Now we are here, in Xanadu
Recently I got invested in the Xanadu games, and wanted to write about them in depth, as I am wont to do. I’ve made similar posts about the Ogre & Ivalice games and the Great Giana Sisters series, among others. So without further ado, here I am, back on my bullshit again.
In 1984, Nihon Falcom decided to make an RPG. Well, to be more accurate, they decided to make another RPG. Their prior year’s Panorama Toh was more of a traditional RPG, with turns and commands and partial ascii graphics. And in June of ’84, Namco had put out The Tower of Druaga in June, lighting a flame under Nihon Falcom. They needed to make something like that.
So they did.
In September, Dragon Slayer was released, which would be the precursor to Xanadu. First to the PC-8800, but then shortly followed by ports to other Japanese home computers of the day, such as the MSX. It is very primitive by today’s standards, but you can see the seed of what was to come. Entirely top down, very blocky graphics, a big open dungeon that you explore, fighting or evading enemies, collecting keys and items needed to complete your quest: to find the legendary Dragon Slayer sword and, well, use it to slay a dragon. It was a massive hit.
So the following year, a scant thirteen months later in October of 1985, Falcom dropped their next RPG, titled Xanadu: Dragon Slayer II, named for the romanticized fantasy version of the Chinese kingdom ruled by Kublai Khan in days past, made popular by a famous poem from Samuel Taylor Coleridge in 1816. Dragon Slayer didn’t really have much of a story, and Xanadu doesn’t either, though it’s got more of one than its predecessor. You play a nameless hero who has arrived in the kingdom of Xanadu, and are tasked by the king with going down into the labyrinthine dungeon below in order to find the four Sacred Crowns needed to recover the legendary Dragon Slayer and slay the King Dragon that is threatening the lands. Doesn’t sound much more complex than Dragon Slayer I, but oh lordy, it is. First of all, you have a ton of character customization for a game of this era, with seven stats to pump points into and some equipment shops to visit before diving into the dungeon proper, basically determining how you’re going to approach your delve. And once you’re down there, you can’t come back up. Fortunately, there are shops and inns and NPCs and so on down there amidst the chaos. You just have to find them.
The game takes lots of cues from the Western game Ultima, sometimes overtly riffing off its art. There’s a ton of other Western influences, as well. I even found a Doctor Who pun when I came across the Tom Bakery. Had to stop and chuckle at that one for a bit. The “overworld” of the labyrinth is split up into ten floors, each of which is basically a full prototypical metroidvania map, traversed side-on with platforming, ladder climbing, etc. Think Wonder Boy, or the later Castlevania games. There are then multiple top-down view “dungeons” on each floor of the labyrinth which will, in turn, look rather familiar to anyone who’s ever played one of the 2D Zelda games. And there’s a reason for that: Xanadu basically invented the Action RPG genre, and was a direct inspiration on Nintendo’s star franchise thereof. These dungeons don’t have puzzles per se, but the Zelda-ish combat is already in place, and most of the time there’s a big boss in at least one of them on a given floor, which you’ll fight side-on. Then you progress downwards, improving your equipment (your base stats almost never change after you’ve entered the dungeon) and skills until you find the legendary blade and confront the evil dragon at the end.
There’s other mechanics in play, like hunger, karma, experience, etc, but that’s the gist of it. Did I mention you can fail? As in, you can work yourself into a state where progression is impossible, and your only recourse is to note what went wrong and roll a new character? This is a game that is meant to take you a long time, and multiple, dozens even, of attempts, before even confronting the King Dragon, and when you do manage it, it’s got over a million health.
It was, in short, way ahead of its time, and unlike anything anyone had ever seen in gaming up to that point.
And people went crazy for it.
To say it was a massive hit would be an understatement. It sold over 400,000 copies, in an era where the internet was still ten years out from existing, gaming magazines weren’t really widespread, and RPGs as a whole were still an experimental genre that Japan wasn’t sure they wanted to get to know better. Its popularity led Falcom to pressure the development team to release an expansion twelve months later, entitled Xanadu Scenario II: the Resurrection of Dragon. And I do mean “expansion”, as it required the original game’s disks to play the new campaign. Scenario II is one of the earliest examples of such a thing in the industry.
