40 years of Dragon Slayer: Xanadu

The first of many loosely connected sequels to Dragon Slayer became its own series after exploding on the PC sales charts in a way that

September marks 40 years of Nihon Falcom’s Dragon Slayer series, which had its original run ended with creator Yoshio Kiya’s exit from the company, but continues to exist to this day through subseries and spin-offs. Throughout the month, I’ll be covering Dragon Slayer games, the growth of the series, officially and unofficially, on a worldwide scale, and the legacy of Falcom’s contribution to role-playing games. Previous entries in the series can be found through this link.

Dragon Slayer’s box art described it as “A new type [of] real time role-playing game,” and it wasn’t kidding. Along with The Tower of Druaga and Hydlide, Dragon Slayer created the template for the action role-playing game. And then, just over one year later, Nihon Falcom followed up that innovation by changing the game once again. It might have seemed weird to use the exact same promise on the box of Dragon Slayer’s sequel as they had on the first game, but, like with that title, it wasn’t a lie here, either.

Xanadu: Dragon Slayer II was a hit in a way that’s difficult to understand. Falcom’s website still brags about selling 400,000 copies, a record “that remains unbroken.” In 1985, personal computers weren’t ubiquitous. Role-playing games were still in a nascent phase where every little innovation rippled throughout the industry — we’re still pre-Dragon Quest here, which was the first turn-based RPG to truly break out and become a phenomenon in Japan. Selling 400,000 copies of a niche game on Japan-specific computers at that point is wild. By ‘85, the Apple II had sold 2.1 million computers. Atari 8-bit computers amounted to about two million units produced. The MSX would sell five million computers in Japan over 10 years, but in ‘85, that platform was all of two years old. Falcom being able to sell 400,000 copies of a personal computer game for a genre that was still in the process of even being invented at this point in time is astounding.

My family didn’t get a PC until well into the 90s. A huge part of DOOM’s early popularity — a game that released eight years after Xanadu — came from people whose work machines were capable of running it, or who utilized those powerful servers for local multiplayer deathmatches. Not everyone had a computer in the home at that point, either! Digital storefronts like Steam were decades from existing; in 1985, you ordered game disks from a magazine, or you found them in a store, but game stores then weren’t like game stores now, either. There was no internet to advertise on, and media coverage of games wasn’t anywhere near what it is today. Just a few years prior, Falcom were selling games on a made-to-order basis. Through word of mouth, Xanadu changed everything for action RPGs and for Falcom.

Image credit: MobyGames

Xanadu might seem difficult to play now, as it can feel as old as it is sometimes. But anyone with knowledge of what games were like at the time can be easily blown away when they realize just what this game was doing. Dragon Slayer was top-down, played on one map, with no stats to speak of besides hit points and strength — damage was calculated by subtracting experience points from strength. Xanadu is a side-scrolling proto-Metroidvania action RPG featuring 10 labyrinths to work your way through, each containing secret pathways and tricks and hidden bits and locked away routes, multiple dungeons to traverse on each map, equipable weapons and armor, consumable items, magic spells, and multiple viewpoints: you switch to a top-down view for combat, where you once again bump into enemies to defeat them.

You gain levels in both melee and magical; whichever you use to defeat an enemy will grant you experience in that space. The more levels you gain — represented as “titles” here, with your growth detailed by that instead of by a straight number — the stronger you are, and two different ways of gaining levels allows you to be that much more powerful. This is a system that Falcom would adapt for Ys V a decade later, but it’s more successfully implemented here in its initial run.

Inside the dungeons of Xanadu is a familiar sight to anyone who has played the original The Legend of Zelda. Single-screen dungeon rooms, with enemies to defeat, locked doors to open, items to collect, and even a switch to a side-scrolling perspective in order to defeat the occasional dungeon boss. Below are screenshots from the Sharp X1 edition of Xanadu, with the first being a dungeon room full of enemies, with locked doors visible and keys to open them waiting to be picked up…

Image credit: MobyGames

…and the second is the first boss fight in the game, against a giant kraken found in the fourth of four dungeons in that initial labyrinth:

Image credit: MobyGames

It’s worth remembering once again that Xanadu predates The Legend of Zelda; it’s not incidental that both of them were designed in these ways, and it’s not a knock on Zelda that it borrowed these elements, either. Xanadu’s success was in coming up with something new, built off of some existing ideas — the basis of the action RPG they had helped develop a year prior in the first place, combined with the platforming and exploring of Namco’s arcade hit Dragon Buster, which also released in 1984, mixed together into something that was unlike either of those things, and pushed the entire genre forward in the process. The Legend of Zelda is something of the Dragon Quest of action RPGs and action-adventure games, in that it did away with some of the intimidating presences of those genres, streamlining and smoothing out in just the right ways to come up with something that also felt new, even if its debts were plain to see for anyone who had played those games themselves. This is the kind of iterating upon that allows genres to advance, to refine themselves, to create a kind of language that both players and developers can understand.

