Xanadu: Anxious powergaming

I have a potential problem. Maybe. Perhaps I'm being paranoid, but I'd rather think about potential problems now and become overprepared for a non-issue than ignore potential problems and get screwed later.

Whenever you get a new spell, weapon, or armor, it is basically useless at first. Every usable item in the game has its own experience level, and when you get that new thing, you have zero experience with it and it's only going to provide a fraction of its potential damage or protection until you use it some.

As far as spells go, this doesn't concern me too much. The ultimate spell, Death, is nearly in my reach already, and if it sucks, I can just spam it on something tanky until it doesn't suck.

For weapons, this concerns me a little bit. The halberd I bought for level 5 was fine, but there are seven more incrementally powerful weapons to find. Future weapons might be more scaled to the level where I find them, and enemies in melee range hit back. What happens if, by the time I find that Dragon Slayer, there's nothing left to kill but the Red Dragon, and no weapon-enhancing pickups left to find? I've already cleared five stages and I don't know how many are left.

For armor, this concerns me a lot. The only way to train armor, apart from finding pickups in the dungeons, is by letting yourself get beat up. Which means finding enemies strong enough to do damage, but not strong enough to OHKO you. There's still six armor upgrades to find, and my experience with plate armor in level 5 involved multiple expensive trips to the healer before it started offering any real protection.

 

My solution - I'm going to use my level-warping items to scout ahead to the towers where the good stuff is, and use my invulnerability items to find them. Items don't expire as long as you're in battle mode, and as long as you don't kill all of the enemies in any given screen, battle mode doesn't end!

A test run - there's a Large Shield +3 in level 6

Better stuff lies in later towers, and the Black Onyxes reveal two things - that level 10 is as deep as Xanadu goes, and its tower is inaccessible. The one in level 9, though, will let me make out like a bandit.

But it also has boss rooms best avoided for now.

 

I map out the dungeon with the aid of my item, mainly Demon's Rings and Mantles (and I have only three of the later), then reload and clean house with strategic use of one of each.

This gets me:

• 1 luck-blade (fifth-best weapon)
• 2 Murasame blades (fourth-best weapon)
• 1 reflex armor (fifth-best armor)
• 1 ring mail+2 (fourth-best armor)
• Small shield +5 (sixth-best shield)
• 2 large shields +5 (fifth-best shield) 

I'm not sure how there can be so much more stuff left in the upgrade path when this is the penultimate tower, but I take what I've got back to level 6, and it's not too long before nothing there can hurt me head-on, and I'm doing enough damage with each hit to kill the toughest enemy three times over.

I need a few mattocks to get everywhere but I find some on the monsters here too.

After clearing level 6 and selling my extra loot, I have over $500,000 saved up, and more than half of it easily came from the gear in level 9 (I kept the best stuff for myself, obviously). That's enough to buy Death and all of the AOE spells in the scroll shop, another 154 keys (at which point I have 200 and the guild kicks me out), and still have $13,329 left over.

I can just stop worrying about money now, right? Right?

I make a backup save just in case.

Xanadu: Full plate and packing steel

The lower-right shows the Strider monster's stats.

A trip to level 5 reveals some trends. Monsters here favor melee over magic, but they hit much harder than they ever have before, with a 11,500 strength Snowman being middle of the road here. However, their HP levels are not that high at all!

I also took an opportunity to play around with magic, using a save point to restore after experimenting. Seems there's really only two kinds of spells - projectiles, which can be steered mid-flight and hit one enemy, and area-of-effect spells which hit everything on screen for much less damage per-hit but can be spammed by holding the space bar down. Projectiles can accidentally (or purposefully, i.e. against poison) destroy treasures, AOE spells do not. Beyond that, the only differences are in power and elemental alignment.

As for what's available, the most expensive spell I could buy, deg-corrosion, is freakishly powerful, doing over 8000 points per cast, and that's without any training! Bear in mind it is an AOE spell and it is no problem at all to spam six casts of an AOE spell in the time it takes for a monster to cross two tiles' widths. However, it would cost most of the cash in my bank. The next-most powerful AOE spell cost half as much and isn't half as powerful, though I'm sure it gets better with repeat use.

That said, my well-trained deg-fire is doing a good 3000 points per cast. For a point of comparison, it was originally doing less than 600 per cast. I'm not sure if all spells scale with experience the same, and deg-fire isn't likely to get much better, but I figure I can rely on it for this level, at least, and save my escudos for something bigger.

