Why I love Tokyo Xanadu
Sep. 22nd, 2017 11:10 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
mikogalateaI bought and started playing this game on the Vita around the beginning of August. I initially thought it might just be a temporary distraction before I put it aside in favour of some shinier game, but not only did Tokyo Xanadu turn out to be a very shiny game in its own right, but I found myself getting super invested in it -- and after about a month and a half, during which I clocked up about 80 hours of playtime, I finished my first playthrough last weekend!
As much as I love this game, it sadly doesn't seem to have gotten much fandom attention, so I thought I'd write a gushy post (not a formal review by any means) talking about why I'm so bloody fond of it; I'm hoping it might encourage more people to give the game a try, along with calling out to existing fans. :3
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What is Tokyo Xanadu, I hear people ask? To those who know nothing about it, it's an action RPG by Falcom, best known as the creators of the Ys and Trails series. TX takes elements from both of those -- Ys's action gameplay, plus emphasis on story and especially characters a la Trails, on top of using Trails of Cold Steel's engine in particular -- and throws it all into a modern Japanese setting instead of a fantasy world.
To most gamers, TX probably gets a lot more comparisons to modern Persona games. It is mainly about high school students who get involved in fighting otherworldly terrors and summon psychic weapons to do so, after all.
One big thing that separates TX from Persona for me, though, is that it's a whole lot more player-friendly. I admittedly never got very far in P3 and never actually played P4, but much of the reason why I stalled on it early was because I felt so utterly intimidated by the amount of time management involved in doing all manner of key things in the game with all their deadlines; it left me feeling like I needed a detailed guide to even play the game properly, which is not how I prefer to do things.
TX doesn't do that. It always lets you know what major quests are available in a chapter (though there's usually more that you have to find for yourself), which characters you can increase your relationship values with and how many opportunities you have to do so in the chapter, where you need to go to advance the story, and so on -- and when you do go to advance the story, the game tells you when doing so makes you lose out on optional stuff and makes sure that's okay before moving the plot along, so you always have the chance to get everything you want to do over with beforehand.
On the action front, combat is fairly straightforward but pretty fun, with an emphasis on targeting enemies' weaknesses by switching characters (all with their own fighting styles) on the fly. Dungeons are mostly quite fast to get through, too -- I think even the longest one only took me, what, half an hour the first time round? -- so you'll never be trudging in a given dungeon for ages. There's also some big ol' bosses to fight, which pose a good challenge.
As I sort of touched on further up, though, just because TX is an action RPG doesn't mean it neglects its story or characters; in fact, the characters are among my favourite things about it! While one could whittle them down to tried-and-true archetypes, they're very endearing and have a decent amount of depth to them, and they're nuanced enough to feel more like people than anime clichés.
I'll talk about Asuka as an example, because she's one of my favourites. She's basically the defrosting ice queen type, but her aloofness and tendency to keep people at arm's length is rarely to the point of being a downright asshole, and her sense of duty is always apparent; she'd more than happy to save your friend for you, she'd just rather not get regular people involved in the dangerous stuff she'd entangled with. (Kou, of course, insists on getting involved anyway because it's gotten personal for him.) Even before her character development kicks in, there's a touch of warmth to her. There's also little details like the fact that she has a thing for Japanese sweets (she lived in the US for several years before the start of the game). Oh, and it helps that she's very hot and badass, but that's just me going into shallow mode.
Speaking of little details, one minor aspect of the game I have a soft spot for is the fact that, after beating minibosses in dungeons, the characters sometimes compliment each other on doing a good job. Every character has a quote like that for every other character, which helps to give an element of camaraderie between party members.
There's also tons of NPCs to interact with! Aksys makes a big deal out of talking to every single NPC while playing, and it's easy to see why; they all have their own little lives going on and many of them have their own quirks, and since their dialogue changes every time the plot moves forward, many have their own character arcs outright.
What's more, the game rewards you for immersing yourself into the world of Morimiya City that way. Not only can talking to NPCs let you find hidden quests to do (with rewards to be gained for doing them, naturally), but the game remembers optional things to do. For example, if you take a character out for a boat ride at one point in the game, the next story event will acknowledge that this happened, and character development that NPCs go through as a result of doing certain quests will stick throughout the game instead of being forgotten by the next chapter. That kind of attention to detail is my other favourite thing about the game!
Oh, and the music's great, but it's a Falcom game so that's to be expected.
With all the gushing I've done, I'm not saying TX is a perfect game by any means. Its main flaws are that it gets off to a slow start -- it takes a while before you get to do any fighting -- and that the localisation has a lot of typos and inconsistent terminology. I've also seen people being unhappy that the voices are Japanese-only with no English dub, but outside of wishing that a certain part near the end had a few extra subtitles, it doesn't bother me at all (and in fact, I'd be worried about mispronounced names if the game did have an English voicetrack).
