for each character. Xenogears features both traditional anime and pre-rendered CGI movie clips by Production I.G to illustrate important plot points. The player advances the protagonist and his companions through a three-dimensional fictional world with visitable cities, geographical sites, and other locations spread out across several continents. Some locations exist not on the original world map, but in the sky. At first, the party only travels on foot, but can eventually use a variety of vehicles, including their gears and the "sand submarine" Yggdrasil. Battle system Battle in Xenogears is a variant of the Active Time Battle system found in games such as Chrono Trigger and the Final Fantasy series. Most enemy encounters in Xenogears are random. When a battle begins, there is a transition to a separate screen with a combat interface. Player-characters use a combination of martial arts moves, "Ether" (magical) attacks, and special "Deathblow" combinations, which are learned through the repetition of specific proportions of strong, moderate, and weak hits. All offensive actions use Action Points (AP), costing either three points, two points, or one point, corresponding to the intensity of the attack. Each character can initially use only three AP per turn, but at higher levels, they can eventually use up to seven AP per turn. At a certain point in the game, characters can use "Elemental Deathblows", which attach elemental attributes to physical combos. In addition to being used for attacks, AP may be saved and allocated to Attack Points for combo attacks during later turns. A total of 28 AP may be accumulated for combo attacks. Characters can use a variety of magical abilities for both offense and ally-support. These abilities are limited by the number of available Ether Points (EP), which must be replenished using items during exploration (non-combat) sequences. For most characters, these abilities are attributed to "Ether", a mysterious power to which (presumably) all humans have access. Some characters' magical abilities are referred to by different names, implying differences in their origins. For example, Fei's magic is called "Chi" and Citan's is called "Arcane". While fighting in gears, human Ether abilities are amplified, though some change or become unavailable during this type of combat. Gear battle In addition to hand-to-hand combat, the characters sometimes fight from within giant robots called gears. In gear combat, the limiting factor of AP is replaced by fuel, with each attack consuming an amount corresponding to