Xanadu Impressions

 This game has definitely left an impression on me. I keep revisiting it in my head. I want to write a guide for it; I want to delve deeper into its mechanics and inner workings. I want to share what I've learned with others.

I bought a copy for Nintendo Switch so I can restart without having to shuffle around game save files in my other version, and I'm starting again documenting whatever I can. But I realize that the amount of effort required to learn everything I'd want to put into a guide is probably well beyond my best attention span, and I'll eventually be at risk of not actually finishing or sharing anything if I try to do it all in one guide.

I thought maybe this blog would be a good place to share what I've already learned, what I suspect, and what I continue to unearth as I go.

I figure I'll start with some impressions and discoveries I had on my first playthrough.

Stats

My first game reset was tied to character creation. I figured, without knowing the mechanics of each stat, I'd just throw some gold around haphazardly and see what happened. As part of that haphazardness, I put no gold into my dexterity. I didn't get very far at all before finding how problematic that was.

My current impressions is that the game might be playable, with some knowledge, if a few stats are very low. It might even be winnable with one or two "0" starting stats, though that's an open question that may depend on factors I haven't explored.

However, having a "0" in certain stats gives an immediate, very large disadvantage. I'll summarize the stats and explain.

STR affects the damage you deal with physical attacks. Apparently, if it's zero, you can't physically damage enemies at all. (Maybe viable for a pure mage? But you can't get treasures from enemies.)

INT affects the damage you deal with magic attacks, as well as the range of spells. From what I've read, you can't use magic at all if it's zero. (But it seems like a pure fighter might still be viable, although there are various enemy types that would be rather difficult without magic.)

DEX only affects the speed at which you open chests. It's not clear to me that the speed at which you open chests is a major factor in any strategic consideration in this game. It's actually true that unopened chests can be strategically used as barriers in fights, and opening them fast can be disadvantageous. But, in any case, a zero score makes chests impossible to open at all. If you know where to get gold and food in dungeons, maybe this could work for an expert of the game, but it's a complete dealbreaker for a casual player. I suspect 10 points is the minimum, and that it's more than enough for most purposes.

AGI affects character movement speed, and, I believe, chance to attack first when you hit an enemy head on. Aside from temporary boosts from items, which do visibly speed you up, the game typically handles higher agility by slowing the enemies down. I believe zero agility makes it impossible to hit an enemy physically, similar to zero strength.

WIS affects usage of magic items. Most items are an all-or-nothing affect and this just affects their duration. Other items, like Red Potions, will have their effect increased by higher wisdom. Apparently zero wisdom makes it impossible to use magic items. It does seem like this might still be viable.

CHR affects shop prices. I don't think it affects food and inn prices, and I'm not sure about the healers. But I think every other shop price linearly decreases with increasing charisma. From recent testing, going from 100 CHR to 200 CHR decreases prices by exactly 1/3. I think I read that zero charisma prevents you from buying items. I feel like that might be viable, but it would require very careful planning of your route to make sure you picked up more keys than you used.

MGR is magic resistance. I guess it lowers the damage you receive from magic, although I couldn't casual discern a large effect returning to low-level monsters to grind up my armor. Not sure what zero does for this one.

Those are all the stats you can sink gold into at the beginning. It's worth noting that all of these (except, I think, CHR), can be increased by gaining levels or by finding certain magic items. I assume that even if you start with a zero score, these items will still let you increase it, which would add to the viability of certain build choices. But for most of these, those items aren't available for a good way into the game.

Because of those items, I think that most builds eventually become viable long term; it's in the short term that you have to live with figuring out how to move forward with your choices.

I noted at several points that my weapon strength capped well before I maxed the experience for my weapons. At first I thought I'd hit a bug. Then I thought maybe there was a soft cap related to my STR score. My gut feel now is that it's just a soft cap for each weapon not related to any other stat. I probably hit a similar cap for several weapons without noticing it. If that's the case, a higher strength score may let you cap a weapon with less weapon experience. But that conversely implies that weapon experience may be "wasted" more with higher strength.

I started with 50 STR on my winning playthrough, and felt physically overpowered for most of that run. On my new run I'm trying with 10 STR, but have quickly noticed that, at that level, neither the dagger nor short sword can damage anything until I pick up a few magic gloves.

Opening maze

I've seen this described as a copyright protection maze, which seems egregiously wrong to me. First of all, it's not exactly difficult to get through with no hints, although you may not understand exactly how you did it should you need to reset. Second, and more importantly, it's not mentioned at all in the game manual as near as I can tell.

Instead, it seems meant to introduce the player to the concept of warp tiles, which is something the player needs to be aware of throughout the game. Certain tiles will teleport the player, and they're often placed in just such a way as to make it not immediately obvious that you're not in the same spot you just were. The destination space may look identical to where you just left, until you move a few spaces away. Generally, being able to successfully navigate the game requires taking note of where these warp tiles are.

I don't believe there's a single solution to get through that opening maze. But if you know the layout, you can find a secret shop near the beginning, which lets you buy any of the game's useable magic items. I suspect you can really change the game quite a bit with different selections of many of these items. For example, if you buy a bunch of Black Onyx's and Fire Crystals, who knows how much of the game you could actually complete before levelling your character? How many dungeons could you trivialize with a high Wisdom score and some early demon's rings or hourglasses?

The shop is also right in the path of the shortest way through the maze, I believe.

Enemies

At a first glance, the game gives you the misleading impression that enemies continually respawn. In fact, every enemy group outside of dungeons appears in exactly four successive instances. Each of the four instances has potentially different stats, treasure, and/or experience values, and I think even resistances may be different. (Although it appears that several of the first available monsters in the game may be identical in their four instances.)

Once you clear all four instances, the monsters are gone from the map permanently. There is an absolute limit to the amount of monsters, and thus earnable experience, in the game. (Although I believe there's enough experience avaialble to hit max level for both fighter and wizard classes in a single run. But I'm sure you can still lock one out class from maxing or progressing if you keep gaining experience in the other after maxing it.) The limit is somewhat variable, as the number of monsters that appear in non-dungeon encounters is somewhat random.

In more practical terms, there's a limit to how much experience you can get in any given area. Although, in general, that limit seems much higher than what you need to progress. And it's actually advantageous not to level up until you have to in this game.

The enemy limit also implies a limit to the amount of gold available in the game, with the same randomness implied in that limit. Managing the amount of gold you get in each area is actually probably a bigger consideration than managing your experience. There's eventually well more than enough gold to buy everything you could think to want, but until you get to that point, managing how much you earn and spend from area to area is one of the most important considerations in progressing.

Equipment Experience

This is a relatively simple system on the surface, but there's still a lot of nuance that I observed.

I think starting equipment starts at 50 experience points per item, while earned equipment later on starts with 30.

Although I never paid attention to it, useable items seem to also have some kind of experience level, but I'm not sure if or how any of what I've learned applies to them, exactly.

Weapon and magic experience goes up when you attack or use a spell, respectively. Armor goes up when you take damage, and shield experience goes up when you take damage from the front. In all these cases, it's a random chance whether the score goes up. The chance is per attack, not per enemy or per kill, and it seems unrelated to the damage done. 

(In theory, you could max any weapon against any enemy strong enough not to die in one hit, since all enemies regenerate when you retreat from battle; in practice, this isn't needed but could prove useful situationally.)

The chances for an increase are relatively high up until you hit 100 points for that equipment. After that, they still randomly go up, but the chances are notably smaller.

The effect of experience on your weapon, spell, or armor effectiveness seems to be generally linear in all cases I've observed. Usually, the same increase in experience will correspond to the same increase in attack strength, magic strength, or defense. 

Sometimes it takes more than one experience point to increase a score. In those cases, it's still linear; it requires the same number of experience points to make it increase by the same amount. Interestingly, I've observed that at 10 INT, Needle first increases by 2 after earning 5 points, but after that only ever increases every 10 points, and only in increments of 2, rather than 5:1.

And, as I've noted before, there does seem to be a point at which experience increases stop increasing the corresponding score, a per-item cap that's independent of the experience cap. I want to look more into this in my upcoming run.

Saving

This is one point that's really different from any other RPG I've ever played (although it's a clear successor of Dragon Slayer's system). You have to pay either a gold penalty or a Karma penalty to save your game. This seems to be a system designed to make your choices more meaningful. You can't trivialize consequences by continually saving and reloading.

But the system is a little unintuitive, and seems to be programmed poorly--enough so that it's actually both possible and easy to avoid the penalty every time. It's easy enough that most players will probably avoid it multiple times without even trying to, not realizing they'd done so. Partly because of that, it took me some time to understand the system.

There are actually two types of saves: a hard save done by pressing Ctrl-Q, and an autosave done by the game under certain circumstances. The game treats these differently, and it's important to understand how in order to not accidentally lose more gold than you need to.

Pressing Ctrl-Q is, a little ironically, the safest way not to lose gold by accident. When you use this, the gold penalty is assessed immediately, and only assessed once, no matter how many times you die or load the save with Ctrl-R.

In what is almost certainly a bug (or at least an oversight), if you turn the game off and reload it from scratch instead of using Ctrl-R, you'll resume with the gold you had before the penalty was applied! This effectively neutralizes the penalty. But, if you then die or reload with Ctrl-R, you'll revert back to the state you should have been in with the penalty applied.

The autosaves seem meant to give you some leeway, but have some pitfalls to them that can make them more dangerous than a hard save. The game autosaves every time you move from one dungeon level to another, and every time you enter a boss room (I'm given to understand that the MSX version also auto-saves when you enter or leave a dungeon, but that doesn't happen in the PC-88 version).