What I do buy is the best weapon and armor for sale - a halberd and full plate. Not so much because I expect to need them here, but so I can get a head's start in training them. Though a quick look at the experience charts tells me that I'm not even close to the end of the weapon and armor upgrade paths.

It's not the most user-friendly layout, but my short sword and deluge magic experience are maxed out.

 

The halberd is indeed powerful - out of the gate it is doing 8,000+ damage per hit which kills most things here, and I expect that with experience the damage will quadruple. When it doesn't, the armor absorbs about 4,000 damage, which isn't nearly enough for what I'm facing here, so I have to rely on magic a lot. Weaker monsters, when I find them, are allowed to beat me up for some armor experience. But I eventually run into two enemies, Storopers and Myconids, who are much too scary to fight in melee but are also immune to deg-fire (and deluge), so I purchase a weak deg-mittar spell which does work on them... almost unbearably slowly.

  

I find in level 5 that I am required to use a strange double-jumping technique to traverse certain places. It isn't in the manual, and it feels weird to execute, as if you're exploiting a bug that requires frame-perfect timing, but this is definitely intentional. Earlier levels had passages that suggested the possibility of double-jumping, but here it's required.

 

Fighting Storopers in dungeons suuuuucks.

 

But my halberd training pays off!

As I prepare to enter level 6, I now have $122,742 saved up, but there's not much I can buy. Deg-corrosion is still the best magic under this price point; apart from that there's just keys, which will cost $750/each at my current level.

I also review my current inventory:

• 76 keys
• 2 crowns - I need 4 to find the Dragon Slayer sword and win the game
• 3 elixirs, which automatically restore 100% of your HP on death
• 55 spectacles, which partially reveal enemy stats
• 50 red potions, which restore 24% of your HP
• 33 lamps, which illuminate a tower for the duration of your trip
• 6 black onyxes, which warp you up a level (e.g. 5->6)
• 5 fire crystals, which warp you down a level
• 8 mattocks, which destroy a single brick tile
• 12 hourglasses, which freeze enemies in place for a short duration
• 2 winged boots, which let you fly for a short duration
• 3 mantles, which, for a short duration, let you pass through brick walls and doors in the overworld, and through tiled walls in towers
• 14 demon's rings, which grant invincibility for a short duration
• 19 balances, which instantly open all treasure chests on the screen
• 20 pendants, which open cave doors in the overworld, or locked doors in towers
• 29 candles, which turn you into a skeleton for a short duration
• 6 rubies, which double your strength for a short duration
• 5 brown potions, which double your intelligence for a short duration
• 8 mirrors, which double your agility for a short duration
• 2 bottles, which double your charisma for a short duration

 

Notably, the "short duration" items, whose durations are determined largely by your wisdom stat, last indefinitely while in battle mode! And if you're in a tower, there are ways to ensure battle mode doesn't end.

I have a cunning plan. 

Xanadu: Honey tongue, butter fingers

How much to pick my lock, stud?

Xanadu clearly wasn't meant to be beaten on your first try, and I'm restarting with a new build.

First and foremost, I decided that I need more charisma. This seems to be the only stat in the game that never goes up, and at 40, the unending need to buy increasingly expensive keys was just bleeding me dry. Charisma should help with that, not to mention give me a much-needed discount on gear and healing, the latter of which just hadn't been worth it compared to the fixed per/HP cost of resting.

Second, based on what the manual said, wisdom seems unimportant. You need some, or else items don't work, but having more than the minimum just means they last longer. I rarely use durationed items, and most of the time that I do, I only need the effect immediately. Long-lasting Demon's Rings will be missed, but there's only so many of them.

Third, dexterity seems like a dump stat. It governs your chest-opening ability, and again, you need some or you can't open chests at all, but past the minimum you just open them faster.

As it happens to work out, if I take the minimum for wisdom and dexterity, I can max out charisma and have just enough left over to have the rest of my stats be exactly as they were during my first playthrough. I might hate it when chests take forever to open, but money is more limited than patience.

 

Yes, this is also an Ultima trace.

The general price difference is striking, even at character level 1. At 40 charisma, a full 1500HP heal had cost $144. At 100 charisma, it's merely $88! Keys come down from $120/per to $75/per. Both will increase as I gain levels, but hopefully in proportion.

Gear and spells are also uniformly 37.5% off, same as level 1 keys. I'm very interested to see what a magic bottle does here, if anything.

