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.