When the game autosaves, it doesn't apply the penalty, which would be a little unfair if it did. But, to keep you from using this as a cheaper alternative to Ctrl-Q, the game instead assesses the normal penalty when you die or reload with Ctrl-R.

This gives you a gamble. If you're confident to continue safely, you can get by without a penalty at all until you're ready to do a hard save. If you miscalculate here and unexpectedly die, or find yourself needing to reload manually, you'll still get the penalty. The gamble is that, if that last situation happens more than once, you'll get the penalty assessed each time you reload that save. With careless play, you can potentially pay much more in penalties on an autosave than you will for hard saves.

However, similar to the hard saves, no penalty is ever assessed on an autosave if you load from startup.

It seems to be that the developers don't mean to penalize you for stopping to take a rest, but do mean to penalize you for using a save to prevent or correct mistakes. In the latter situation, the autosaves are potentially more penalizing for a careless player.

The autosave situation is also potentially worse because loading an autosave puts you in an immediate situation to recreate it. If you autosave again after the penalty is applied, then no workaround reloading from scratch will help you recover the pre-save penalty. Particularly in boss fights, this can be an easy way to burn gold without meaning to. (This is also counter-intuitive because boss fights can involve more action elements than other fights, so trial-and-error would be very useful if it weren't for this penalty.)

The gold penalty for saving is 100 gold times your character level. Because of the way gold scales during this game, if you keep the minimum level for your area, your save penalty actually scales much lower than other costs in this game. In general, you can afford to be much more liberal with your saves than I felt I could be when I was first starting out.

Note that, importantly, if you don't have enough gold to pay the penalty, you will gain Karma instead. This can be much worse. You can't level-up to progress with non-zero Karma, and lowering it requires voluntarily taking damage from black potions. Healing that damage, in general, may cost a lot more than the gold penalty for saving.

One note: based on the description on the guide on Gamefaqs, which is for the MSX version, I think that the saving mechanism may have been changed in a few ways for that version, aside from just adding more auto-save points. The writer notes that the manual describes it inaccurately; I wonder if they changed the mechanism without changing the manual. In any case, that guide's full description of saving has some discrepancies from what I've observed and noted above.

One other caution for autosaves: using a Black Onyx or Fire Crystal transitions you to a new dungeon level, and autosaves just the same as if you were doing it with a door. But the autosave happens before the actual transition. If you load these autosaves, you will load in a state where the item is consumed but the effect hasn't happened yet. Make sure you do a hard save after using these if you don't want to risk wasting the item!

Karma

That leads me into this. Karma is the reason I can't claim to have beaten this without outside resources. It doesn't appear to be explained in the manual (there is some possibility that I missed it due to a lack of Japanese proficiency, but I think I pored through it enough to be fairly confident it's not mentioned anywhere you'd expect it to be). It's also counter-intuitive: for all the other main stats, higher numbers reflect a better score. For Karma (KRM), higher numbers are worse.

I got to a point where I couldn't progress without using Black Onyx's, and then ran out of those, and I couldn't figure out why no doors were opening and I wasn't levelling up. I feared I'd triggered some bug, and Googled to find if there was any such known bug, before stumbling on the real reason.

Many sources misleadingly claim you can't progress if you have "too much" Karma. The reason it's misleading is that any amount of Karma is "too much" at least according to other sources I've read.

There are only two ways to increase your Karma: trying to save or load in a situation that would trigger a gold penalty, where you don't have enough gold, and killing certain kinds of enemies. 

In the base game, there are exactly three enemies that are not considered evil, and killing them will increase your karma. They can be quickly identified because their first instance will cast spells that don't actually damage the player. I think the implication is they're trying to scare you off, not to hurt you. (If you do kill them and then engage stronger instances, they do prove dangerous if memory serves).

If you miss that indication, they can also be quickly identified by seeing your KRM score has increased after killing one.

The first one you find is Uinal. It's in level 3, and it's one of the closest enemies to the main door. I had killed every one in the whole level not knowing I wasn't supposed to. Once I learned about the Karma stat online, it was clear that my 400+ KRM score was not something I could fix. This prompted me to put the game down for a whole year before I restarted and finally finished the game.

I think the second enemy is around level 7, give or take, and the last one is in level 10. For the record, none of these enemies is a butterfly. I read several places online that certain butterfly enemies would reduce your karma, but I'm confident that's not true in the PC-88 version.

From what I've read, KRM can only be lowered by drinking Black Potions, which are poisonous and remove half your HP. I had either accidentally drunk or purposefully destroyed every one I'd come across. I think they only remove 5 or so KRM. Maybe there would have been enough later in the game if I'd already known the layout and how to optimize Black Onyx usage, but I ran out of those anyway due to not hard-saving in the new areas.

Leveling

There's a warning in the game manual about levelling up too soon. Although levelling increases your character stats and your HP, it also increases your food consumption and the cost of keys. It seems it's generally best to wait until you've cleared the current area before visiting the temple to level up.

You only gain one level per temple visit, and it seems to be awarded to whatever you have the most experience in. Because I was being careful about not gaining too many levels at once, and because I did level up as a warrior every time I went, my wizard level stayed at level one until I decided to go for broke at the end of the game, gaining some 10 levels almost at once.

After cranking it up, I ran into the first point of the game where I actually had to buy food. You can survive the whole game without needing to do so, just relying on enemies that drop it, if you keep yourself at the minimum level required. But when you max those levels, it goes fast.

Virtually every Japanese guide I could find has a quick mention of buying as many keys as you can before levelling up. From my own experience, I think it's pretty sound advice. Although, there did come a point, around level 7 or 8, where the amount of keys I bought proved well more than I ended up using the rest of the game.

Keys

Keys can be frustrating because they're an additional cost in a resource management game, and there are so many doors that take one but don't actually need to be opened. In dungeons, doors are in the room and not between the rooms; even if you unlock one and pass through, there may be (and often is) another door immediately on the other side that needs to be opened if you want to pass back that way, requiring two keys to open up a two-way path.

For rooms that are locked on the "far" side only, you can enter without a key, but can't exit the same way without using one. It's possible to softlock yourself by entering certain rooms without a key. The game's first boss room is one such room; I had to reset the first time I beat him because I couldn't leave the room. (You have a one-tile grace period where you're standing on the locked door where you can still leave the room after entering, but good luck remembering that in time for all relevant cases.)

In the end, I finished with considerably more keys than I ever would think of using. But I ran out temporarily many times before that. It's hard to gauge optimal key use if you don't already know how many doors are ahead of you in the game. But you also don't really need to be optimal. Just be careful not to run out of gold in an area where you'll need them.


Magic Items

I resisted using many of these for a long time, as I often do in RPG's (why use a limited-use item before you absolutely need it if you can get by fine without it). When I finally decided they'd be very useful for overcoming other bottlenecks I was facing, even my more liberal use wasn't enough to come close to exhausting these.

The exception to this is the Mantle. I don't think I found half a dozen of these the whole game, and most of them were in level 1. In retrospect, it's a little surprising how uncommon these are relative to everything else.

I suspect there are secret rooms in the dungeons only accessible with this item. There are certainly quite a few weapons and armor I never found with thorough, conventional exploration. I hope to learn more about this in my current replay, where I bought a bunch of Mantles in the secret shop.

One benefit of saving these items until the end of the game is that my wisdom score had increased considerably by then. Some of these items are rather potent when they last longer.

One thing I learned late game was that, regardless of wisdom score, the usage timer for each item doesn't go down while you're in battle. That means that, for dungeons that have enemies on every screen, you can leave enemies alive to get huge mileage out of them. Even if you don't leave enemies alive, if you have high wisdom and only spend a short time on the screen after finishing everyone off, you'll get a ton of mileage from them. Once I reached a point where I struggled to find armor that kept up with enemy damage, my hourglasses and demon's rings went an incredibly long way to helping me finish.

One thing I learned was that, after finding all the items that increase Wisdom, and after levelling to the max, a red potion would restore my health completely, in contrast to the small amount they'd heal early on. But it's not worth saving them, either; I must have had more than 80 when I finished the game.

There's enough items in the game that you can very frequently afford not to get them from battles if you prefer to use magic instead. Although it helps to know what the treasure would be.


Boss Combat

Because the game penalizes trial-and-error gameplay against bosses, there are some things I didn't realize until I was forced to learn them, when other methods failed.

Even though you can't equip items during these battles, you can use your currently-equipped item. I don't know if all of them actually work normally; a few that I tried seemed not to. But, for example, you can use Red Potions. At maximum stats I couldn't beat Silver Dragons until I realized that (but I think there are still other ways I didn't get to trying).

(However, items don't work in the final boss fight.)

One thing I didn't realize until nothing else seemed to work is that positioning and attack angles change outcomes; I think they're meant to be more action-oriented fights. Even though positioning matters for regular battles, I didn't think that applied to the boss fights until observing it. You can take advantage of higher jumps to get around the large boss sprites and do more damage than a head-on attack will do. It takes some practice to get it right, but the fights I needed it for were at a stage where gold wasn't so tight, so I could afford the penalty without onerously reloading from scratch every time.

Dungeons

I suspected this after experimenting with the Mantle in level 1, and read something to this effect a few times online without elaboration.

Even though each level has as many as four separate dungeons, each level is really just one interconnected dungeon structure. Furthermore, the structure is the same, and can be mapped into a grid 16 rooms tall and 4 rooms wide. Moving vertically, or north-south, it's a straight wraparound, making it impossible to tell where the true "top" of the grid is without being able to see the code. But moving left-to right, leaving the right side of the grid moves you to the left side of the next row and vice versa. So a hallway that you map as a corridor eight rooms long is really just four rooms wrapping to another four rooms north of it.

