As I mentioned in my last post, part of the reason why I’ve been less active these past few weeks is because I’ve been preparing to review a JRPG, more specifically, Tokyo Xanadu eX+, a PS4 port of a 2015 Vita JRPG released late last year. Considering how long it took me to beat the game and write the review (whilst being distracted by real life events at the same time) it almost doesn’t feel worth the inactivity, considering how few people I imagine will care about a review of this particular game. But stick with me, even if you’ve never heard of Tokyo Xanadu and have no interest in playing it, I think you might find something interesting in this review, as there’s a number of things I noticed whilst playing the game that are broadly applicable to a lot of JRPGs.
If you haven’t guessed by the title, this article is only part one of the review, since it ended up being fairly long. Now, before anyone starts thinking that I’m trying to split up my articles to earn more votes, I should explain why I’m splitting this particular article first. Firstly, even part 1 is longer than one of my regular articles, and in the past it’s been made apparent to me that my usual articles are fairly long by Steemit standards anyway, and that many users of this site can get overwhelmed by what they consider to be a long article, so hopefully splitting things in half will make the review more digestible to those people. Secondly, writing the review itself taken longer than writing a review of an anime episode has been, and consuming the media itself has taken dramatically longer (100ish hours) than watching a 22 minute anime episode. As such I think the amount of work being put in to this one article is worthy of having two articles worth of votes associated with it. Also, it helps me get this post out sooner since at the time of writing this sentence, part 2 isn’t yet fully complete. Lastly, I don’t get a high amount of average votes anyway under ordinary (Read: Not boosted by Curie) circumstances, so this defense is likely a moot point anyway. You are free to disagree with me in the comments or suggest alternate methods for how I might go about publishing long articles like this in the future.
So part 1 will largely be laying out the context for the second part, and this part will also be discussing gameplay and aspects of the game that does not constitute any spoilers for the story. Part 2 will be discussing the story in more detail, including full spoilers. I will be posting part 2 tomorrow, (or later today, depending on your time zone) and I recommend reading it even if you have no interest in playing the game, since that is when I will also start discussing the merits of the game, its themes, its place in the wider culture and other observations I’ve made. So if you’re not interested in actually playing the game, maybe wait for part 2 since that is when the more broadly applicable, idea driven and analysis focused part of this review will start. For now, we’ll be going over a fairly dry, opinion-lite and consumer focused run-down of the game’s systems and spoiler-free aspects of the story.
With that out of the way, let us begin.
So, for those who don’t know anything about the game, Tokyo Xanadu is about a protagonist named Kou Tokisaka who lives in a fictional location called Morimiya City, which exists somewhere in Tokyo. 10 years prior to the start of the story Morimiya suffered from an Earthquake which killed a whole lot of people, and Kou and many of the other characters were caught up in it whilst they were kids. In the present day the city has mostly recovered, and Kou is now a regular Highschool student in his second year. Through happenstance, a transfer student known as Asuka Hiiragi ends up introducing Kou to a world known as the Eclipse, an alternate reality wherein monsters known as Greeds live. Greeds cause havoc in the real world if gates to the Eclipse are left unchecked, and it’s Asuka’s job, being a member of an underground organisation, to defeat the greed and protect the world from the shadows. Since Greeds can’t be harmed by conventional weaponry, only those who are known as ‘wielders’ can use what is known as a ‘soul device’, a weapon that reflects the shape of their user’s soul, to harm the Greed. There’s no criteria for becoming a wielder from what I or anybody else in the world can tell, though they usually seem to manifest in people who display a strong emotional resolve. When Kou becomes a wielder, Asuka is forced to reluctantly drag him along on her missions despite her not wanting to involve any civilians.
Now that I’m out of wikipedia mode, I can start commenting on the obvious. Tokyo Xanadu is obviously a reaction to the ever popular Persona series, with so many plot and aesthetic elements being similar to Atlus’ franchise that it can almost feel like plagiarism in some respects. While it should be noted that ‘Xanadu’ is a franchise that Nihon Falcom has been making since 1985, (really) Xanadu has always been a fantasy RPG whereas Tokyo Xanadu takes the setting in a completely different direction. It’s also worthwhile to note that the last entry in the Xanadu series was in 2005, so when you combine that all together, Tokyo Xanadu may as well be a brand new IP.