Other than that, I adore this game and I hope my fannish ramble might pique other people's interest and encourage them to give it a try. :3
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I started playing Trails of Cold Steel shortly after beating TX, and I'm enjoying that so far as well. I guess I'm steadily falling into Falcom hell!
As much as I love this game, it sadly doesn't seem to have gotten much fandom attention, so I thought I'd write a gushy post (not a formal review by any means) talking about why I'm so bloody fond of it; I'm hoping it might encourage more people to give the game a try, along with calling out to existing fans. :3
-
What is Tokyo Xanadu, I hear people ask? To those who know nothing about it, it's an action RPG by Falcom, best known as the creators of the Ys and Trails series. TX takes elements from both of those -- Ys's action gameplay, plus emphasis on story and especially characters a la Trails, on top of using Trails of Cold Steel's engine in particular -- and throws it all into a modern Japanese setting instead of a fantasy world.
To most gamers, TX probably gets a lot more comparisons to modern Persona games. It is mainly about high school students who get involved in fighting otherworldly terrors and summon psychic weapons to do so, after all.
One big thing that separates TX from Persona for me, though, is that it's a whole lot more player-friendly. I admittedly never got very far in P3 and never actually played P4, but much of the reason why I stalled on it early was because I felt so utterly intimidated by the amount of time management involved in doing all manner of key things in the game with all their deadlines; it left me feeling like I needed a detailed guide to even play the game properly, which is not how I prefer to do things.
TX doesn't do that. It always lets you know what major quests are available in a chapter (though there's usually more that you have to find for yourself), which characters you can increase your relationship values with and how many opportunities you have to do so in the chapter, where you need to go to advance the story, and so on -- and when you do go to advance the story, the game tells you when doing so makes you lose out on optional stuff and makes sure that's okay before moving the plot along, so you always have the chance to get everything you want to do over with beforehand.
On the action front, combat is fairly straightforward but pretty fun, with an emphasis on targeting enemies' weaknesses by switching characters (all with their own fighting styles) on the fly. Dungeons are mostly quite fast to get through, too -- I think even the longest one only took me, what, half an hour the first time round? -- so you'll never be trudging in a given dungeon for ages. There's also some big ol' bosses to fight, which pose a good challenge.
As I sort of touched on further up, though, just because TX is an action RPG doesn't mean it neglects its story or characters; in fact, the characters are among my favourite things about it! While one could whittle them down to tried-and-true archetypes, they're very endearing and have a decent amount of depth to them, and they're nuanced enough to feel more like people than anime clichés.
I'll talk about Asuka as an example, because she's one of my favourites. She's basically the defrosting ice queen type, but her aloofness and tendency to keep people at arm's length is rarely to the point of being a downright asshole, and her sense of duty is always apparent; she'd more than happy to save your friend for you, she'd just rather not get regular people involved in the dangerous stuff she'd entangled with. (Kou, of course, insists on getting involved anyway because it's gotten personal for him.) Even before her character development kicks in, there's a touch of warmth to her. There's also little details like the fact that she has a thing for Japanese sweets (she lived in the US for several years before the start of the game). Oh, and it helps that she's very hot and badass, but that's just me going into shallow mode.
Speaking of little details, one minor aspect of the game I have a soft spot for is the fact that, after beating minibosses in dungeons, the characters sometimes compliment each other on doing a good job. Every character has a quote like that for every other character, which helps to give an element of camaraderie between party members.
There's also tons of NPCs to interact with! Aksys makes a big deal out of talking to every single NPC while playing, and it's easy to see why; they all have their own little lives going on and many of them have their own quirks, and since their dialogue changes every time the plot moves forward, many have their own character arcs outright.
What's more, the game rewards you for immersing yourself into the world of Morimiya City that way. Not only can talking to NPCs let you find hidden quests to do (with rewards to be gained for doing them, naturally), but the game remembers optional things to do. For example, if you take a character out for a boat ride at one point in the game, the next story event will acknowledge that this happened, and character development that NPCs go through as a result of doing certain quests will stick throughout the game instead of being forgotten by the next chapter. That kind of attention to detail is my other favourite thing about the game!
Oh, and the music's great, but it's a Falcom game so that's to be expected.
With all the gushing I've done, I'm not saying TX is a perfect game by any means. Its main flaws are that it gets off to a slow start -- it takes a while before you get to do any fighting -- and that the localisation has a lot of typos and inconsistent terminology. I've also seen people being unhappy that the voices are Japanese-only with no English dub, but outside of wishing that a certain part near the end had a few extra subtitles, it doesn't bother me at all (and in fact, I'd be worried about mispronounced names if the game did have an English voicetrack).
Other than that, I adore this game and I hope my fannish ramble might pique other people's interest and encourage them to give it a try. :3
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I started playing Trails of Cold Steel shortly after beating TX, and I'm enjoying that so far as well. I guess I'm steadily falling into Falcom hell!
