Is this game any good?

In the prison where Fei has to take part in a battling tournament. World and lore building is great and all, but it's not done very well. That all the endless dialogue is bothering me when I've played a lot of games like this says something.

you are still in the portion of the game that's building up the concepts, the game really starts going into motion soon after kislev

Gears and Eva are nothing alike, outside of the usage of mecha, and having religious subtext. It's more important in Gears, though.

Too bad a lot of JRPGs have trouble with taking 10-30 hours to get good. I really don't know why fans put up with some of the shoddy design principles in the genre.

From what I gather, Eva's narrative is more psychological, and Xenogear's is more theological.

Superb story, gameplay has its issues. Second disc feels rushed.

It really doesn't help that Kislev is by far the worst part of the game and takes forever.

gear's story is good from the start, it dedicated a portion of it to worldbuilding which doesn't appeal to everyone

xenogears has more psychological aspects to it than eva, as well as religious aspects

Pretty much. Gears has its share of psychology, and the topic of trauma, and mental abuse, though.
I feel like this is a major exaggeration. There's just as many JRPG's that have an amazing first half, and then the pacing dims in the second half of the game.

For anyone familiar with the series, and has played both games, how would you compare the overall writing in Gears, to that of XC1/XC2?

I like world building. Trails in the Sky didn't even bore me despite the staggering amounts of text. Xenogears is just not doing it for me.

Both are true. There are a lot with shit starts that get good far too late, and some that start with a bang and just become uninteresting later.

World building is all well and good, but they didn't need some of the scenes to last as long as they did. The game was in desperate need of an editor. Most RPGs seem to be, actually.

superior. XC1 has fuck all for characters/worldbuilding and lore, XC2 did a lot better in this aspect but it's better in part to it having repurposed plotpoints/character arcs from gears and doesn't reach it's heights

Before anyone starts saying Takahashi fell off as a writer, that's not true. Gears had great writing to a degree, but his issue was that he didn't know how to be subtle at all with his execution. Sometimes it really feels like he just slapped together everything he liked, and dumped a lot of lore on you. The Blade titles however, have much more nuanced, and subtle writing, while handling just about the same aspects as Gears does. If you actually analyzed the arcs, or tropes in Gears, you'd find just about find a direct parallel in both mainline Blade games.

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XC2 basically is Gears lite, so yeah. Not true for XC1, though. There's plenty of lore scattered around, but the world building feels dim at times. Character arcs have their direct moments of focus, otherwise they're more subtle. I think the only character who literally had fuck all development, was Riki

Yes, but get ready to do a lot of reading. It is a very slowburn game. And then the last disc becomes basically a visual novel with the occasional dungeon, though Disc 1 is good enough to recommend the game.