Xanadu: Magic

 

The pit underneath town is a confusing, seemingly infinitely-repeating maze, and I'm not sure how I got out, but eventually I stumbled into a ladder I hadn't seen before and took it down to a passage, leading to a cave into Xanadu's first "level."

 

There are a whole bunch of enemies wandering around here, and touching them switches the main view into an overhead battle screen.

For now, my "needle" spell makes simple work of anything I come across - it's ranged, it's free, it kills just about anything in two hits, and it can be steered mid-flight. I just have to be careful not to let it hit treasure because that destroys it.

Unclaimed treasure also serves as monster barriers which works to my advantage

 

So for now, combat is pretty easy, but there's an unpleasant realization - monster spawns are finite! Which on one hand is actually great; I can clear a level and explore it unharassed, unlike Dragon Slayer where killing anything just means something tougher spawns in its place, and uncontrolled slaughter means you eventually get overwhelmed. But it also means opportunities to gain XP, gold, and treasure have an absolute limit, and the XP part worries me - XP either goes to weapon or magic ability, and if I rely solely on spells, then my weapons don't get any better. What happens if I encounter something nasty and magic resistant?

My magic spectacles reveal that giant bees are fairly weak and I make it a point to train my swordsmanship skills on them. Some damage is unavoidable - you attack by "bumping" them and staying behind them so they can't hit you back seems impossible, but it heals on its own as long as you've got food.

Chest drops help prevent them from surrounding me.

One odd thing I notice is that whenever I kill the last monster in a group with my sword, it leaves a red chest. But if I kill it with magic, it leaves a white chest. Why? The red chests' contents don't seem to be special.

Skeletons are particularly dangerous

 

I clear the majority of the monsters from this level and map it out using my EF1941 mapper, now enhanced for chunky sidescrollers like this one.

 

Some notes:

• Temples aren't performing any function right now. The manual says you level up here, and I have a combined 3360 XP right now, but the priests just go "good luck" and send me out.
• Healers and Inns both restore HP - healers charge a flat fee for a full restoration, inns charge by the point. Right now, Inns are more economical for any amount up to 1,440HP, and considering HP maxes out at 1,500 and heals on its own (albeit slowly), inns are definitely the way to go.
• Most of the other stores are just too expensive to shop at right now. Weapons, shields, magic, etc. costs hundreds or thousands of coins, and encounters are dropping tens. I've got to save them for the necessities, like food and health.
• The Thieves' Guild sells keys at $120/per. Important? Perhaps, and I've already seen four locked doors in this level, and opened one of them with a key dropped by a monster. But right now it's a bit expensive.
• A number of buildings can be entered and explored, though building interiors use the overhead battle mode perspective and controls. All of them are dark, though.
• A lone door in an alcove near the bottom of the map leads to level 2. I'm probably not ready for that yet! 

A few of the items dropped by monsters:

• Red Potion - Consumable for a modest HP boost
• Lamp - Illuminates dark interiors
• Pendant - Opens magic doors
• Candle - Turns you into a skeleton. I'm not sure what the purpose of this is. 

 

Next, I check out the buildings. Items are more plentiful here, but so are locked doors, and monsters are stronger. The lamps are, unfortunately, consumed on use, and expire when leaving, so each trip needs to count.

My progress is gated by fire elementals, immune to my magic needle and devastating up close, so I retreat to heal up and buy myself a Deluge spell - a cost of $2400 which is most of my savings, and I spend the rest on keys.

Haven't I see this before? Yes. Yes I have!

 

'Deluge' will one-shot those flames. It's also a decent general damage spell!

  

A fire burns outside a larger building. And there are multitudes of fire elementals within. Actually, fighting them gets boring really fast.

Surprise! I'm not ready for this yet.

I reload, and do the other dungeons. There are four in this level including the deferred fire dungeon.

Free shield! Buying things is for suckers.

 

Super goblins at a choke point. A good place to use the temporary invisibility of the Demons Ring.

Eventually, there's nowhere left to go but the fire dungeon. I spend what I've got left on keys - they've doubled in price now that I'm at level 2, and then I level up again at the temple before going in.

There's a free short sword in here too, but it does absolutely pitiful damage compared to the dagger. Against the snakes surrounding it, it's doing 1-2 damage per hit when my dagger was doing 70-110 or so. This isn't because it's a worse weapon - it's because my character is completely inexperienced with it! Thankfully, weapons improve with each hit, and poor damage means lots of hits. At least the snakes don't hit back too hard. Before long, I'm doing okay damage with it.

