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 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.