It’s also worthwhile to note Falcom’s other, much more popular franchise, The Legend of Heroes series. More recently, that series has branched off into the Trails series, which is possibly one of the most ambitious yet undervalued JRPG franchises out there right now. Trails is a series of trilogies (and one duology) that all take place in the same universe on the same continent during roughly the same span of time, with each trilogy focusing on a different country and a different set of protagonists. The current ongoing series is the Trails of Cold Steel series, which received its second entry last year. Trails of Cold Steel is important because Tokyo Xanadu runs on exactly the same engine, and the similarities between the games on top of that are absolutely stunning, with minigames, character progression and customisation systems, narrative structure, gameplay loops and even a character design with the same name as their Trails counterpart being lifted completely from Cold Steel. I wouldn’t be surprised if a casual observer couldn’t tell the two games apart at a casual glance.
So if TXeX+ is a ripoff of the persona series that also lifts so much from one of the companies other franchises, what makes the game unique? Well, that would be real time combat. See, Xanadu has always been a real-time combat franchise, but what was innovative for 1985 isn’t really innovative today, with action-RPGs dominating the current gaming landscape. The game isn’t a turnbased hybrid or anything like that, it just gives you a real time combat system without any significant bells and whistles attatched. For what it’s worth, however, here’s how the combat works.
The game throws you into a dungeon and you can move about freely. You have a regular attack button and a ranged attack button, the ranged attack button obviously fires projectiles in exchange for resources on a magic meter, whereas using the ranged attack button in the air activates a skill which propels you forward towards the enemy. You have no guard button, but you do get a dodge roll that has fairly generous invincibility frames. The ranged attack button can be held to use a power attack. You only control one character at once but you can have three characters with you at any time, and you have two buttons which you can use to cycle through them on the fly and at no cost to resources. Each character controls a little differently, with some characters being slightly faster, some having more of a focus on physical, magical, or aerial attacks. Each character also has an element associated with them, with the four main elements operating in a rock-paper-scissors like-fashion. The element system isn’t very complex, and mainly just seems to be there to incentivise you to switch to different characters throughout the dungeon rather than just sticking to one character you happen to like for as much as possible.
While the description of the system does sound pretty dry, once it’s actually in your hands, it’s pretty fun. The animation quality, sound design, and the way those elements contribute to the overall game-feel isn’t exactly what you might be used to from most western titles or even other JRPGs such as Persona 5 or Final Fantasy XV, but TX has a charm all of its own. It’s a no nonsense system, and it also feels loose and responsive which makes it a great button masher which still requires some degree of reflexes. The lack of a guard button also contributes to making the game feel like something of a less deliberately-designed, faster, much looser, and much easier version of Bloodborne, or perhaps a more accurate comparison would be Kingdom Hearts, where watching and learning enemy animations is one of the more important skills to master. Whereas other games might let you hold the guard button indefinitely without forcing you to learn the correct dodge timings. Throughout the game, there were only one or two major instances where I felt the enemy hitboxes were unfair, where I felt like I was being hit by attacks that I had successfully dodged, those instances thankfully (or un-thankfully depending on your point of view) being towards the beginning of the game.
That said while the combat is fun, it isn’t very deep, and there’s some aspects on top of that that somewhat ruin it for me. The major one is that the game gives you access to three ‘skills’ that can turn the tide of a match for you. The first is a super attack reminiscent of the ultimate skills you might find in traditional turn based RPGs, where you watch a 20-second long animation that you have no input in that usually kills all the enemies in your immediate vicinity. These attacks have a seperate gauge associated with them that allows you to stock up to three of these attacks at once, meaning it’s very easy to save them for a huge room of enemies. This essentially allows you to skip what might otherwise be fairly tough challenges.