 

I replay level 1, and I'm able to enter level 2 with 38 dirt-cheap keys (they won't be dirt cheap for long!), ring mail, deluge, and 11,500HP. After that, knowing I won't need better gear just yet, I'm able to enter level 3 with 53 keys and 44,000HP. Level 4 is entered with 72 keys and a screen-harming deg-fire spell (and 59K maxHP but I don't bother healing from the current value of 32K).

I wind up using most of these keys on level 4's towers (like I said, you never seem to have enough of them!) but for my thoroughness I have $67,050 in the bank plus a Large Shield+1 and Scale Armor, as well as the various pickups and skill points found exploring, which includes a truly impressive amount of food dropped by the shriekers.

Level 3 has a convenient shopping mall.

 

So now I have a choice. With the gold accumulated, and the use of a charisma-doubling bottle, I could buy any of the following:

• A $12,500 halberd, which is the best melee weapon in the shop, and a $20,000 full plate suit.
• Any spell in the shop except the last two, which are "Deg-Tilte" and "Death." I'm not really sure what most of them do, but the most expensive one I can afford, "Deg-Corrosion," costs $62,500. The preceding two, "Tilte" and "Deg-Poison," would cost $25,000 each.
• 134 keys, which would give me a total of 153. 

I think I'll poke my head into level 5 and see what nightmares await!

Xanadu: Pick poor Robin clean

Another Ultima trace job.

 

One of Xanadu's most agonizing decisions is figuring what to spend your money on and when.

In most RPG-adjacent games this isn't that much of a dilemma. You have spare cash, you can afford something that will make your party incrementally better, whether it be a superior sword, a new suit of armor, a new spell, some training fees, or whatever. The investment makes you stronger and able to take on harder, better paying challenges, and the cycle repeats until you've bought best-in-class gear for your entire party and money becomes useless, unless the game has a bottomless money sink that you turn to for infinite upgrade potential.

Not so here. Money is a limited resource, and if you've farmed all the enemies you can currently handle, you'd better hope your next upgrade is enough to take on the next level. In Wizardry, you might spend your last piece of gold on suit of plate armor, but if you do that in Xanadu, then you might have doomed yourself to a walking dead scenario where you can't harm anything on the next level, all so that they do slightly less damage to you. Or maybe you buy a new spell and find out it's borderline useless. Or maybe you upgrade to a longsword, large shield, and banded mail, and then find out that you needed the plate armor after all because with anything weaker you get stunlocked. Or maybe what you really needed was keys, since you can't open doors with a sword upgrade. Damn keys - never seem to have enough of them!

Compounding the dilemma here is the fact that every time you level up, keys get more expensive, and therefore you buy fewer of them with the money you do have.

To an extent, it makes sense to prioritize buying keys before leveling up, but without knowledge of what awaits you, this is risky. Will I face more locked doors than I have spare keys? Almost certainly - so better to buy as many keys as possible before the price goes up, right? An expendable "bottle" item also temporarily raises my charisma which lowers the prices on keys and gear, allowing me to buy more of them (or afford a better upgrade). But what if the next level introduces something too nasty for my current setup and I regret not having a bigger sword?

A quick visit into level 4 shows that this is, in fact, not the correct decision, as a number of very scary monsters do await there. In particular, there are Liliths, teleporting ghosts who are immune to my physical attacks and shoot lighting bolts for 1000+ damage a piece, and "Ustilagors" who appear in groups of 9, spam the hell out of unavoidable deg-needle spells, and hit for 2000-3000 points of damage up close.

I'll need some group-targeting magic, and the best I can do is "deg-fire" which requires a bottle item and still uses up most of my cash. It's significantly weaker than the deluge spell, but it hits everything on screen instantly and is spammable.

It's boring, but do you have any better ideas?

Level 4 is very twisty and annoying to map out, but the enemies for the most part pose very little threat as long as I keep out of their line-of-sight when spamming deg-fire. Probably the most threatening enemies are an octopus monster whose magic resistances vary depending on the respawn count; when they have fire resistance I must engage with deluge and risk eating return fire; and "Shriekers" who to be fair only do any damage to me because they are among the few enemies weak enough to fight with a sword and shield.

 

The towers are, overall, somewhat easier to manage, as the monsters don't respawn with greater strength.

But sometimes damage is completely unavoidable.

Alas, I run out of keys exploring the larger of the towers. And while I could go back to the thieves' guild and buy more at $1200/per ($850/per with a magic bottle), I can't help but feel I might be able to do better and have a less frustrating experience in the long run with a different build strategy.

