I have not had a lot of experience with games by the venerable game studio Falcom. In fact before now, I had only ever played the first two Y's games. But my first encounter with them happened at a much much younger age. I was a tiny kid during the age of the original NES, and at times a game would come along with a mysterious enough concept that that alone would at least draw my attention for a while. Faxanadu was one of those games. I never got to play it, but I remember watching a friend play before having to go home one day. At the time, my curiosity was satisfied and I moved on...
At least I did until I found Xanadu Next was part of a sale on gog.com. My curiosity peaked, I found not only that the NES game that grabbed that same curiosity was a spinoff from a series I never even knew existed, but there was another such spin-off that instantly felt more familiar to me from the trailer: Tokyo Xanadu eX+. At the time I left both games alone as my backlog was kinda large for a game who's place in the main timeline I couldn't even guess as well as another more enticing, but full price title. Then Tokyo Xanadu eX+ went on a steep sale. And I promised myself I play it next as I picked it up. I kinda lied a bit to myself due to news at E3: PSO2 coming out in the west demanded this title wait till I was done with Ragol. But as soon as I finished with Phantasy Star Online, it was time to install.
Welcome to Morimiya City, a small town that appears to be just another normal suburb of Tokyo. You will find plenty to do here, of course, from night clubs to arcades, to even a temple with a well established dojo. Kou Tokisaka has pretty much lived here all his life. He is a second-year high school student who lives alone on account of his parents taking an extended business trip. Both to help provide for himself as well as to fill in his days, he often takes part time jobs after school. But this night would be different. After getting out for the night, he noticed the class president Asuka Hiiragi wandering the street. A bit odd for her perhaps, but far more troubling were the delinquent gang-members who took interest and began to follow her.
Unable to leave her to her face them alone, Kou chased after everyone, but before anything could start, reality broke down. Literally a rip in reality opened up and pulled the gang members inside. Then he watched as Asuka went in after them. Desperate to not leave everyone to their fate, even as he had no idea what was going on, Kou dove in too only to find himself in a weird other-worldly labyrinth. Where did everyone go? Where did he find himself and just what the HELL is going on?
From this point you will guide Kou through a few corridors to get a feel for moving around before he finds his classmate beating up demons while the delinquents who were giving her a hard time are sprawled on the floor. And with those creatures' deaths, the world melted back to the real world, leaving our lead to question if any of it was real... before Asuka knocked him out with some kind of magic. Waking up in his bed (and woken up by his childhood friend Shiori), he can only draw this conclusion. But this is also when you start to get your first vibe that if you were looking for more action then plot, you may have just picked up the wrong game. You see, dungeon crawling is definitely a major part of the game since as the story unfolds, you will be required to spend a descent amount of time traveling through and fighting in these rifts in reality. But this time is bookmarked between social simulation and cut-scenes.
And while you can choose to skip the simulation portion if you desire (but you shouldn't as it does put you at a disadvantage in some stats), those cut-scenes are absolutely essential to understand what is going on... and some of them, especially while the game is winding up and introducing you to everything and everyone, can take hours to get through. If you have seen it before you CAN fast-forward through, but this need is not going to be often as outside of those dungeons, you can save any time you want and even those dungeons always allow you to save before you go in. In essence it's a nice thing to check off on the box, but little else.
Not that the story you are about to play through is bad. Quite the contrary, it is actually very engaging. Organized like a one season long anime, you will make your way through each chapter as a self-contained smaller plot that together add up nicely to explain the whole picture and how all your team-mates (as well as some others) fit into the greater scheme. Finding this out is a big part of the overall story, but to explain what you will find very early on to get you started Asuka is not just a normal student. She is a member of a shadowy organization who's purpose is to find these rips in reality (called Eclipses), invade them, and destroy the forces within to force them to close before they can absorb anyone pulled inside. Her "spell" was an attempt to erase Kou's memory of the night for his own sake and protection, but for reasons that will become appearant quickly, the spell didn't hold and off Kou goes to actually fight in your first "real" dungeon.
And that part of the game is pretty satisfying. The game will slowly introduce you to mechanics around combat, adding a new one at each dungeon until it you've seen it all, at which point it will leave it to you to find your favorite tactics to combine with the different monsters and even environments you will navigate. The final result is relatively simple, leaving any real depth in how you equip and which members of your team you bring with you/switch to on the fly. But at the same time it brings everything to a fluid balance which is very satisfying to play through for the most part.
