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.