This is extremely apparent in, I think, level 7 (I think it was where you got the third crown). In that level, there was only one dungeon, and my map of it looked just like this. When there's no walls preventing movement between areas, it's easy to see.

Conversely, in level 10 there's only one dungeon, but the map that the game gives you seems to deliberately obscure this.

I've personally confirmed mapping the dungeons in level one that they conform to this. Now I need to redo my hand drawn maps to fit that structure. I made a few notes on where the wraparound occurs to aid me when I get to it. It's noteworthy that, in the level 1 boss dungeon, a thorough map will run into this wraparound even without a Mantle. If you're mapping it straight, your map will begin to overlap on itself when you get "back" to the entrance and realize something weird happened.

Misc

Items and spells both run A through Q in shop menus and with a corresponding 17 entries on the inventory screen. Because weapon, armor, and shield shops have fewer entries, it's not immediately obvious that the 17 spaces on the inventory screen aren't filler--until you find the first magic items available in dungeons. In the end, there are indeed 17 weapons, armor suits, and even shields, though I didn't find all of them.

I'm sure there's more than this that's been running through my head, but I'm momentarily exhausted myself putting all this down. I'm taking extensive notes to try and understand the game's mechanics a little better, and see if I can divine the game's formulas.

It's interesting to see that there are apparent discrepancies between the game manual's bestiary data and what I can see with Spectacles in-game. Some preliminary observations seem to suggest that the manual's information may be more accurate in some cases. For example, several early enemies show "DFP 0" with spectacles, which looks like zero defense points. But the manual gives non-zero, differing values for all of them, and I noted that I can damage bees but not boalisks or bats once my STR-10 dagger gets glove-enhanced for 27 attack power. I also noted that I did hit a boalisk exactly once at that level, presumably from the back which I couldn't replicate. It's clear from the manual that side and back attacks give different results, and it's implied that each enemy reacts differently to side and back attacks. I hope to learn more via direct observation.

Xanadu

Last year, I dipped my toe into early Falcom RPGs and a few other games from that time period. I beat Dragon Slayer (version 1.1), played Hydlide until I got stuck, and played through the first Ys game (I didn't do a post for Ys, but that was easily the best of these).

I also tried my hand at Xanadu, the sequel to Dragon Slayer. After a few false starts (the game is kind of designed to ensure a new player will have a few of those) I played through probably not quite half the game before I found myself at another point of forced restart, at which point I lost heart and put it down for around a year. But it stayed at the back of my mind until I finally picked it up a month or so ago, and played it through to completion. It's really quite the game, and I can't stop thinking about it.

I was, unsurprisingly, mistaken in my post on the game Dragon Slayer about references to it being a direct sequel to Dragon Slayer. I viewed a scan of the game box, which comes with the Project Egg version, and realized "Dragon Slayer II" is printed on a seal shown on the game box, which also appears in low resolution on the game's own title screen. The same text is actually printed on the game's title screen, but it's very hard to make out if you don't already know what it says. The game's final level also has "D S II" printed on the back wall of the level. I think there's also a secret code, entering your name as something related to DS II will superpower you early on.

And of course, as I knew even then, since it's implied in the manual, "Dragon Slayer" is also the name of this game's final weapon.

Despite being a sequel, its only real similarity to its predecessor is the skeleton of the game: both games  are action-RPG pioneers with "bump" systems, that are also a long, involved RPG grind to get strong enough to defeat a dragon (both games also involve four crowns). But the details of how they fill in that skeleton could hardly be more different.

Despite Xanadu being, by all accounts, a very influential game, with various elements being emulated by many prominent game series, the whole package is actually pretty unique. I've never seen anything quite like it. Even its own sequels (of which I've currently still only sampled up through number four) don't seem interested in really revisiting Xanadu's core concepts.

Like Dragon Slayer, the core gameplay loop is getting your character strong enough to defeat the dragon at the end. Unlike Dragon Slayer, you can't just walk up to that dragon from the get-go. The game world is much more complex. At first, and as a baseline rule of thumb, you can't progress through the world until your character level increases (though you can bypass that later on with certain magic items). But regardless of character level, you can't reasonably make progress without upgrading and training equipment and/or magic, and/or making use of a plethora of magic items both dropped by monsters or found in dungeons. Also, unlike Dragon Slayer, you collect four crowns before fighting the dragon rather than after.

The game's perspective is rather different. It reminds me of Zelda II, only inverted. I want to use the terms "overworld" and "dungeons", but strictly speaking the whole game takes place underground. The overworld analog, or non-dungeon areas, are all in a side-scrolling view, complete with platforming sections and gravity that can sometimes trap you if you don't have certain magic items to aid you. But the dungeon-analog areas, the castles and towers that you enter, are all in an overhead view. All battles are also in a top-down view. Speaking of being reminded of Zelda, the dungeons in this game really feel like a proto-Zelda dungeon design, complete with locked doors opened with keys, and even doors that only go one-way.

The kicker that really makes this game different is that nearly all of the game's resources are finite. Enemies in dungeons don't respawn, and enemies outside of dungeons only spawn four times total before disappearing.

Coupled with this, you consume food every few seconds. It can be obtained from certain enemies, found in dungeons, or bought, but the former two are in finite supply and gold for the last is also finite. So spending a lot of time wandering aimlessly can put you in a bind if you're not careful.

Coupled even further, saving your game requires gold, forcing you to be very thoughtful about when and where you do it.

Also, the cost of keys, healing services, and saving, increases with each level you gain, forcing you to make decisions about how long you want to spend in an area before trying to move onward, and what to spend your gold on before moving ahead.

Even with the above restrictions, there does appear to be a large variety of ways you can approach the game, and that's part of what makes it fascinating. With limited resources, there are all sorts of different trade-offs one might have to make for a given approach. But the game still seems designed to allow for many of those tradeoffs to work.

You can play as a fighter, or a wizard, or a hybrid of the two. Magic is very effective at keeping you from taking damage, but for enemies to drop anything besides food or gold, they have to be beaten with a weapon. The magic items aren't always necessary, but they can be extremely useful. Deciding how much treasure to use and how much to save is an interesting part of the dynamic. Weapons, magic, and armor have their own individual experience points, and deciding when or not to level any particular piece of equipment also plays into the overall strategy.

You have to pick and choose your starting stats, with limited gold to spend on which to develop (and a choice whether to save some gold for other purchases). Eventually, from level-ups and stat-boosting treasure, most of your stats seem to get sufficiently high regardless of how you start, but your choices can really inform your early gameplay and development with distinct tradeoffs. Leaving any stat at "0" can make the early game nearly unplayable, but I can't help but wonder if specialized challenge runs with certain stats at "0" might still be possible.

There's a basic morality system that doesn't seem to be explained in the game manual. My final game reset was tied to not understanding this system. Unlike other stats, you need to keep Karma down. If you have a non-zero Karma stat you can't gain character levels, which keeps you from freely going back and forth through the game world. You also can't access the final dungeon. There is a small handful of enemy types that are considered non-evil, and killing them will increase the Karma score. Also saving the game without the required gold fee will increase it (also loading an auto-save without that fee will increase it). You can lower Karma by drinking Black Potions that damage you, but like everything else those are in limited supply. There's another tradeoff that you can deliberately kill these enemies for their treasure and experience, but you have to be able to offset that Karma.

It's the type of game that benefits from extensive note taking and mapping, or else from using a guide.  A great deal of the challenge comes from not knowing what to expect. Despite the limited resources and tradeoffs, it's actually more forgiving in the end than I expected. I had a very large stash of extremely useful magic items left over, even after I decided to start using them very liberally around Level 8 of the game. The final dungeon has enough treasure to sell that you could probably buy every spell, weapon and armor in the game you wanted that you couldn't afford earlier; at a minimum you can finance heavy end-game food consumption and reload saves without a lot of fear.

I thought I was going to have another restart at two different points when some of the late game bosses proved to be bottlenecks. I think the bosses are actually meant to be beaten with more action-style gameplay rather than RPG brute force, but I hadn't tried it out enough because of the way the save system discourages reloads. I also hadn't realized that potions can still be used in those fights, barring the final one (and are extremely effective when your Wisdom score has increased sufficiently high). The final boss still requires thinking about your movement and attack angles, even at full power. But thankfully by that time, you have access to large amounts of gold from the final dungeon treasure, to give you plenty of time to try many things in the fight.

I'm not actually sure if the Dragon Slayer is required for beating the final boss, though if not, it would be very difficult to win without it.

I find myself wanting to write more about this game, maybe making a guide. Despite the game being very prominent in RPG history, there are very few accurate resources available for it. I could only find two guides for the game in English, one on Strategywiki and one on Gamefaqs. The former only covered the first three game levels, and didn't seem very accurate even then. The latter is actually pretty good, and fairly comprehensive, which diminished my immediate need to get information out there. But it's also specific to the MSX version, which apparently has some notable differences to the version I played, even if most of the game is still the same.

There's also Scenario II, a sequel expansion for this game, that I haven't purchased yet but am very interested in trying.

I'm playing the third Dragon Slayer game, Romancia. But it's very different from this, building off of the side-view portions and eliminating RPG elements all together to make a side-scrolling action-adventure game (which looks staggeringly like a Zelda II clone, despite being older than that game!). It's interesting in its own way so far. But very different from Xanadu and unrecognizable from Dragon Slayer.

Octopath Traveler First Impressions

A few years ago, I was speaking with my brother about how I felt a little out of the loop on modern RPG's, and was looking for something I could get into that wasn't the latest entry in a decades-long series. Soon after, he gifted me a copy of Octopath Traveler for the Switch, a game he strongly recommended.

