comfortable with this; indeed I feel it is almost a mandatory requirement for games with as complex plots as Xenosaga. Companies making flimsy thrown-together plot RPGs should take heed and learn.

The number of story sequences amounts to massive amounts of voice acting. Because you will be listening to the characters' voices a lot, that voice acting needs to be good - which it is. A number of industry veterans cast to leading parts make stellar performances, and the rest can be rated as average at worst. Unfortunately, the story no longer features a half-nutty Albedo; his spirited ramblings were some of the earlier episodes' high points in voice acting.

As foreshadowed at the end of Xenosaga II, the mysterious Vector CEO Wilhelm and his masked allies, the Testaments, step to spotlight in this episode. Wilhelm's grand plan, as well as those of several other series' villains, unfold and reach fruition through the course of this episode. With these come unearthed the last secrets and the last questions are answered. The plot is complex and intricate, featuring many sudden twists, yet holds together remarkably well. Everything featured in these three episodes put together and wrapped up nicely. After the ending credits rolled, I couldn't think of any even remotely major plot point that would've been left unaddressed. All in all, Monolith has done an excellent job holding onto multiple plot threads without losing grasp of any. Without a doubt, on story department this game is one of my favourites of this year. I could ramble on about the story and its twists, the little details, the depth and development of characters, but I don't think I could convince people more than I already have so I'll stop here instead. To sum it all up: Xenosaga III offers the third and final chapter in an epic tale of love, loss, redemption and sacrifice. No fan of RPGs should pass the chance to experience it.