I have to bring the caveat up though due to a few very specific dungeons which will demand you handle platforming puzzles in 3D. These can be annoying, especially since arial movement fluidity is made around combat and not these challenges. And in the one or two where messing up will land you in an environmental hazard, this annoyance can quickly become frustrating.
In addition, later in the game tends to use bosses that fit into one of two forms: way too easy to figure out the pattern or pure bullshit to fight. The former tend to fall in line of being able to take abuse, but having only a few attacks that are easy to see coming and respond to, while the latter can be anything from attacks you literally can not get out of the range of and or/leaving the ground you have pretty much unusable, to bullet-hell in 3D where you really dont just not have a lot of room to fight, but can't even really see what room you have. (This last one was really only one boss in the entire game, but she is VERY memorable for it.) It's satisfying to take any of them down, but it can be maddening for the wrong reasons to get there.
Not that you had no warning of this early in the game either. Within the first "in-between" chapter of the game, it will ramp up the difficulty immediately before you are ever given a chance to grind (as RPGs, including this one tend to offer) or really gear up with a boss that will literally knock you on your ass in a few hits. It pulls no punches, except for perhaps the ability to change difficulty as you play at will. You might well take advantage of this and come back for more difficult skill levels if you choose to play the New Game + once you are finished.
But the game also has an exploratory/social part of the structure as well. Most days in-game will follow a pattern of story-at-school, free time, more story, dungeon, rinse and repeat or some slight variant of that flow. And free time is when you can do what you want. You will be given locations you can go to where you can talk to anyone you wish, sometimes unlocking new options in the process. This is also when you can visit any shops to upgrade your gear and even your weapon (called a Soul Device). This is also when you can grind by choosing to replay dungeons to level yourself up and earn gems you can turn in for cash.
You will also be given "time shards" which you can turn in with friends to spend time with them, increasing your connection to that person. This has two purposes: most immediate of which is to increase bonds with the team you will go into Eclipses with. This will in turn unlock extra traits to your super-techniques when you use them with the different party members in your group, making those moves all the more effective. But these are limited so while you will have a selection to choose from, it is highly unlikely you will be able to choose everyone.
The second of these functions is to learn more about that friend and potentially add additional touches to the end of the game as you roll credits for the first time. And I must emphasize first since if you finish this game correctly, you will reach the end three different times: once for the main end, once for the "true" end, and once for the eX+ expansion included in this edition. And no this is not a spoiler. When the game originally came out for PSVita, it did not have this additional piece of content at all... it was added when the game was ported to PS4 and PC and is a prominent feature.
Unfortunately, however, this game also shows it's origins as a portable game first in it's presentation. Simply put the graphics here to not take advantage of the hardware very much and look like they could be from a late PS2/early PS3 game running at a much higher resolution. It doesn't look ugly, but it looks simple and restrained a lot of the time with animation that is just clearly dated beyond the age of the game. It will never really pull you out of the game, but it will always be there and more then noticeable.
Also noticeable to the same level is the sound. Don't get me wrong the music is great and will likely have tunes that will stick with you well after you finish playing, but there is no English cut in this game. Everything is the Japanese sound track and voice acting, leaving you to read what everyone is saying... and let's just say when you have an ex-gang founder constantly talking like "damn, son" or replacing the word fuck with "efff" I do have to bring into question the quality of some of these lines. Yeah, I do detect a whiff of some light censorship in this game... and it does soil it just a little bit for me.
Bugs: Outside of an odd frame-drop once in a blue moon (seriously I think I saw 3 total in my time playing... 5 if you include in the video logos as the game starts), this game ran absolutely flawlessly.
Overall: I can honestly walk away from this title knowing I had a great time overall. Yes, it has it's warts from time to time and honestly even though I expected a slow start, this game turned out a lot different then I expected. But it was still pretty good. My only consideration here is the price. I bought the game on sale and would have a hard time recommending it any other way due to it being a full price release despite showing itself quite clearly to be a port of a game that's been around a while.
Score:
7/10
System Requirements:
- 2.4 Ghz Intel Core 2 Duo or AMD equivilant
- 4 GB RAM
- NVidia GTX 650 or AMD equivilant
- Windows 7/8/10
- 6 GB hard drive space
- Ryzen 3 2200G running at 3.5 Ghz
- 16 GB RAM
- Windows 10
- PDP DX Wired Controller (Crimson)
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