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| 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.
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| 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.
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| 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.
This looks like a really frustrating game design. In my mind, finite resources need to be abundant enough that there is a reasonable cushion for different builds, experimentation, etc. Having to perfectly min/max the way you are describing would turn me off. My recollection of playing the later Faxanadu on the NES was that it was really nicely balanced in this respect with progressive power scaling and a fairly moderate amount of grinding (little to none required if you had good skills in the game but you could farm experience and gold if you wanted to give yourself an advantage in the early to mid game).
ReplyDeleteI'm honestly not sure how much obsessive optimization is actually needed. For all I know, I could still beat the game with my current trajectory. The only thing is, I don't know that.
DeleteI concurwith Dwayne indeed (and with Ahab obviously). I feel I would experience major decision paralysis in that case. Does the game at least allow to save freely so you can roll back poor decisions?
DeleteEh... yes but actually no. You can save any time you want, even during combat, but it costs $100 per character level. But there's also automatic saving whenever you change dungeon levels which overwrites your slot and can't be disabled. And typically you'd choose to buy keys or not *before* scouting out the next dungeon level. But you can also back up your save disk by booting from it - it is exactly the same as the master disk except it isn't write protected, boot sectors and self-copying utility included.
DeleteLong story short, I'm using quicksaves for this function.
I wonder if Ustilagors are supposed to be "astrologers"
ReplyDeleteI'm glad you're playing Xanadu. It's a game that deeply fascinates me, as the progenitor of, well, entire swathes of later genres (action-RPGs being the obvious one), never mind its place in a series that has reinvented itself so many times that it's still going strong as one of the biggest modern JRPG franchises in the world (the Trails games).
ReplyDeleteMy favorite direct descendants, however, are the weird optimization RPG/puzzle games that lean into Xanadu's closed economy. There's one that's quite contemporary to Xanadu itself called Wibarm--probably an attempt at "Wyvern?"--that had real-time 3D dungeons on a computer system that really, *really* wasn't up for the job. But the Big One is Tower of the Sorcerer, which was a freeware game that came out for Win32 in the '90s. It's a seminal work particularly in China and Japan, and there are a ton of "magic tower" games that are essentially direct clones; I like to call them TotSlikes.
Unlike Xanadu, TotSlikes have 100% deterministic combat and (generally) enemies that don't move but which stand in rooms and hallways to block progression. When you choose to fight an enemy, you swing until either you or the enemy dies; your attack does (player_ATK - enemy_DEF) damage to the enemy, and if that doesn't kill them, they do (enemy_ATK - player_DEF) damage to your HP. If you're still alive, you attack back, etc. So you can Do The Math and know exactly how much damage any given enemy will do to you. You often gain money or XP from those fights, and can spend those on healing items or stat upgrades, and due to the way the numbers work sometimes ATK is better and sometimes DEF is and it's all a super-complex optimization puzzle. Tower of the Sorcerer specifically has some Tower of Druaga DNA as well, with some obscure stuff you must do to successfully beat the game that is only lightly hinted at in the game, but other Magic Tower games are usually not quite so obscure.
The pinnacle of the genre is a game called Tactical Nexus, which nowadays is free for the first huge chunk of the game on Steam. It's not uncommon that people have put literally tens of thousands of hours into Tactical Nexus due to its multiple levels of metaprogression, wildly different designs for its towers, and the general addictiveness of trying to figure out a puzzle that's constantly changing out from under you.
One definite result of all of these design choices is that these games are very "Marmite;" people often enjoy them or bounce off of them hard. They also often frustrate pure puzzle-heads such as myself with the exact opacity problems you're experiencing with Xanadu: it's impossible to predict without foreknowledge what stat builds (and key uses, and metakey uses, and...) are going to actually get you through the game, and it's entirely possible to make it 90% of the way through only to be stopped by bad decisions you made much earlier but don't even know how to fix. Various games in this lineage do a better or worse job at easing this. Wibarm does it by dramatically oversupplying you with healing items and other consumables, to the point that by the halfway point you can only ruin the game by your own folly; Tactical Nexus does it by having your map knowledge persist between plays, so you can actually work out how to better optimize a brand new run with much more foreknowledge than you had before. It also makes the math extremely explicit, telling you how much ATK you need to gain to shorten a particular enemy's round count and how much damage every enemy will currently do to you.
Sorry for the enormous wall of text, but this game brings it out in me. You're probably going to do fine with any reasonable stat build (at least, BillBull did in a recent playthrough), so: keep at it! And it's worth checking out Tactical Nexus, but be forewarned that it can become an infinite time sink. I've "only" put several hundred hours in, and I'm basically incompetent at it...
Aw, I was going to mention Tower of the Sorcerer in a later post! But I guess that means I'm not totally crazy for drawing a connection despite some pretty fundamental differences.
DeleteDROD RPG is another TOTS-like. DROD is among my favorite puzzle games of all time, but I never really got anywhere in DROD RPG. Mainly for lack of time; I still haven't finished Journey to Rooted Hold, but also because DROD classic is much more my speed, with puzzles that give you all the information needed to solve them on a single screen (usually).
TBH, Tactical Nexus is almost singularly unappealing to me. I've beaten TOTS, actually, but I never wished the base game had 20 towers instead of 1, and the general aesthetic looks like Excel and RPG Maker had a screen-cluttering baby.
DeleteYup, I'm quite familiar with DROD RPG (and its recent sequel), although I haven't played very far into either.
DeleteI've beaten all three loops of TotS; each has a substantially different endgame. I'll freely admit that I cheated on my first loop by watching a video, but that was years ago now. I should retry it with my greater TotSlike experience.
I 100% understand looking at Tactical Nexus and going "nope" hard. I do believe it's worth trying the free version for a very specific "tower" (it's a single screen), "Tactical mini 1." Yes, it's almost unparseable at first, but you can beat it with zero metaprogression elements, and it's a fun miniature puzzle. But if I looked at it with my non-played-too-much eyes I'm pretty sure I'd just go "naaaaaah" too.
I like the concept of vanilla DROD a lot but the repetition it asks for in many puzzles turned me off. I think I own them all, though (except for maybe the most recent), because I like to support people making interesting puzzle games. My recent enormous time-sink in the genre are the two 14 Minesweeper Variants games, which somehow are full of procgen puzzles that are almost always fascinatingly challenging. And Tametsi is my single favorite puzzle game of all time (and $1 when it's on sale on the Steam store); it's a brutally hard but utterly fair (no-guessing) sweeperlike.