It featured the next king down the line sending off a new hero to investigate why monsters were showing up again, on an adventure consisting of twelve new floors in a fresh labyrinth, each with a host of new items and new dungeons and new enemies and new bosses, culminating in a battle against the reanimated undead skeleton of the Red Dragon from the first campaign, now retroactively named the Galsis.
And like the previous Xanadu release, it was also popular.
Xanadu and its expansion were so popular, in fact, that over the next few years it got a board game, a manga about a mech pilot from the year 2030 getting isekai’d to Xanadu to undergo the events of the game, and a high-budget animated film that adapts it.
Plus, it got sequels.
The Dragon Slayer franchise was now an established brand, and Falcom soon released the next entry, Romancia: Dragon Slayer Jr. It came out in 1986 and took lessons from Xanadu’s side-on level design and stat systems (Xanadu’s manga & anime in turn borrowed Romancia’s character looks).
Falcom also released a spiritual successor to Xanadu’s top-down gameplay, called Ys (which rhymes with “geese”, and is named after a different mythical kingdom), which debuted in 1987 and was not unlike Nintendo’s Zelda series.
They also licensed out the Xanadu name, allowing Hudson to make an original Xanadu title for the Famicom in 1987, which they would name “Faxanadu” (a portmanteau of Famicom and Xanadu), making Xanadu itself the first sub-series of the Dragon Slayer brand.
Just as the original Legend of Zelda was a reaction to Xanadu, Faxanadu, in turn, was a reaction to Zelda II: The Adventure of Link. The Western packaging for the game even tries to play this up, having a gold box with a shiny shield on it, matching Nintendo’s packaging aesthetic for the Zelda titles of the day. Unlike Zelda II and the two prior Xanadu adventures, the game is entirely a side-scrolling metroidvania, one of the earlier examples of one with RPG trappings, in fact. You play as an unnamed elven warrior who has come home after a long and arduous adventure (once again playing on Zelda’s popularity with the implications of who this elf might be wink wink) to find your home kingdom nearly deserted.
The King informs you that something has happened to the dwarves of the nearby mountain, driving them mad and changing many into fearsome creatures, and that the townsfolk have been cut off from their water supply and are slowly wasting away. So, you go procure a sword and set out to do something about it. The Dragon Slayer is still in it, and you do end up slaying a dragon lord, but they’re not the final goal, and there’s a bigger bad at work behind the scenes. It’s quite expansive in scope for the day and age in which it came out.
And that was… it. For a while. The Ys series really took off, and more Dragon Slayer titles were put out — including IV: Legacy of the Wizard, V: Sorcerian, VI: The Legend of Heroes, and VII: Lord Monarch. All but Legacy of the Wizard would go on to spawn their own subseries, getting many more releases. Seriously though, the Dragon Slayer franchise is ginormous. Finally, we come up on 1994, in which Nihon Falcom decided to put out what would be the last numbered Dragon Slayer title to date, Dragon Slayer VIII: The Legend of Xanadu. Yes, after seven years away, it was time to go back to Xanadu. Sort of.
One of Falcom’s first in-house console titles (as opposed to licensing out and focusing in-house on PC development) The Legend of Xanadu released in February of 1994 for the TurboGrafx-CD (aka the PC Engine CD, depending on where you live), and was… something of a departure. Structured more like an Ys game, it was primarily top-down, with scattered side scrolling segments — an inversion of the original Xanadu formula. Making use of the console’s power, it has roughly two hours of fully voiced anime-style story scenes, beautiful sprite art in its side-scrolling sections, and a sprawling story that unfolds over the course of twelve chapters, each with its own unique locales, characters, enemies, and bosses.
The story is more of a JRPG affair this time and wasn’t originally intended to have anything to do with Xanadu. The title and connections were added later in development at Falcom’s insistence. It stars the young knight Areios, the descendant of the legendary hero who used the Dragon Slayer sword to slay a mighty dragon some one thousand years prior. And now the time has come for Areios to follow in his ancestor’s footsteps and set out on his own dragon-slaying journey. It didn’t just copy the Ys gameplay, it also iterated on several key aspects, and introduced having party members with you out on the field and contributing in combat. This was something the Ys games would then adopt back into themselves a couple titles down the line, and is now considered a staple of the series.
