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.