I remember trying it, but was quickly overwhelmed by...something I can't even rightly remember.  Maybe it was a sense that I didn't have time to give enough focus to it. Maybe on the surface it looked too different than what I've been used to lately. Maybe something on the surface reminded me vaguely of The 7th Saga, a game I purchased a few years ago that's still in the queue. Whatever it was, the game triggered something in me that kept me from continuing with it at the time, and I continued a focus on older RPG's.

I guess I've come back to where I was. I want an RPG that's in English that I can play alongside my current queue without disrupting it; the Switch is ideal for that. In addition to my brother's recommendation, I have seen that this game has continued with a strong reputation. And, although it seems to have a unique concept, the game art and design looks like a clear callback to the era I grew up in. It seems like a perfect fit.

So I started it up, and played for longer than ten minutes this time.

I imagine that anyone who happens to run across this article is statistically likely to know more about the game than I do, even if they haven't played it. I've read very little about the game and know very little beyond its reputation. 

I gather from what I've read, as well as from just playing for five minutes, that there are eight main characters each with separate stories, played out separately from other characters. I can see that you pick one of them, and play from there.

I don't know exactly how things work from there. Is it like Final Fantasy VI, or Final Fantasy IV: The After Years, where you play various scenarios to completion, independent of each other, in an order of your choice, and then play the rest of the game once they're done? Or is it more complicated than that, having a game experience that depends and evolves differently depending on which character you choose at the beginning, with a full experience depending on multiple replays? Something else?

I picked the scholar, Cyrus Albright. Normally I do a warrior archetype as a default given a choice, which I can see from my first save back when is what I'd picked then. But I decided I was feeling inspired to try something matching my actual persona a little more closely.

Most of the time I played was an introductory storyline confined to the town I started in, solving a mystery of someone stealing books from the archives. 

I played an hour or two, long enough to get acquainted with the area and some basic mechanics, go through an introductory dungeon, and finally leave my starting town. Also long enough to feel like I want to keep going.

The look of the game is very striking to me. I believe this was one of the first games, if not the first, to use the "HD 2D" art style, which has clearly become a beloved style in the circles I wander. It's easy to see why.

When I see it, it makes me think that this is how games might have evolved if visuals had continued to evolve on the same path after the SNES generation, instead of going to fully 3D models and environments. In so doing, it evokes an incredibly nostalgic feel, while still not altogether feeling fully retro. I don't think I've seen a 2D overhead RPG that looked this pretty, even later generation hold-outs like Dragon Quest IX.

I don't know if I've played enough to get a good feel for the audio. The title screen music is very impressive, and so far I like the character voice acting.

The battle system is interesting so far. It blends concepts I've seen from Final Fantasy XIII (a stagger-like "break" system, without the action elements) and Final Fantasy: The 4 Heroes of Light (a "boost" system resembling that game's MP system; there's a game I need to get back to and finish). Interestingly, those last two, aside from Dragon Quest XI, are probably the most "modern" RPG's I've really played before this.

I noticed I couldn't get by without using healing items at the beginning, and only won the first boss fight by the narrowest of margins after running out of healing items. That's actually a little refreshing.

The scholar has an ability that lets him get a little more information out of talking to townspeople, which I find intriguing. But, after the introductory scenario, it seems to be tied to some kind of reputation system that I don't really know much about yet.

I think the game has hooked me enough that I won't convince myself to defer it longer. I'm looking forward to having a game that's less than a decade old that I can get a little more excited about.

Interlude post

 I just wanted to do a quick summary, without going into too much detail.

Since the last round of posts, I've been playing Dragon Quest IV for the PSX. But I've been simultaneously playing the Famicom, NES, and Android versions, mostly to see how the official localizations compare to what I can come up with on my own (with the Famicom version informing me of changes to the PSX version).

This is similar to what I did on the first three Dragon Quest games, but with a large increase to the amount of dialog to parse, due largely to the party chat feature introduced in the PSX version.

After failing to beat Hydlide and Xanadu, I tried out Ys I: Ancient Ys Vanished - Omens, and really, really enjoyed it. I bought the second game, too, but haven't played it due to translation fatigue.

I've been playing through the DS Castlevania games. Those have been great. I seem to be over half-way through Order of Ecclesia. I also played through "Castlevania" on the N64, but apparently got the "bad" ending for taking too much time. That game was more fun than I'd expected based on what I'd heard.

I think I've decided that my next adventure will be with the Switch game Octopath Traveler. I am considering revisiting my blog here because it will be the first current gen RPG I've played in a long time that wasn't Dragon Quest or Final Fantasy. I can't say for sure that I'll actually follow through on blogging about it, but I thought I'd bring things a bit more up to speed just in case.

Hydlide

This post was originally drafted, but never posted, very shortly after the previous post. It wasn't quite finished, and I don't remember my whole train of thought, but I thought I'd try and finish it and move on.

In my tour of trying out old action RPG's, I decided to take a second stab at a game I've actually tried once before, long ago: Hydlide.

I remember seeing this advertised decades ago in Nintendo Power, and I remember hearing mention of sequels. I tried it out some twenty years ago, in the interest (even then) of filling in some gaps in my gaming history.

I ended up being a little frustrated by it. It started out interesting enough, but ultimately I reached a point where I couldn't figure out how to proceed.

I figured time, with additional experience and access to the original manual would present a great opportunity to rectify that.

Unfortunately, though I can't say I have a clear memory of my original experience, I'm pretty sure I duplicated it almost exactly, and this game has left a bad taste in my mouth because of it.

It starts off on a good note. It's a classic adventure game with RPG elements. It really seems like something right up my alley. It's a lot more simple than I expected, with the only controls besides movement being a toggle between attack and defense modes. (I'd forgotten that the NES version also added spells and a button for that). You get various special items, but as near as I can tell they are all automatically activated just by having them.

It's a very small world map. It takes a few power-ups in succession to gain access to all of it, but once you can get through all the opening caves, you can basically go anywhere.

(From here on out, I'm not going to take much care to avoid potential spoilers, so be warned).

And therein lies the problem that I ran into. Once you get through the opening caves, nearly all of the rest of the map opens up. But from that point on, there's seemingly nothing that you can actually do there. You have a relatively engaging first half, followed by an extremely empty second half.

Because the map is small, it's easy to retrace your steps and travel it over and over. After retreading it maybe a dozen times, I can't find a single thing left to do on the map that yields any unknown result at all.

Where that leaves me: I see a dragon-guarded castle on an island that's completely inaccessible. Outside of that island, I've crossed probably every tile of the map multiple times, killed everything that seems killable over and over, tried everything I can think of against enemies that don't seem killable. No more treasure appears anywhere, nothing new happens.

The game just comes to a jarring, screeching halt.

I feel like I must be missing something obvious. It's hard to see how the game would have been so influential if no one had been able to solve it back then. But I've racked my brain so much and still can't crack it. Maybe it was popular precisely because different players had to talk to each other to figure out the things they couldn't on their own?

I've ended up putting it on hold; I haven't touched it since I first drafted this. I want to go back to it eventually and try yet again with fresh eyes; if I can't figure it then I'll probably finally look it up. 

One current line of thought is that maybe the solution to the game is missable; maybe you have a window beyond which the game is unbeatable, if you don't do something within a certain window. I still can't imagine what that might be, but it's worth looking into. It feels like the only thing I haven't thoroughly explored.

Update November 5, 2024:

I beat Hydlide several months back (not entirely without outside help). I'd like to write a more detailed writeup, but I don't have a moment right now and hope to get to it before I forget about my blog again.

Super Metroid, Low% Glitchless

I've often been interested in the idea of game runs that collect a minimum amount of items.

A couple of years ago, in the spirit of getting all endings on Metroid Zero mission and simultaneously testing some limits of the game, I decided to do a minimum percent run on the game, finishing it with 9%. I then did the same thing on Hard mode, but with 10% (Hard Mode gives you fewer missiles, which ends up requiring you to pick up an extra missile pack or alternate item to clear one late-game room).

I enjoyed it enough that I decided to do the same thing for Fusion. Main powerups don't count to the percentage in that game (and aren't avoidable anyway), so I finished it with 1% (there's a missile pack that can't be avoided without exploiting some kind of glitch).

I made aspirations to do the same thing on earlier Metroid games, but I ran out of steam.

When this year's first Nintendo Direct had multiple old Metroid games announced for the Switch, I felt inspired to resume it.

I discovered that Metroid I was beatable with just morph ball, bombs, ice beam, and a single missile pack (but you also get bonus missiles from the bosses in that game), and it was far easier than 10-year old me would ever have guessed.

Metroid II is beatable with just bombs, the ice beam, and a single energy tank. Also, you need to either utilize a technique that allows you to jump in midair after coming out of morph-ball, or else pick up either the high jump or the space jump, to escape certain vertical shafts. The former technique may or may not be a glitch, so I did it both ways. The initial compliment of 30 missiles is enough to beat all the Metroids in the game except the Queen. But the queen can be killed with a small number of missiles and 5 bombs, laid in her belly. The caveat there is that you take unavoidable damage in the belly, around 30 energy a pop. So beating her at low missile capacity requires an energy tank.

The Omega Metroids and more particularly the Queen definitely took some practice, but I was able to do it. The Omega Metroids were a little harder because I didn't collect the extra energy tank until I needed it, but the Queen was predictably the real challenge of the run. I was grateful to do it on NSO, where I could practice with save states (though of course those were only for practice and disallowed for the actual run).

That brings me to the big one: Super Metroid. I have discovered that it's on a whole different level for this type of challenge, and I've been working on it for months now. I think I may finally be approaching the end.