The following year, The Legend of Xanadu II: The Last of Dragon Slayer was released and made an effort to make the graphics even more gorgeous than before, though it’s somewhat shorter than its predecessor in turn. The sequel follows Areios and his friends some three years after the ending of the prior game as new adventures unfold on a different continent. Unfortunately, these were the first Xanadu games to lack even a lick of English anywhere in them, and have not been localized at the time of writing, so it’s a bit of an investment if you intend to play them and actually follow along with what’s going on.
At the same time the Legend of Xanadu duology was hot off the presses in ’95, Falcom also decided to revisit the classics. Around the time The Legend of Xanada II came out, Revival Xanadu was released on the PC-98 series of home computers. Revival Xanadu was a remake of the original, bumping up the graphics from 8 to 16 bit, and having entirely new music from the original composer. It implements some quality of life improvements and design tweaks here and there, making for a rather good experience. Think of it like the PSX or GBA Final Fantasy remakes of the earlier NES games. Later in the year, Revival Xanadu II Remix came out, this time a remake of Scenario II, but instead of just all new music and graphics, the maps were also all-new, making for a “remixed” experience for fans who were overly familiar with the original and wanted a new challenge. Revival II also came bundled with an “Easy Mode” of Revival Xanadu I, which added a map the player could pull up in-game to keep track of things, a very welcome addition haha.
A couple years later in 1997, Falcom released the Falcom Classics Collection for the Sega Saturn, consisting of remakes of Dragon Slayer, Xanadu, and the first Ys game. Xanadu’s was based on Revival, but with the graphics bumped from 16 bit to 32 this time, and even more quality of life improvements. This is probably the best version of the game to play (and also the most accessible), though there’s not much English in it. Unfortunately, they never did a Saturn version of Scenario II.
And then, again, that was it for another while.
In 2005, Falcom decided to revisit the setting once again. Just as the original Xanadu was greatly influenced by contemporary Western games such as Ultima, this new title would draw inspiration from titles like Elder Scrolls and Diablo. And thus, Xanadu Next came to be. An original handheld spinoff of the same name was first released in August of 2005 for the N-Gage mobile phone/gaming device, of all things, but a more robust version was launched two months later for home computers.
The story follows a youth traveling with his sister to the island of Harlech. He’s been dismissed from his knighthood, and his sister figured some field work and light adventuring would get him out of his funk, and brought him to the island to explore the ruins there at the behest of a local scholar. Unfortunately, the ruins are of the ancient kingdom of Xanadu, and someone with plans for the things buried there offs our young knight soon after he discovers one of the Sacred Crowns early in his explorations. He is revived from the dead at the local temple by his sister and the local priestess, but now he is bound to the island and can not leave without giving up his life (permanently), unless he can find the lost Dragon Slayer sword in the ruins somewhere and use it to break his newfound curse. And that’s just where the plot starts.
Whereas something like Ys favors mechanical skill, and Diablo favors having a good character build, Xanadu Next favors more tactical combat that relies on knowing where to put your character and when to use which abilities, with an emphasis on backstabs and a rather robust secondary magic system. In addition to its core Diablo-ish gameplay, there’s also a fair amount of Zelda puzzles to be had throughout, hitting switches, triggering lifts, moving blocks, cutting crates in half to use as stairs, and so on. All of this was combined with some excellent level design that constantly loops back on itself, opening up shortcuts back to town so it’s easy to stock up and get back to where you were. It’s a fun game, and really went above and beyond to flesh out the scant lore from the older titles into a real world, full of political intrigue and ancient histories and expanding on the kingdom and the defeat (and impending return) of the dragon Galsis, in a way that puts me in mind of things like Vagrant Story.
If all of that in addition to the main character dying and being revived at the start of the game by a mysterious priestess who will then aid you in leveling up throughout your adventure sound familiar, then I would be remiss to not point out that, yeah, it’s basically Demon’s Souls but half a decade earlier.