The second attack is a skill which you use in real-time, and it’s essentially a strong attack that has around a 5 second animation time, and these build up on another separate gauge. While a skill like this would normally be fine, the problem with it is that the game makes you completely invincible while the skill is in use, meaning you can use it any time when there’s an enemy attack that you haven’t yet learned how to avoid normally. Lastly, there’s a skill called the X-Drive, which is a new feature added onto the PS4 port. For a new feature, however, it’s not very interesting. When activated, one of your reserve partners enters the battlefield and uses their strongest skill (usually twice) whilst you have full movement and the ability to do whatever you want. While you’re not invincible during this time, you do gain a passive HP recovery effect which provides a significant amount of healing. This skill is also tracked on a seperate gauge, meaning that when you add it all together, there’s four separate gauges for you to be watching at all times.
The problem with these skills is that they make the game far too easy. Even one of these skills by themselves might threaten to ruin the game’s balance, but the game gives you access to all three of them at once and gives you no reason not to use them. If they were all tied to a single resource meter, the game might have a degree of choice with how you use your meter, forcing you to decide if you’d rather blow your meter on one large attack or use weaker skills whilst waiting for a better opening. As is, giving you four separate gauges actually removes your decision making, as you can spam these skills the moment you gain access to them.
Another issue is that the game lets you access items from the pause menu at any time during combat. Using an item gives you a slight delay of about 10 seconds or so before you can use an item again, but I feel like action RPGs learned a long time ago that healing in real time is much more interesting than being able to pause the game at any time to use an item, get yourself out of any jam, and use an item when you’re right next to the enemy who can’t do a thing to you whilst you’re in the item menu. I made the mistake of starting the game on Hard difficulty, meaning that I could only turn the difficulty up as high as Nightmare. While Calamity is the hardest difficulty available to you on your first playthrough, the idea is that you have to pick that difficulty from the very beginning of the game, because starting on Calamity doesn’t let you lower the difficulty. As such, I was already halfway through the game before I decided that I wanted to switch up to Nightmare and beyond. Whilst Nightmare can be quite difficult in some instances, especially later in the game when the game forces you to use characters you might not be as proficient with, a lot of the game can be cheesed by spamming items and skills. This is why I feel the best game mode is the boss rush mode that can be accessed from the title menu, which locks your level, equipment, and items to set presets, meaning that even with all the features of the combat system available to you they can be quite a challenge on the higher difficulties. You can also redo dungeons you’ve already beaten to attempt to get S-ranks on them, which require beating it quickly and with a high combo, enemy, and correct element kill count. For the most part, though, getting an S rank can be done pretty easily through normal play by accident, and I never once got bellow an A rank while playing through a dungeon for the first time.
The character progression features are also fairly standard. In addition to equipment which works exactly as you would expect it to, the game gives you element cores which can be slotted into your soul device. They might provide flat increases to stats or percentage increases to different types of attacks, or some special abilities such as passive HP regen. My favourite cores were the more defensive ones, such as the ones that restore take 3% for every damage figure you inflict on your enemies and restore that to your HP, or the ones which provide a 15% chance to completely negate an enemy attack if it hits you. Enemies can hit hard on the higher difficulties, and despite complaining about the game being easy, death can come swiftly, so these are pretty helpful in making sure you don’t have to break the pace of combat by relying on items too frequently. You typically need to find materials from certain monsters or drop a lot of yen in order to obtain these cores, but you’re not required to get the absolute best cores to stand a chance in combat so the game is far from grind-heavy. While you can spend a while fiddling with character setups, I wouldn’t say there’s much depth to this system, as you’re usually just slotting in the best cores you have available onto your favourite characters.
On the face of it, the main issues with TX’s story, and the game as a whole, comes down to a lack of originality. As I outlined in the last part, the premise for TX is very similar to the Persona series, which serves as a good comparison point. Largely because I feel like Persona does what TX is trying to do a lot better, at least when it comes to the narrative structure and the worldbuilding.