The big sticking point for me has been a true minimalist approach: I'm generally not picking up items until they're strictly necessary...with one caveat so far. I've read over and over again that getting through the Zebetites and Mother Brain requires 3 energy tanks, 2 missile packs, 2 super missile packs, and 1 more pack of either missiles or super missiles. But I'm trying to do as much as I can with no energy tanks, just 5 missiles, and just 5 super missiles.

Most of the run was pretty straightforward. Even though you have to pick up a super missile pack early on, I've found most of the bosses are handily beaten without using them, picking up regular missile refills that the bosses drop. Even Draygon, whom I feared in my youth, is not that hard to beat that way.

Here's the caveat: I wanted to see how long I could go without the charge beam, and discovered that Botwoon, who doesn't drop refills, couldn't be beat with just 5 missiles and 5 super missiles. You do eventually have to pick up extras of each, so I decided to grab an extra super missile pack instead of the charge beam. But in the spirit of minimalism, I've been trying to do the rest assuming I only had 5 super missiles.

After beating Draygon, I did pick up the charge beam, because I had thankfully read that it's required for low percent on Ridley.

The first roadblock I found was just getting into lower Norfair with no Space Jump. My research only turned up one method without using glitches, and that's bomb jumping. But the fire-breathing statues in the room seem almost clearly designed to prevent that option. It's still possible. You can position yourself so that you only need to deal with one of them, at the very top of the room. But it takes a pretty fair degree of precision to time your bombs in a way that misses his fireballs. It took me a few weeks of practice, after which I foolishly believed the rest would be all downhill.

Well, as it turns out, that was nothing compared to Ridley himself.

Ridley, under minimum conditions, is many times more difficult than any other Metroid boss I've fought under minimum conditions. It's not even close. I definitely had the sense of biting off more than I could chew.

Perhaps the biggest obstacle in fighting him is his sheer amount of health. With just the charge beam, it would take 300 hits to kill him. So much of the fight is just a test of endurance.

But he's also tough. He's fast-moving, and he's relatively unpredictable. He's also difficult to follow due to his ability to fly off the screen. And at 99 health, he can kill you in as little as 3 or 4 hits.

Thankfully, do to this game's popularity for speedrunners, I was able to find quite a bit in the way of resources for how to approach the fight. With a lot of research and nearly two-months worth of practice, I'm on the verge of finally being able to beat him.

Ridley has a fairly complicated AI compared to most Metroid bosses, but there are ways to exploit it. The basic strategy is that, while he's doing pogo bounces on his tail, he's not too hard to avoid, and there's a mostly safe spot on the far left of the platform if (and only if) he's facing left while he's bouncing.

The other basic part is that some of his AI routines actually depend on whether Samus is spin-jumping or not, and breaking out of a spin jump in just the right circumstances forces him into starting a pogo-jump pattern, while simultaneously causing him to turn around if he's already in such a pattern and you're behind him.

You have to be roughly at Ridley's height when you break your spin, and it doesn't work (and will often get you hit) if he just finished a pogo sequence and is already repositioning himself for the next one. It also doesn't seem to work if Ridley is too close to the same screen edge you're on, and it's sometimes hard to tell exactly where that cutoff is.

But Ridley has so, so many subtleties to his AI. Even knowing the basic strategy, it takes a large amount of practice to get a good feel for every type of attack Ridley can throw at you. And some of his attacks take a fair amount of precise maneuvering to avoid. Higher skilled players than myself could comment better, but I'm really not sure it's always possible to avoid him at all.

And he speeds up 3 times during the fight. During the last two parts, I'm really not sure that even a skilled player can avoid damage indefinitely. Thankfully (with save state practice), I've developed a method that allows me to finish the fight relatively fast at that point. But I've yet to be able to do it from a save.

I had early on entertained trying to beat Ridley with just the charge beam, but I abandoned that idea long ago.

I divide the fight into four major phases. At the beginning of the fight, Ridley does nothing but pogo jumps as long as you stay near the ground. It's the easiest part of the fight. It took me weeks of practice to even be able to finish that part, but I can often do it now without taking damage. The most dangerous part for me is positioning myself in morph ball mode to roll under him. Most of the time it's pretty simple, but with his variance in horizontal and vertical distance there are still times he can trap you if you're not positioned well and reacting quickly.

The other dangerous part, which happens all through the fight, is when he pogos backwards off the left edge of the platform. He'll do this if you try and turn him around too far to the left. He also often does it later on in the fight if you start him pogoing right after he finishes a leftward swoop. And sometimes he just randomly does it while pogoing right just to spite you.

It's dangerous because of his fireballs. Usually they'll go over you when he's bouncing and you're close to him. But if he's too far left or right, they may hit the floor and you have to jump over it. But if he's far left and his tail is in the lava, his fireballs can hit you whether they hit the ground or not.

You can avoid damage by spin-jumping with a charge shot (being careful not to land on fire that hits the floor), but spin jumping also affects his AI, and when he's that far left something seems to tend to keep him repeating that backward pogo jump into the fire. I've gotten pretty good at avoiding damage until he breaks out of his cycle, and I usually seem to be able to "get" him back to normal by varying my jumps just right. But I can't ever tell if it's from anything I did or if it's just random. Especially when he speeds up, this seems to be one of my likeliest places to take damage. (Thankfully, his fire actually does less damage than hitting Ridley himself).

I'm not sure if breaking spin at that point can have a beneficial effect, but it does leave you vulnerable to his fire. I try it when I think I'll be safe, but it's hard to tell if it has an effect.

The first phase of the fight ends after hitting him with 60 charge shots. (Here is one big difference between myself and most of the videos I watch; most videos have people equipped with the ice-beam which does 50% more damage.) After that, he starts randomly rising off the top of the screen to swoop at you.

The first thing it learning to recognize when he's actually going up to swoop and when he's just bouncing high. You have to watch him very carefully every time he's nearing the end of a pogo phase. If he's just bouncing high, you can usually see just enough of him to tell if he's turning around. If he goes up high without turning around, he's getting ready to swoop.

To avoid the swoop, you have to wall-jump up the wall and then wall-jump over him. The timing is highly variable and he sometimes throws fireballs at the wall, which you can't see until you start jumping. Learning when to start charging is important, as well as the timing for avoiding fire that's already hit the wall. During the wall jump itself, you lose the invincibility, so there's a timing element that's very important here (I still really don't have this totally down). You also have to let go of the fire button when you start your spin jump. Otherwise it fires and breaks spin as soon as you wall-jump. But if you let go of the button, Samus will keep spinning when the wall-jump is finished, and not release the shot until you land or press the fire button.

Going up the wall is the other point where I sometimes take a hit that I didn't want to. He actually doesn't shoot fireballs, or shoots easily avoidable ones, more often than not. But sometimes he shoots them in a way I just can't see how to avoid, especially if he also starts his actual swoop very quickly.

Typically, after he swoops he then begins a dive to try and grab you. One of the best things I found in my research was a video about no-damage runs, showing how you can skip that dive every time by breaking a spin jump at his height. Instead of the dive, he'll either swoop again or start pogoing (usually the latter if the timing is right). Before I learned that, it was often difficult or impossible to tell what he was going to do after the grab attempt. But if you skip the grab attempt by spin jumping to his height and breaking it, because you're nearly at his height, you can almost always see if he's going to swoop or pogo (and if you miss it you can usually tell he's swooping if he takes more than a moment to reappear).

This second part of the fight takes 90 charge shots, and is a real test of endurance. I've gotten to a point where I can occasionally get past the first two phases without taking damage, but usually I've taken a few hits and often only have one hit left by this point. I'm not to the point where I clear this part every time, and I quite probably more often than I should if I take too much damage too early.

The end of that is actually the half-way point by damage, but it's really past that. The next part of the fight is exactly the same, except that he speeds up for the first time. All the same strategy applies. It seems like his horizontal pogoing distance is less variable from here on, so it's safer to move away if you don't see a good bounce, but the window on the good bounces is smaller due to the speed. It takes 60 charged shots to get through this phase of the fight. Despite the increased speed, he's still mostly manageable with the same strategy, as long as I can keep my head. But I'm not consistent damageless at all yet here. The saving grace is that this part is shorter than the previous phase.

Now for the last part. He has 5400 health left, he changes color again, and speeds up again. At this point, the strategies still mostly work, but it's now noticeably more difficult to avoid damage long-term.

However, with perfect execution, my remaining non-charge beam weapons are capable of dealing 5500 damage altogether. So with a bit of good luck, I'm right there.

I count my successful charge shots as I wait for him to do a swoop to the left. When he does one, on my way over him, I lay a power bomb near the middle of the screen. I then immediately do a wall jump off the right wall, and try to lay another power bomb in nearly the same place. I then repeat for the rest of my bombs.

It's entirely possible to hit him twice with each power bomb this way. But the bomb has to be placed just right. Ridley can be trapped between going towards the bomb (or you? I'm not quite sure) initially, then retreating from the bomb, in a way that often makes him take two hits from the bomb.

If all five bombs hit twice, then five missiles and five super missiles is enough to finish him. (Actually only 4 missiles and 5 super missiles, but it's easier to fire all five and the extra damage gives a buffer).

If any of the bombs misses (likely) then I've got to make it up with charge shots. I've usually already gotten a few off while waiting for a swoop. It's 3.33 charge shots, rounded up, for each power bomb hit that misses (and here that extra missile makes up some of that so I can often safely round down to 3 shots per missed bomb if I need to figure it quickly. In any case, I can fire off extra charge shots while waiting for opportune shots.

I want to wait until he's pogoing left to fire my missiles, and due to his speed I may need to do the missiles and super missiles on separate pogo sequences, depending on how far right he is when he starts bouncing.