None of this is meant to imply that The Legend of Zelda is easy, or lacks depth, or is simple. But in comparison to Xanadu… the things that truly made Xanadu Xanadu haven’t even been mentioned here yet. In addition to the different ways to gain levels, there’s customization of the player character, using some typical Dungeons & Dragons-style statistics along with a couple of others (strength, intelligence, wisdom, dexterity, charisma, magic, agility). These can be leveled up to 100 points, before the game really begins. Xanadu opens with you outside of a castle, and when you enter and speak to the king, he’ll hand you a big bag of gold and a sword. So, you get 3,500 gold, and if you spend 100 of it to train in the building with the sign that says “STR” above the door, you can gain 10 strength. And so on down the line.

Once you’ve customized your character to your liking, you then head toward the labyrinth. Initial versions of the game had a copyright protection puzzle to overcome here, where the entrance to the labyrinth is something you won’t discover by accident: everything loops and loops again unless you take a specific action in an otherwise nondescript place, which is explained to you in the manual. If you had a copy of the game you hadn’t paid for, you didn’t have the manual, and couldn’t actually get into the game. Once you’re in, though, that’s it: those stats are your stats, and everything from here on is built upon them. Don’t worry, there’s still loads of customization left, much more than you think a game from 1985 would have, but it’s not to your character.

Your gear also gains experience points through use. This makes it so that a weaker weapon can actually be stronger than a more powerful one, at least at first: if you’ve played through an entire floor of the labyrinth using one kind of sword that you acquired in the previous labyrinth, when it’s time to upgrade, it might take some time for the new one that lacks any experience to actually be the better option. But once you use that enough, it’s going to be clearly stronger: weaker weapons can be strong, too, but they have lower ceilings than stronger weapons do. So you want to upgrade even if there’s a temporary hit to your damage output, as, in the long run, it’s the better move for you. Xanadu is a game where, if you aren’t strong enough, your attacks simply won’t cause enough damage to an enemy before it kills you, which is something you learn early on when you discover that some fire obstacles can’t be smacked around with a sword, but require, instead, that you use long-distance ice magic to put them out. Try to take those on with your sword, and you’ll burn up in a hurry.

There’s a wealth of spells for you to acquire, and for that, you need money. You’ll start with a basic spell, which lets you attack from range and build up your magic experience, but you’ll want that ice spell in a hurry, for instance, and others will, of course, have their own specific uses, and higher base power levels, and so on. It might be tempting to keep using just magic sometimes, since it lets you attack from range, but you don’t want to neglect building up your physical attacks, either, because there will be times where that’s the far better option for you, just like sometimes magic is the key.

There’s some strategy involved in the bump combat here, which moves a little faster than in Dragon Slayer’s, but still not as fast as it would in the early Ys titles. The thing that ends up being intriguing here is how every enemy you defeat drops a treasure chest, which then blocks the path of both you and the remaining foes. So, if you notice you’re wildly outnumbered by aggressive enemies who can definitely kill you, you can swap between bump combat, ranged magic attacks, and killing enemies where they’ll leave treasure chests to impede the progress of other monsters trying to reach you. You can build a wall around yourself, basically, where the entrances to reach you are where you want them to be, giving yourself an advantage in place of where the numbers game once was. It feels very intentional, a way for you to slow things down and control the situation.

On top of all of this is Xanadu including a food system. You slowly recover health as you eat food, which you’ll do on a regular basis. When you don’t have any food, you won’t recover health, your hit points will drop faster, and you’ll die. Some enemies drop gold, and others drop food: you’ll want to remember which ones drop the latter and build up your stockpile, or else you’ll end up spending money on food to avoid dying instead of saving it up for that big new axe or powerful magic scroll. Or shield, or helm, or armor, and all the other stuff you’ll find yourself buying. Your gear, by the way, shows up on your character: yes, your appearance changes as you change it, all the way back here in 1985.

The game is full of items that you’ll want to familiarize yourself with. Keys, which you’ll need to get anywhere: you’ll find some throughout dungeons, but you’re also going to end up buying quite a few keys as you play. Keys become more expensive the higher your level, so stock up on those before going to the temple to level up, lest you pay for more keys. Not every door needs to be opened, but you don’t always know which doors are required ones until after you’ve explored behind them, so more keys than you think you need is the way to go, even if it does end up costing a lot of gold to be that way. Better that than getting 90 percent of the way through a dungeon and having to leave to get keys, especially since, on occasion, doors lock once more after you’ve used them. Again, it’s better to be overprepared here.

And then there’s the most important statistic to keep track of. Karma. Xanadu, not content with all of the other complication it introduced to action RPGs in 1985, also made it so that some monsters were fine to kill, but others weren’t actually all that bad, and killing them would raise your karma. And no, more karma is not good here. More is bad. You want your karma to be zero. If your karma is too high, the priests inside of the temples won’t allow you to enter them in order to level up. And even more importantly, you can’t wield the Dragonslayer if your karma is high, meaning you can’t beat Xanadu. There are ways to reduce your karma, by drinking a black potion that cuts your hit points in half, but guess what? There’s a limited number of these in the entire game, which means if you don’t learn your lesson and stop killing the monsters whose deaths will raise your karma, you can lock yourself out of actually completing the game. Had it been mentioned yet that Xanadu is a game that takes dozens of hours to complete?