Xanadu: I expect you to buy

Curbed-stomped by birds.

Xanadu isn't playing around any more and it's obvious I'm not going to survive by my current combination of stats and gear. Magic is great and all - the deluge spell kills most things, but not everything. One of the first monsters I find on level 2 is a mutant lobster person who is immune and forces me to rely on the much weaker needle spell, and occasionally I'm just going to have to fight things that spawn up close, so I'm screwed if I can't even stand toe-to-claw against a three pound corvid.

I wish I could go back to town and train more stats; I could easily afford to max out STR/DEX/AGL, but there's no way back as far as I can tell, so I'm only going to get better through leveling and buying better gear.

The weak link in my gear is definitely armor - I haven't found a single upgrade from my cloth gambeson, and I've been wary about buying any from the shops. There are so many armors to choose from, and with gold being a finite resource, I certainly don't want to waste money on the leather armor only to find out that by the time I needed it, I could have afforded the studded leather. But I need something better now.

I return to the shopping mall on level 1 and buy the best armor I can afford - ring mail for $3600. Armor also has skill points which are tracked individually and go up as you take damage - another good reason not to upgrade your armor too frequently - so I pick fights with the few remaining denizens of this level and allow them to hit me repeatedly for minuscule damage.

It's not long before they stop doing damage altogether, so I continue the pain training on the weakest monsters of level 2, who do a number on my health but also raise my ring-armor skill considerably - at least until it reaches 100 points. Then, the level's enemies are sharply divided into "enemies that can't hurt me at all" and "enemies that will do thousands of cumulative HP damage before the armor skill goes up by even a single point."

But by this point, I'm immune to all enemies except the krakens and  ravens when attacking them head-on. And after a few more armor points gained, I'm immune to the krakens too. Ravens, with a weirdly high strength rating of 2000, remain suicidal to engage in melee. This doesn't mean I can be careless fighting anything else, mind you - most enemies can still inflict grievous injuries if they hit me from the sides or behind.

Red spots = Invisible, silent teleporters, which can be confusing until you realize they exist.

 

I'm able to clear out the map, purchase roughly 20 keys, and level up considerably (which then jacks up the key price to $720/per) before storming the towers, one of which must be entered by digging through a blocking wall with a mattock, and another, the boss tower, by backtracking to level 1 and re-entering level 2 by way of a different, less easily-accessible door.

Getting there takes some cursed jumping techniques.

 

The towers don't reveal anything except several treasures, so I move on to level 3. 

The self-contained region dominating the left column has to be reached by way of an alternate level 1 exit.

 

Monsters in level 3 aren't too bad at first, with one exception - Beholders teleport and pelt you with rapid-fire Mittar spells, and Xanadu's clumsy controls don't make it easy to close in and hit them without having massive amounts of HP whittled away first. I use up a Demons Ring to clear a pocket of them. Lizard Men are also hard-hitters and more advanced varieties of them cast magic, but Deluge makes short work of them.

There's also a ghostly enemy "Uinal" who teleports around and spams needle spells, but they don't do any damage to me at all. And they drop more Demons Rings, which is great, except killing them also brings you bad karma. Lots of bad karma.

 

Walking around them is really annoying and it's real tempting to just smash them.

When the time comes to take on the towers, I come to realize something about how they're laid out. All of the towers in any given level occupy the same space; a grid of 64 rooms, laid out in a 4x16 pattern:

0	1	2	3
4	5	6	7
8	9	10	11
12	13	14	15
16	17	18	19
20	21	22	23
24	25	26	27
28	29	30	31
32	33	34	35
36	37	38	39
40	41	42	43
44	45	46	47
48	49	50	51
52	53	54	55
56	57	58	59
60	61	62	63

Going east from any room increments by 1, going west decrements by 1, going down increments by 4, and up decrements by 4, and if the end result falls outside the 0-63 range, add (or subtract) 64 to find out where you wind up. Not all of the rooms are meant to be accessible, and not all of them contain anything interesting, but they're all there, and they all obey the same wrap-around rules except for a select few containing the tower exits.

Ultimately, I have a plan to deal with everything I meet in the towers. My short sword, ring mail, and small shield (soon replaced with a small shield+1) are enough to take on most foes with acceptable damage, though the stronger varieties can withstand numerous hits before they go. For the Lizard Men, I use magic. When I encounter Uinals, I walk around them. The few Beholders can be destroyed with a Demon's Ring, though I do worry about running out.