Lots of fire guarding the final exit

I defeated the kraken! No strategy, just tanktics.

My reward for this is a hammer. I'm not completely sure what it does, and it doesn't show in my inventory, but my stats show that STR, INT, and WIS have all gone up from their initial values of 40 to 50, and MGR to 45.

Onward to level 2! Hope I don't get curb-stomped.

Game 463: Xanadu: Dragon Slayer II

The title screen suggests a Gauntlet clone, but this is a solo adventure.

Funnily enough, Falcom's Xanadu: Dragon Slayer II doesn't come anywhere close to meeting whale status, but seemed too important not to play. Unlike its predecessor, a chaotic puzzle-like maze game with resource and stat management that never quite work like RPG mechanics, Xanadu is the first Nihon Falcom game that feels like one. We'll see its sidescrolling action roleplaying style again with more polish, and in an abstract sense, this influenced the direction of Falcom's action roleplaying games to this day even though sidescrolling went out of fashion long ago. It's also probably fair to say that Xanadu had more direct influence on Metroid (and therefore on Metroidvanias) than any other game I've covered yet, though it does not gate your progress through locked abilities.

Although I've only played Falcom's games on a PC-88 emulator so far, I believe that the target platform for this one is the Sharp X1, and this is because of music. This is the first Falcom game to have any during gameplay, and I've found two distinct versions of the PC-88 port that differ by music; one of them uses the Yamaha YM2203 that NEC introduced to the PC-88's second major hardware revision, but the music is awfully simplistic and repetitive for a fairly powerful chip. The other, labeled 'mkii,' only has beeper music and is just awful. The Sharp X1, on the other hand, uses a multi-voice PSG and Xanadu's compositions sound about right here.

These screenshots are going to be rough downscaled. But eX1 has a pretty good RGB filter.

Xanadu is in English, but unlike Dragon Slayer, there's no ingame help screen, and I understand this game can be a pain if you don't know what you're doing. Thankfully, Google helps with translating the manual.

The goal is straightforward - find and kill the giant red dragon who reigns the underworld. This is only possible with the legendary Dragon Slayer sword, which the gods bequeathed to an ancient king, and whose whereabouts are no longer known of except for a vague clue that the answer lies within the crowns of elemental kings. The current king sends you, an anonymous adventurer, on this quest, granting you some basic equipment and a decent amount of gold. Hey, at least you don't need to hunt down your starter sword this time!

 

There's a few gameplay notes on the manual which are not immediately obvious from gameplay:

• Stats are enhanced at the castle training grounds and purchased with gold. You must purchase at least one point in each core stat, or else some of your basic abilities will always fail. The manual urges restarting the game if you forget to do this.
• Combat with monsters switches to a top-down view. It is possible to move without changing your facing direction by holding Shift, and it's possible to guide magic projectiles by pressing Ctrl+directions.
• Xanadu has built-in RAM quicksave, autosave, & quickload functions! But there's a price - a quickload costs you gold, and if you haven't got the gold, you incur karmic debt instead. You really don't want that, so it's probably better just to restart and load your on-disk saves instead. Or rely on emulator quicksaves/quickloads. Autosaves can't be turned off and overwrite manual quicksaves, so be careful about continued play in a doomed session.
• Your are effectively a dual-class character, with independent experience levels in Warrior and Magic User which go up by defeating enemies with weapons or magic, respectively.
• Leveling up has two surprising drawbacks. Vendors will charge you more money for the same items, and you'll also eat more food.

 

Towards the end are some gameplay tips, including a list of three sample characters with their stats, tactics, and eventual demises thanks to having a dump stat. Fighter/magician Laspthin does well in battle but poor charisma means merchants upcharge him on the necessities, and one day, a bruiser faster than himself closes in and combos him to death. Brutish gladiator Stain maxes out strength and doesn't skimp on agility either, but does skimp on intelligence and magic resistance, and pays for it when a wizard zaps him with a powerful spell. Rogue Tomo Yamane pumps up the charisma and barters effectively for some high-end magic stuff on the cheap, but low wisdom prevents him from using these trinkets to their fullest extent, and one day a pair of winged boots fizzle out and drop him into the bottomless pit he was trying to fly over.

So, that must mean I need a perfectly balanced character to succeed, right? The initial retainer buys me 40 points in everything except magic resistance, and with what's left over I can afford 30 points in that.

And from the final trainer, I take the ladder at the edge of town to descend into Xanadu. 

Ok, so these graphics actually aren't good even at full resolution. RGB helps a bit but not much.