The first major point to bring up is that TX does not copy Persona’s calendar structure, where the player would experience each day in the protagonist’s life over the course of an entire year, with extremely few cases of time skipping forward. Instead, TX is split into a series of chapters, and plot relevant details usually only happen over the course of about 2-3 days of in-game time followed by a weeks long absence between chapters where the player doesn’t get to see what goes on in Kou or the character’s lives. The game is split into several different gameplay sections, however, that are reminiscent of Persona. On the first day of a chapter, Kou will have some time after school to do sidequests, go through optional dungeons, and interact with various characters in a way that is reminiscent of the social link or confidant system. Much like Persona, Kou will only have a set amount of time after school to interact with people, meaning he can’t see every scene. The story then progresses when Kou decides to go to work, which is usually when Eclipse-related events start becoming more prominent. The following day is usually spent investigating the Eclipse phenomenon, and early on in the game, a new party member will usually join during the second day. On the third day, the new party member will help you put an end to the Elder Greed causing trouble, and the chapter will end.
While the structure works well earlier on, the lack of a real progression system make the game feel like more of a standard JRPG or anime episode with a monster of the week rather than a life sim in the vein of Persona, which is one of the major strengths contributing to the atmosphere and themes implicit themes in those games. Another is the fact that in Persona, it’s theoretically possible to see every relationship scene with every character on your first playthrough if you schedule your time well enough. In TX, however, if you choose not to see a scene that scene will be unavailable until your next playthrough. While this doesn’t seem like a big deal on the surface, this results in a larger, less obvious problem- it means that characters can’t have significant narratives associated with them that are divorced from the main plot. There are some free time events that are more impactful than others in terms of character development, as they can range from going shopping and having a casual chat to visiting a friend’s father in hospital, and there’s no real way of knowing what the scene might be about until you’ve already committed to watching it. This is why the Persona series commits to a 10 stage narrative that the player can choose to access and progress at any time before the very end of the game. Since you have a limited amount of time and there’s various gameplay bonuses associated with forming a strong bond with the playable characters, what this also means is that you’ll typically commit to a set group of characters and rarely ever touch the others, because that would waste progression on the others. This sort of results in lopsided character development, where the player will only be able to see one character’s development whilst the others left out in the cold remain static and largely unchanging following their introduction chapter. The game’s structure focuses so heavily on Eclipse related phenomenon and Greed invasions in the later half that the game leaves little time for the life sim aspects of the narrative to breathe.
The voice work for this game also only has the Japanese dub only, which is a slight shame, although from my limited understanding I thought the voice work was pretty good, particularly during some late game scenes. However, I did notice that there were a few grammatical errors in the English translation, as well as some scenes where someone like Kou simply wasn’t speaking while the other lines were voice acted, or where only the later half of a cutscene is voice acted, which lead to a bit of a haphazard feel, like they were being very particular about which lines to pay their voice actors for.
To round this part off, I should mention that I didn’t find the soundtrack too interesting, which is a shame. Falcom is known for composing some genuinely excellent music for the Trails series, (Look up the tracks ‘Silver Will’ and ‘Inevitable Struggle’) but a lot of the music here is fairly generic, and there’s not many tracks that I remember even after spending almost 100 hours with the game and thusly listening to a lot of the same tracks on repeat. The only time I recall the music impressing me during gameplay was during one late game boss-fight where the opening theme starts playing half-way through, and the opening is legitimately pretty catchy. It helps that the opening plays at the start of every new chapter, as if the game was paced like an episodic TV series.
So on the surface, there are many, many strikes going against this game, plenty of which are noticeable before you even boot up the game for the first time. So why, then, did I not only finish the game, but take the time to review it? Well, put simply, of all the middle of the road JRPGs I’ve played recently, this would be one of the best for me. We can’t have a Persona 5 every year, so I think it’s important to respect the games that operate on a small budget despite being somewhat cliche. That some games are worth checking out even if they’re not the game of the year.
We’ll be discussing that in greater detail in the next part, so I’ll see you all then.