The last trick is that Ridley doesn't die when his health is gone. He keeps fighting until he grabs you with a lunge attack. And he becomes a lot more unpredictable at this point.

Based off a recommendation from that endurance video, I usually save my last super missile until Ridley does a leftward swoop. Because he always (normally) does a lunge after a swoop, you can position yourself to fire the last shot and then let him grab you. It works most of the time, but sometimes he swings his tail in a way that blocks it.

In fact, what motivated me to finally write all this up is that this morning, for the first time, I did the whole fight up to that last super missile, but he blocked it with his tail. 

After months of practice, any improvement at all to my now-best run is victory. I only need one more successful hit than my current best run has done.

This has been quite the journey for me. It's possibly the most involved action-based game challenge I've ever done, and I wasn't sure when I started if it was going to be beyond me. But I've stubbornly persisted, and I'm close now. I'll post here when I finally finish. I'm eager to move beyond this when it's done.

7-10

I had quite the range of emotions on Saturday morning. I beat him. After two months of practice, I had an amazing run where I didn't take any damage at all until three charge shots before the final phase. The last phase went smoothly, and I won. Everyone in my house heard me cheering for joy.

But...I realized with a slight panic that I'd long since forgotten the need to practice and prepare the return path to the save, and I quickly realized it was less straightforward than the trip to Ridley.

I got all the way to the room before the save, and the Kihunter right outside the room ended up killing me.

I think everyone in my house heard me crying after that...

I'm not gonna shortcut it with save states, even though I know I did the hardest part. On the contrary, knowing I've already done the hardest part is just enough to let me know I can do it again. I've now planned out my return, and I'm confident I've figured out how to remove any significant random element there.

7-13 

I'm delighted and elated to say I did it last night.

I wasn't expecting too; I've been having very poor luck overall with the fight since my failure and I was feeling a little tired last night. But I decided to give it a try and surprised myself getting all the way to the end of the fight, even firing off the last Super Missile to get him to zero health--only to get hit by the tail he was swinging.

Encouraged by my best run since that big loss, I tried again. This time I did less well, taking a big hit in the second phase and dying in the third.

But I decided to round it out to three attempts. This time I took a small fireball hit relatively early, but I managed to keep my focus up anyway and found to my surprise and excitement that I hadn't taken any other hits even well into the third phase. I did my best to keep my nerves down as I successfully made it to the very last part.

He swooped almost immediately and I was able to start my power bombs. I managed to land eight out of ten hits, and I knew I needed to land a few more charge shots. He stayed relatively well behaved in the meantime. I think I took another fire hit, but somehow managed to still keep my nerve.

I still choked on one thing. I wasn't doing my mental math quickly enough, and I fired too many charge shots afterward. So when the opportunity came to fire off my five missiles and four super missiles, to save my last super for a swoop, I found to my alarm that my fourth Super Missile was enough to take him to zero health and trigger his new AI.

But then I had fortune smile on me. Instead of immediately going to the other end of the screen and spamming fireballs erratically, which is what he usually does when I get him to zero health prematurely, he moved up just a few tiles away and immediately lunged, grabbing me and ending the fight before I had any time to react to my mistake.

In all my practice sessions where I took all his health before a swoop, I'd only ever seen him do that once. I could barely process how lucky I felt.

I almost choked again on the way out. The second corridor on the way back is the first real danger spot I had identified before. I had determined the reliable way to get through it was to simply run across the bottom through the lava. It's nerve-racking, but in the time it takes to run across, it only deals around 50 damage with no real random element to it.

But, when I went to do it for real, I hit one of the two enemies hovering over the drop into it. I nearly panicked, and made it to other side with less than 20 energy left.

Thankfully, I was able to shove my panic down enough to realize that from the right side of that room I could refill everything safely, as long as I could stay calm and patient. I had to use charge shots to kill the purple enemies that jump from the ceiling, but they don't come onto that ledge if you don't do anything unusual to change their pattern.

I was able to avoid damage from the hopper enemies by using most of my power bombs on them. I don't know how to clear the right side of that room without taking small damage from the fire, but it's a tiny amount.

The Kihunter before the save point is what killed me before. At one point I had developed a reliable strategy for getting past him, back when I was still working on beating the Space Pirates before Ridley. But in my nervous state a few days ago I couldn't remember it well enough to execute it, tried something a little different, and messed it up.

This time I'd practiced my original strategy. The Kihunter actually doesn't spawn in front of the entrance; he starts on the level above it. But he drops down to it in the time it takes you to get back up there. Regardless of where the floors are, he always moves toward your horizontal position, and since you enter the room from the right he's already fallen to that corridor by the time you can get to it.

But, if you stay on the right side and move left at just the right time, it's possible to manipulate him in to jumping back up to his starting level. And if you stay toward the left, he won't fall back down, clearing the way to the save room. (Of course you can't stay left to go into the save room, but you should be able to see his location above you well enough to avoid him at that point.)

There's still a danger related to your field of view. When he's on the save room level, you can't see him without jumping, and even then you might miss him if he's hugging the ceiling. I seem to recall once where I mistakenly thought I'd succeeded in getting him to the top because I didn't see him in my jump, only to find him waiting for me when I moved left. I think that memory was a big contributor to me choking my first attempt out.

It's also possible for him to go up to the top level and still fall back down immediately after depending on your positioning.

But even those things are really only a risk if you try to rush it. You can jump multiple times to make sure he's not where he shouldn't be before you move left.

It took a minute or two to make him go up and stay up, but I was able to do it. And I'm thrilled. This has taken more effort than any other action-based challenge I've attempted.

Last night I went on to clear all the Metroids in Tourian. This morning, before getting myself up to the needed15%, I did a probing run using the Switch rewind to keep me alive. All this time I haven't really looked to heavily into the why of the required missile/super missile setup, but it didn't take at all long to understand most of it. There are no energy or missles drops in Tourian. I understood that was part of the reason before, but what I didn't totally connect before is that, while there's a missile station to refill your missiles, there's no way at all to refill your Super Missiles. And you can't backtrack at that point either; there's a point of no return.

One missile pack and one super missile pack isn't enough to get past all the Zebetites; if you only have one missile pack then two super missiles are needed for each Zebetite, and there are four of them. One extra expansion of either is enough to get you through the Zebetites.

So the rest of it is for Mother Brain. From all I've read, you need either two missile packs and three super missile packs, or three missile packs and two super missile packs, to defeat all the Zeebetites and Mother Brain. I can see that if you have three missile packs, then you don't need Super Missiles for the Zeebetites. But you'll have to use at least four super missiles on them if you only have two missile packs.

I've set myself to try it with two missile packs and three super missile packs. I grabbed two energy tanks and one reserve tank, which as I understand should be enough to survive Mother Brain's hyper beam attack. I got the last save and beat the first Zebetite, but that's as far as time allowed me this morning. I'll see this evening just what the final fight will end up requiring of me.

7-17

It feels like it's been more than four days since I started this; maybe that's an indication that I've been playing it too much.

Mother Brain is definitely not on the same level as Ridley, but is still definitely a cut above everything else in the game as far as difficulty in these circumstances.

Quick note: online sources say that you need either 2 missile packs and 3 super missile packs, or 3 missile packs and 2 missile packs. However, I saw one single source that said 4 missile packs would work (and that seems logical to me), and, though I haven't read this online, unless I'm having a massive brain burp in my analysis, I think 1 missile pack and 4 super missile packs should work also.

Edit: I'd left a copied save before collecting the extra missile packs so I could come back to investigate this, and eventually did. I don't know where I read that either combination of 4/1 would work, but as near as I can tell both come up exactly one missile short. 

The first six shots of any kind don't damage Mother Brain and only break the glass, and it's exactly six shots regardless of which you use (so obviously regular missiles are optimal there). With the 4/1 combo, you get 6 missiles to break the glass, then 14 missiles and 5 super missiles for damage. Missiles do 100, supers do 300, so you deal 2900 damage, just 100 shy of what you need.

With the 1/4 combo, it appears to work on paper. You need (2) supers for each Zebetite, so you have 12 left for Mother Brain. 5 missiles and 1 super missile to break the glass, then 11 super missiles is enough to drain all her health with one left over. The catch here is that draining her health is not the only win condition. You also need to finish breaking the jar. Hits on Mother Brain through the glass count towards breaking this, but it takes 18 hits regardless of missile type to fully break it, including those first 6. So even though you can drain her health with 10 super missiles, you still need a minimum of 2 more successful shots to win, and you again come up one missile short. End Edit.

Basically, that's what's needed to get through the Zebetites and Mother Brain's first form. You can refill your missiles as many times as you need, but there's no way to refill Super Missiles. If you have enough missiles to kill the Zebetites, you'll have a lower maximum of Super Missiles to use against Mother Brain. If you have lower missiles and more maximum Super Missiles, you'll have to use some Super Missiles on the Zebetites and will consequently have fewer available for Mother Brain. It seems to balance out to where you'll have almost none of either by the time you beat Mother Brain's first form.

Also, there seems to be a discrepancy in my math. Sources say Mother Brain has 3,000 health, and the first six missiles of either type against the glass won't take her health away. By my calculations, if I start firing everything I have left and don't miss (4 missiles and 10 super missiles), I should end the fight with one super missile left. And one guide I've referenced on Gamefaqs says that's what I should be left with on my current setup. But, if I don't miss, I always have two super missiles left. I don't know what the deal is. 

(Edit: I found my discrepancy; and of course it was something dumb. It's my starting values; they weren't 4 and 10, they were 4 and 11. Not sure why I was trying to use the former; maybe mentally I was shifting from the 15/10 calculation without changing the 10. You should have 2 missiles left over; the Gamefaqs guide is wrong here. It does, however, have the correct leftover value for the 15/10 scenario.)