This seemed like it could have been the start of a whole new era of Xanadu. Buuuuut, Falcom already had another money-maker in the bag. The Legend of Heroes’ subseries had become increasingly popular, and the year prior, the latest entry, Trails in the Sky, had struck gold, and its sequel was already in the works. For five years they focused hard on the Ys franchise and Trails in the Sky sequels, and in 2010, after half a dozen more Ys and Trails titles, they decided to put out a crossover of the two. Set in Xanadu against the backdrop of another return of the Dragon Lord Galsis. As a fighting game. Yeah, I don’t know what they were thinking either. This undertaking debuted for the PlayStation Portable as Ys vs. Trails in the Sky: Alternative Saga.
My understanding is that Alternative Saga is built off the back of Ys Seven’s engine, and plays incredibly similar to that game’s battles, but with some added mechanics, support characters, and other such party fighter shenanigans. The plot, surprisingly, has some deep cuts. It states that, in the forgotten land of Xanadu, Galsis revives periodically every thousand years or so, and the powers that be isekai heroes in to deal with him. This harkens back to both The Legend of Xanadu with its “thousand years later” plot and the manga and anime tie-ins to the original game which had an isekai plotline to explain where the nameless hero came from. And it just so happens that the random heroes summoned in this time are primarily from the worlds of Ys and Trails of the Sky, which some various other Falcom properties sprinkled in for taste. It’s all very fanficish nonsense, but it makes a good enough excuse for the mashup, and it’s neat that it has those callbacks at all.
From 2010 to 2015, Falcom kept blazing ahead with their other franchises, putting out several more Ys titles and completing the Trails in the Sky storyline of The Legend of Heroes before starting up the Trails of Cold Steel arc, which proved even more popular than its predecessor. It was around this period in the mid-2010s that Falcom decided to put out something new… named after something old.
Described as a mashup of aspects of Trails of Cold Steel and Ys, but in a setting unlike either of those, Tokyo Xanadu released in 2015 for the PlayStation Vita, and looked like it might be the start of another ongoing thing. Set in the fictional Morimiya district on the outskirts of contemporary Tokyo, in a world not entirely unlike our own, highschooler Kou Tokisaka gets sucked into the alternate shadowy world of The Eclipse while trying to save a classmate from some ruffians one night. He is granted a special weapon and manages to make his way home safely, but winds up involved in the conflict of the various agencies which are each dealing with the Eclipse and its dungeons in their own ways and the classmates that are connected to them. He also has to manage normal everyday high-schooler stuff like hitting the arcade after school, going to concerts, hanging out at the gym, and various other side activities. It’s got rather a lot going on.
This being a mashup of Falcom’s two tentpoles, you can expect aspects of both here. Mechanically, it’s built off of the Cold Steel engine, and retains a lot of its out-of-combat gameplay (and even some character crossovers) while inside the dungeons is more Ys, though like Legend of Xanadu prior, it iterates on some aspects of Ys’ signature combat & exploration loop in marked ways that many hope will once again feed back into later Ys games. In 2017, it was ported to the PlayStation 4 and home computers in a version called Tokyo Xanadu eX+, which adds side stories in between all the main chapters, as well as an after-story. All in all summing up to several dozen hours of new content, and nearly doubling the length of the game. It’s all very impressive, and was rather well received. As far as I can tell, though, it doesn’t actually bear any story connection to the previous titles, the kingdom of Xanadu, or the conflict with Galsis. Still, it is not unappreciated!
Since then, Nihon Falcom has wrapped up the Cold Steel storyline, started a new Trails arc that they’re two games in to, put out two more Ys games, and are in the process of making another. There’s no word yet on when they’ll return once again to Xanadu, but they have expressed an interest in doing a follow-up to Tokyo Xanadu. So, here’s hoping that the brand continues in the near future once they’re done with Ys X and whatever Trails thing they’ve got in the oven. After all, there’s been a major Xanadu game released every ten years since the series began (with other releases in between), and I’d really like that trend to continue in 2025.