Well, almost everything. There is a boss kraken here, and I can't inflict a single point of damage on him, but he can one-shot me.

Guess I'll come back later?

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.

Silent Service: Tang & final rating

The USS Tang, a Balao-class sub put to service in January 1944, was one of the most successful and most decorated submarines in the war despite her short career, having sunk 33 ships in only five patrols before being struck by her own torpedo. Her captain, Richard O'Kane, was one of the few survivors, and his 1977 memoir Clear the Bridge! became Sid Meier's main inspiration and historical reference for Silent Service.

I will, once again, be using my iron man house rules to play Silent Service's Tang scenario, in which Japan is demoralized and quickly losing their grip on the pacific, and the IJN is largely relegated to defending the shipping lanes that sustain their civilian population. Individually, Japanese destroyers remain formidable enemies, with more experience, more effective anti-submarine equipment and techniques, and greater numbers assigned per convoy. US submarines have also improved, with superior hull construction and more reliable, less detectable torpedoes.

 

In June 1944, Japan is on the ropes, and there will be little shipping activity far from the main islands. I sail due west to the Sea of Japan and very soon spot ships in the Yellow Sea off China. 

 

Day 11, 1600 hours

 

They're sailing west, putting me right in their wake, which isn't ideal - I'll need to do an end-around maneuver to have a chance of interception. Unfortunately, after an hour-long chase, I don't seem to be making any sort of gains on the perimeter of their vision range, and the "convoy search" mode doesn't make tracking them any easier. So I abandon this chase and keep patrolling.

Our positions over time

Day 12, 900 hours

 

I'm alerted to ships, but there's nothing on the map, so I sweep the horizon with binoculars.

 

I wait for movement and reckon their bearing - they're going more or less north, so I'll need another end-around to catch up. This one is more successful.

I submerge, wait, and observe. It's two cargo ships and a single Kaibokan encircling them.

I move a bit closer and wait until both are in range, and fire. One sinks, one does not, but the Kaibokan - thankfully on the far side of the convoy - is definitely on alert, so I slip away before it can pinpoint me.

 

Day 17, 1200 hours

 

A large convoy of at least 6 ships, but it's fast-moving. I lose the trail.

 

Day 19, 1600 hours

Two ships, initially out of my line of sight, but spotted northward. My instincts tell me they're too fast to pursue, but I'm impatient and try.

That was a mistake.

 

The Kaibokan spots me approaching - I dive, and it encircles my diving spot, but by the time it reaches I have plenty of time to vanish at 360 feet beneath the waves.

Day 21, 1900 hours

Dusk. The perfect time for an attack. A convoy of six is sighted at 300 degrees, heading south. Poor visibility means I have to close in 6000 yards before I can identify, but they don't spot me.

Unfortunately, I lose my twilight hour in the time it takes to close in to firing range. And when I do, the game crashes.

 

To be honest, I'm kind of okay with it. This was a boring patrol.

 

GAB rating: Above average. 

I am impressed by the balance of plausible realism and accessibility achieved here; despite my initial apprehension, I did not have any trouble coming to terms with Silent Services' controls and systems, and at the best of times, I felt like a skipper in command of a silent underwater terror, calculating the risks and rewards, not to mention angles and vectors, trying to guess where the enemy will go and figure out how to anticipate and attack without being seen. There's an element of randomness, but it raises uncertainty without making your successes and failures feel arbitrary as it did in GATO. Sometimes victory just isn't possible, and that's okay - part of the game is knowing when to fold!

I do wish that the map view provided a bit more information - so much of your approach depends on knowing the enemy's distance and heading, and if your crew can plot their precise locations on the map and update them every two seconds, then they should be able to tell you this with some precision. Gridlines would have helped a lot here!

But the biggest flaw with Silent Service is a lack of content. I had most of the fun with the five instant action scenarios, but these are just practice modes for the war patrols. Unfortunately, the war patrols do very little to distinguish themselves from each other, and serve as a paper-thin sheet of fabric to stitch a sequence of random encounters. There's not much to do when you're not in sight of your enemies, and the encounters can get awful repetitive. And the crash did sour my impressions a bit, not going to lie. 

So, I don't necessarily recommend Silent Service, but I do recognize it as a quality simulation that largely accomplishes what it sets out to do - give players the experience of commanding a WWII submarine in the constraints of 64KB.