In any case, once the Zebetites are gone, it only takes a minute or so to get through the room and get through Mother Brain's first form. Consequently, I have not relied much at all on save states for practice. I can usually finish that room with 70+ health remaining, but I've gotten to where I usually reset if it's less than 80. I'm increasingly able to get through with 90+ health, with a handful of perfect 99's in there from time to time. Although, from a practical standpoint, I dont think anything above 91 actually matters as there's nothing that can damage you for less than 20 health. Most of Mother Brain's attacks do multiples of 20 damage, but there's one that does 30. If not for that attack, any energy above 81 wouldn't matter.

Actually, since I wrote that last paragraph in stream of conscious, I should clarify that I've got two energy tanks and a reserve tank behind those. I still have to treat the fight as though it runs from 1-99; if I go below that I can keep fighting for practice, but Mother Brain's final unavoidable attack is unsurvivable if those energy/reserve tanks aren't full (or even, I think, if they're evenly full with zero energy displayed).

I've run the fight too many times in the last several days, and I've gotten pretty decent at it. Mother Brain's AI is pretty basic, and most of her attacks are pretty avoidable. But there's just enough randomness to it that, with a health bar as high as Ridley's, it's hard to finish the whole fight without taking damage. And her blue ring attack damages you even if you're flashing from damage. If it hits you just right you take damage from all four rings for 80 damage, and she can fire it at just the right time to make it virtually unavoidable.

The challenge all but requires you to focus on two different parts of the screen at the same time, which is the biggest adjustment factor for me. You have to watch the bombs she drops so that you know when to jump to avoid them. But you also can't take your eyes off her mouth, or else you won't be able to react consistently in time to her ring attack. Focusing too much on either gives me a guaranteed hit. Thankfully, the bombs have a consistent timing and cadence to them once released, so it becomes easier over time to not watch them as closely.

You also have to learn not to jump too high, except for when blue rings are coming at you. High jumps will randomly get you hit by a laser. Unfortunately, she sometimes releases her blue rings immediately as you commit to a certain jump height, which is what makes them sometimes unavoidable.

It's almost essential to keep an accurate shot count in the fight, because when she drops below a quarter of her max health she abruptly changes AI to start spamming a rather devastating attack, with almost no warning. She doesn't change color like Ridley. She gives a rather quick visual clue half a second before her attack. The attack she spams does 100 damage minimum, so it's an automatic loss if it hits you. It's fairly easy to avoid, but you pretty much have to be expecting it.

I almost got it yesterday at one point. I was within about 25 charge shots of winning when someone around my attempted to get my attention and my concentration broke.

This morning, I did some manipulation to give me a test run on the final part of the fight and escape sequence. I'd figured from past experience that they wouldn't give me too much grief, but I realized yesterday I hadn't factored the lack of a space jump into that experience. But when I tried it this morning, even without the space jump and with notable fumbling, I finished with over 30 seconds left even after saving the critters, and less than half my health gone. It looks like the end is not going to be a problem.

So I may finish this any day now. I'm trying to cut back to three attempts per sit-down with my Switch. I think I'll have this licked pretty soon.

7-18

I did four tries this morning. I came close to the fireball stage on the first try, and got there on the next two. It's the best consistency I've had so far.

Even if you account for the randomness of the rings, I can usually take four hits from full health and still be in the running, and that seems to be getting more and more common for me. It's less if any of those hits are from the eye laser (although if I start over 91, even that attack gets included in my buffer. The trick here is that the rings can do up to four hits at the same time if they hit just right.

Now that I have a bit more experience with the fireballs (I've heard this referred to as hand beam and redbeam in different sources online) I realize that the consistency I thought I'd have based on early runs was misleading. It's easy to time spin jumps to avoid taking damage from the fireballs, but the thing that messes me up is that she still fires those rings at random times. And if I'm setting myself up to dodge  or spin through the fireballs, I occasionally put myself right in the line of fire of the rings. I haven't figured out a consistent way to avoid this. Part of it, I'm sure, is that it's hard to watch Mother Brain's mouth while I'm focused on the fireballs.

I watched one video showing how to avoid the beam and fire back without leaving the ground, and I think I want to give it a try if it seems like something I can do consistently. It involves standing fairly near Mother Brain until just before the shot, then moving to the right to avoid the attack and back again to repeat.

If I can just get consistency on that last part, I'll clinch this.

07-19

Finished it last night, on I think either my third or fourth attempt.

I ended up not using the ground strategy for the fireball portion, as Mother Brain still occasionally fires rings even then. I'd stand just a little away from the wall, fire two charge shots, then spin jump (charged) toward the wall, while carefully watching Mother Brain's mouth.

I had a couple of close calls, but managed to avoid damage throughout the whole portion. That was good, too, because I think one hit from anything would have dropped me below for that part. Actually, I think I took my four hits rather early in the fight, and had thought this was going to be a throwaway one.

When I saw Mother Brain begin charging her hyper beam attack, I was ecstatic. But I had to pause the game. I knew my nerves were high, but it manifested itself in a stronger physical way than I'm used to. My hands felt like pins and needles, like I'd been sleeping on my arms wrong and my hands had fallen asleep but were now coming back. I've never experienced anything like that before, other than actually having my hands fall asleep from leaning on my arm just wrong.

Anyway, a few minutes later, it had calmed and I resumed. I screwed up the shinespark shortcut, and then accidentally went down in the next room instead of up. I started to panic from making such stupid mistakes under pressure. However, I pulled it together and ended with almost the same time left I had in my practice run yesterday, even after saving the critters. There's so much room for error in the escape.

I also have a speedrun on the docket for this game. And, I was going to research the legitimacy of a 100% glitchless best ending run; I think I've read that it's possible but I'm not wholly sure. However, I also feel like I need to take a break from this game for a bit.

8/9 I finished the above run. Not only is it possible, it wasn't even particularly hard. I think my final time was 1:48, well over an hour to spare, even after making some significant blunders that cost me probably 15 minutes.

I don't think I've ever beat this game at 100% in less than five or six hours, which is why I was skeptical of how fast I could do it. It just goes to show that I typically spend a lot more time than I think I do just mucking about.

I also did some analysis on the missile requirements for the 15% run, which I've added into two edits above, each marked with (Edit).

I'm done with this game for now, I think. I was going to move on to replays of Metroid: Samus Returns. But my New Nintendo 3DS, which I got brand new just a few years ago to replace my broken old 3DS, is not working and the local repair shop can't fix it.

Dragon Slayer

 Okay, after finishing Panoramah Toh, I finally took a deep dive into Dragon Slayer.

First thing's first. Panoramah Toh is not actually an predecessor of this game, in my opinion, in any sense other than that it happened to have been written by the same person. Beyond that, there's almost nothing in common.

By all accounts, Dragon Slayer is the first real action RPG. It's a very rudimentary game (actually even more so than Panoramah Toh), but it has a certain addictive quality once you get the hang of it.

I'd like to get one thing out of the way. I'm not totally comfortable playing games via unofficial emulation, but have still done it in cases like Panorama Toh where there's no discernible hope if it ever being playable to me otherwise. I had started out with the same reasoning for Dragon Slayer, only to discover later, almost by accident, that I was quite wrong.

One page I was reading about Dragon Slayer casually mentioned something called Project Egg. After a little research, I discovered that it's a Japanese storefront, similar in principle to GOG.com, that offers an officially sanctioned way to play a plethora of old Japanese computer games, including most of the games that Nihon Falcom built its reputation on (though not Panorama Toh, in this case). There's a small catch; in addition to the purchase fee for the games there's a subscription fee for the site. But reportedly you can still play the games you've bought even if your subsciption lapses, though they won't offer support if you need it then.

Via this site, I was actually able to purchase the original Dragon Slayer. In fact, there were two major versions of the game and both are available, and I could play both of them. This also helped to resolve some ambiguity as to the nature of the ROM I had actually downloaded before (which seems to have been version 2.0 rather than 1.1, which is what I would have preferred to start with. It also resolved a question I had about whether my emulator was running the game too fast (it definitely was!). As a huge bonus, I could also download a PDF of the original game manual!

So, on to the game itself. I've mostly been playing the 1.1 version so far, and it's possible that some of what I say below might be exclusive to that version.

It's a very simple game overall, but there's a learning curve to it. If you had the manual and could read Japanese, that learning curve would undoubtedly be smaller.

The game world is one of the most basic structures I've ever seen in an RPG. There are no towns or castles or anything. There are no NPC's in this game besides the monsters you fight. The world is not super large; you can traverse the whole horizontal and vertical axes of the map in minutes. Covering everything will take longer, but even that isn't super long once you learn and develop your toolset. There are hard boundaries on the north and south of the map, but the east-west axis wraps around on itself. You can initially move in four directions, but once you gain enough EXP you can also move diagonally.

The locations of note are the house you start with, (which, importantly, can be moved), various gravestones from which monsters spawn, various portals that transport you between themselves in sequence, tons and tons of treasure chests, and most importantly, an eponymous three-headed dragon stationed somewhere on the map. The objective of the game is to slay this dragon and take the crowns he hoards back to your house. 

Once you do, you can repeat the process on a different map. Nothing carries over; it's effectively just replaying the game with different obstacles and treasures available. There are, apparently, 10 maps in the 1.1 version of the game, and 20 in the 2.0 version. I've only played the first two so far, without finishing the second yet. The second map has secondary "houses" whose effect is to teleport you to the location of your actual house.

But the dragon is to strong to fight until you grow your stats high enough. The basic gameplay loop is essentially a large grind until you are able to defeat the dragon. It's simple, sometimes very tedious-feeling, but also surprisingly addicting.

When you start the game, you are unarmed, and your first task is to find a sword. There's actually one visible on the starting screen, but it's behind a wall and you have to be creative to get it.

There are actually various swords scattered through the map. It's kind of up to the player to decide how to go about getting one. I found a quick, easy way to use a ring to get the one you see at the beginning, but I've seen various alternate recommendations online.

Collecting more than one sword has no additional effect.

Your house is incredibly important. Going there will refill your health, to either exactly 1,000 or to your current experience total, whichever is higher. If you have any coins, you also trade them in for health and if you have power stones, you can deposit them to increase your strength.

There are four other items scattered through the map that you will want to make use of. The most important are the power stones. These look kind of like little snowflakes. I couldn't figure out what these were for right off (although if I'd had the manual right off I'd have been able to figure it out). Grab these and bring them back to your house; each one increases your strength by, I think, 2500. This is the single most important part of the gameplay after picking up the sword at the beginning.

At first, I thought these were spawning randomly on the map, but that's not the case. There's a set number right from the get-go that doesn't change, but there's a ghost that flies around that randomly moves them to other locations. On my first almost-successful run through the game, I discovered that the limited number of power stones can actually make the map unwinnable if you have enough bad luck against a certain enemy--more on that later.

A very useful early-game item is the cross. If you carry it, you become invulnerable to monster attacks, although you can't attack back either. This can be very useful for searching out a sword at the beginning. The catch: you can get stuck between monsters in a way that leaves you alive but unable to move, effectively soft-locking you. Although, I found that if you drop the cross and pick it up again, it often causes the enemy to move away from you briefly, which can sometimes be used to avoid being trapped.

Another item that I realized the importance of belatedly is the ring. It lets you move walls, giving you access to treasure you might not otherwise be able to get to. That becomes less important as you eventually gain the abililty to destroy walls, but even then you can move them strategically to keep enemies away (you can even block off spawn points if you want to take the time).

But, even more important than all that is the ability to move your house. Since you only realize the effect of power stones from returning them there, you need to move your house to where the power stones are to keep the game from getting too tedious. This also helps keep you safe if you start running into monsters that are stronger than you.

There are various magic potions scattered around. Each one of these adds to your magic power by one. There are far, far more of these than you will ever need, but you will definitely want to collect a good number of these. I didn't experiment enough with the magic my first time through, because I didn't understand the system, but it's very useful. (Maybe most critically, you actually need magic power to save your game!)

The coins scattered throughout the map are useful early on, when you're still very weak, but their importance seems to drop off dramatically once you get some experience points behind you. You take the coins to your home to exchange them for HP. But even without coins, you will still gain enough HP to match your current EXP, so the coin effect becomes comparably small over time.

Lastly, there are keys. You want to find and keep one of these nearby at all times. You need to use them to open the chests you see laying around. Many of the power stones are in the chests, I don't think there's enough outside of chests to get you to victory (though that could vary by map, I suppose).

I guess there's one more thing: not an item per se, but a skeleton that attaches itself to you if you walk over or near it. It's a curse that keeps you from using any magic. You can get rid of it by walking into your house or a teleporter. I've also heard that walking over crosses destroys it, but I don't think that works in version 1.1.

Any item on the map, as well as any item you're carrying (except the sword) can be stolen and moved to a new location by a ghost).

So, then we get to the enemies. Combat involves walking into a space that is occupied by an enemy. You then damage them based on the difference between your strength and their defense. If your strength is lower than their defense, or if you don't have a sword yet, you do 10 damage (except, it seems, for the 3-headed dragon, which is invulnerable until your strength exceeds its defense).

The same is true in reverse, but your own defense is equivalent to your EXP total. The HP you gain from going to your house also increases with your EXP total. So your survivability directly ramps up as your EXP increases. 

Typically, each time you kill an enemy, a higher level enemy will spawn at the nearest grave. Although it's tempting to grind against the strongest enemies you can survive, this mechanic makes it advantageous to hunt for weaker enemies, at least until you can get enough power stones behind you to increase your strength.

Some enemies, instead of dealing damage, will actually lower your magic power, your experience, or worst of all, your strength.

That last one creates a bottleneck in the game play. There's an enemy, with red and black coloring, that looks like of like a cloaked vampire or something, that lowers your strength when you attack them. It's extremely advantageous not to let this enemy spawn until your strength is high enough to kill it in one hit. Since power stones are limited in number, enough hits from this enemy can make the map unwinnable.

But, even if you do happen to spawn more of them, they can still be dealt with safely using magic.

That brings me to the last major gameplay element. Once you have a potion and a certain amount of EXP, you can start casting spells. Each spell seems to unlock at a certain EXP threshold. Interestingly, saving your game is also a spell, and seems to be one of the last ones to unlock.

There are two ways to cast spells. You can press Return for a menu, which you cycle through with Space and select from with Return again. Or you can use a keyboard shortcut; the game's intro shows you a list.

Basically, the danger level in the early game drops off considerably once you learn some magic. The jump spell moves you randomly to another part of the map, so if you ever find yourself trapped and/or about to die you can quickly escape. The Return spell does even better by taking you directly to your house (was this an inspiration for the Dragon Quest spell?).

There's a spell to break walls, and anther to "kick" walls down the path, which negates the need for a ring to reach many treasure rooms. I think the former doesn't even actually take any magic power to use.

There's a spell that lets you see a larger view of the map. I think it covers the entire east-west distance, but not the north-south, and it's a great way to zero in on treasure troves or the likely location of the 3-headed dragon.

There's also a Fly spell, last to be unlocked if I recall, that lets you fly around unimpeded by walls and monsters for a limited time, which is great for finding pretty much anything you might be looking for, such as a stolen key, a loose power stone, the dragon, or a crown. It's also an option, along with Return, for quickly getting to power stones far from your house.

Then, there are two spells for dealing with enemies. One is a freeze spell, which permanently freezes the target. This is fantastic if you accidentally spawn the strength-draining enemy too early. It also lets you safely kill enemies with high strength relative to your exp.

The other is the flash spell, which freezes everything on the screen for a short time, letting you get out of a tight spot if you get nearly surrounded by strong enemies.

Lastly is the save/reload feature. This is interesting, and different than anything I've seen. You can't save until you get enough experience points. And even then, when you actually load the save, there is actually an EXP penalty! I'm not sure if it's a percentage or a set amount; I've read both online, but it's there. It's not too big a deal as, once your strength is high enough, EXP comes pretty easily. But it's there.

But it's strange that Restoring also costs MP. That one doesn't require EXP, but if you close out the program and reload, you have to find a potion before you can restore your previous game!

Well, that's about it. The dragon appears invulnerable until you have 350,000 strength. But once you exceed that, it only takes one hit for each of his three heads. You have to attack the heads; the tail will knock you back to your house. You might get burned if you attack the head, and you might lose a lot of health depending on your EXP. But, as near as I can tell, this game actually has some programming that keeps anything from killing you in one hit from full health. So you should be able to beat each head regardless of your current EXP.

It's not over yet once you beat him. Once he's dead, the four crowns he's hoarding get scattered  randomly across the map, and you have to find them and return them to your house (the Fly spell is great for this). But your house also gets moved back to its original location and four graves spawn immediately around it, spawning swarms of enemies rapidly.

Also, magic (at least not Return) doesn't seem to work while holding a crown, so you have to cut your way through these swarms of enemies to return the crown. If your EXP was low when you beat the dragon, this part might be very hard. You might have to drop the crown and use your magic to safely restore your health at your house. But your EXP should go up quickly now as you have all these enemies at hand.

There's at least one enemy that takes more strength to significantly damage than even the dragon. It's a warrior with a shield, who looks surprisingly like Link from the NES game Zelda II. I didn't face him on the first map, but I read elsewhere that there may not be enough power stones on the entire first map to pass his defense (but there's enough on the second map for sure). He also has very high strength, so if he spawns here you might need magic to get past him. There aren't any enemies stronger than him; if you beat him a skeleton spawns to start the cycle over.

I discovered yesterday that strength can't go past around 650,000, and if you try it will actually, catastrophically, wrap around back to around 1,000. I read elsewhere that the same thing happens with experience. So there's not really any reason to prolong the game once you can beat the strongest monsters (and that's not even a necessity by any means).

So, that's pretty much it. The game is a combination of exploring and grinding, where the treasure you find from exploring is actually the more important part of the grind. It's simple, more rudimentary than I'd expected. But it's also surprisingly addictive. I could see a clone or port of this game being well-suited for casual play on a modern smartphone.

I want to dive into version 2.0 a little bit more. There doesn't seem to be a good "version difference" reference online. Some that I've read and/or experienced:

-Starting stats are different, as are experience totals from beating enemies. I believe some enemies have different stats.

-In 2.0, crosses on the ground act as barriers for enemies, and also reportedly destroy the skeleton curse that keeps you from using magic.

-Instead of four graves around your house, monsters spawn directly from your house after beating the dragon.

I'm sure there are more. If I find them, I'll write them here.

I've also read, apparently incorrectly, that the graphics were changed for version 2.0. This doesn't seem to be true, but there was another version of this game after 2.0 that changed the main character graphics and added some maps. I think this was called the "Login" version or something like that.

The last thing I'll type here is that I tried out the first parts of Xanadu, which by all accounts is the sequel to this game (although the game itself and its documentation seem strangely devoid of any reference to that). Based on first impressions, it looks like a completely different type of game from Dragon Slayer, rather than an evolution it. It also looks a lot more advanced. It may well be the true jumping-off point for future action RPG's.