Luckily, you learn to pay attention to this sort of thing to keep it from being a problem. When you discover a new enemy type, kill one, and then check the menu to see if your karma score has increased. If it has, stop killing those guys, now and forever. If it hasn’t, slash and burn with impunity, god has got your back here. You can run from any standard battle at any time by leaving the “room” out in the labyrinth, since battle switches the viewpoint from side-scrolling to top-down, and inside dungeons, it’s as easy as just going through a door. Which means there’s no excuse for you to keep on killing these karma-raising monsters. Just don’t do it! It’s your own fault if you lock yourself out of being able to finish Xanadu and are forced to re-roll an entirely new character to start the quest over!

Xanadu was, as said, a smash hit upon its original release. To the point that it kind of became its own thing outside of Dragon Slayer. It received a spin-off for the Famicom and NES, Faxanadu, developed by Hudson Soft and published in North America by the developers of Zelda themselves. The odd name makes a lot more sense when you realize that it’s a portmanteau of “Famicom” and “Xanadu,” huh? Which might still seem obscure to you, stateside, but consider Xanadu being a genre-defining hit and all that in Japan. It would be remade on a few occasions, such as for the PC-98 as the 16-bit Revival Xanadu, and then for the Sega Saturn release, Falcom Classics, which put the game into a 32-bit world. Xanadu would also see later spin-offs, like with the Windows game, Xanadu Next — there’s also a semi-related N-Gage game of the same name that released shortly before — and, more recently, Tokyo Xanadu. Which came out for the Playstation Vita first, then was released and expanded in a huge way for the Playstation 4 and Windows, before getting a total retranslation that included all of the PS4 edition’s content for the Switch in 2024. Given Revival Xanadu was a 10th-anniversary release, Xanadu Next came out for the 20th anniversary of Xanadu, and Tokyo Xanadu for the 30th, Falcom might have something up their sleeves for the 40th next summer: it, alongside The Legend of Heroes, is the only Dragon Slayer series that the company has kept going after Yoshio Kiya exited, and they’ve done so like clockwork to this point.

Tokyo Xanadu is something of a combination of a different Dragon Slayer subseries — The Legend of Heroes, specifically, the Cold Steel games of the Trails subseries — along with Ys, into something that isn’t quite either of them. It also doesn’t feel very Xanadu, either, but it’s at least doing something a little different by combining established ideas into something new, which is actually fairly Xanadu after all. The other modern nod to Xanadu in Falcom’s output is in Ys vs. Trails in the Sky: Alternative Saga, which is an arena fighting game featuring characters from both franchises. The two groups are actually sent to the world of Xanadu, and have to defeat the revived dragon king, Galsis, while they’re there. Xanadu isn’t updated nearly as often as The Legend of Heroes no, but it does get around.

It wasn’t just spin-offs and remakes for Xanadu, though. There was also a full expansion. Xanadu Scenario II released in 1986, and (1) requires the base game to work, and (2) was even bigger than the original game it was expanding, as it featured 12 labyrinths to clear instead of 10 on your way to defeat a revived Galsis. That’s the dragon, by the way, who wasn’t named until this point, but Falcom saw how popular Xanadu was and got to work filling in blanks. Kiya is on the record, per an interview in The Untold History of Japanese Game Developers, Vol. 3, as not being thrilled about having to make what is practically an entirely new Xanadu game — he actually developed what ended up being Dragon Slayer III in his spare time to keep him happy during the forced work of Scenario II — but, sadly, so it goes in game development. The soundtrack for Scenario II is brand new, by the way, and includes music from Yuzo Koshiro, early in his career. With Mikito Ichikawa, aka Mickey Albert, doing level design for the original Xanadu, as well, Xanadu’s staff included some ridiculous teenage talent.

Xanadu also got a manga (drawn by Tsuzuki Kazuhiko, who worked on other Falcom properties as well) and original video animation, i.e. an OVA, a few years after Xanadu first launched. It featured a modern soldier isekai’d into the world of Xanadu, who then had to deal with an evil dragon king and his army instead of tanks. For years, all we had available to watch Xanadu: Dragonslayer Densetsu was a poor transfer that lacked English subtitles. In 2023, however, there was a breakthrough, with a much higher-quality transfer created from VHS, and subtitles were finally added. Now, you can watch the whole thing online below if you care to:

This art style is actually more reminiscent of what Dragon Slayer III, known as Romancia, would look like, as that eschewed the more western influences of Ultima for something more decidedly anime and Japanese in style. And it was also used for the box art — shown way back at the top of this piece — for the MSX and MSX2 release of Xanadu, which wouldn’t arrive until late 1987. Speaking of Ultima, Falcom was actually sued by that game’s publisher, Origin, after a meeting in which Richard Garriot had flown out to Japan to discuss publishing Xanadu in the west, with Falcom handling Ultima IV in Japan. It turns out that you shouldn’t use art lifted from the manual of Ultima III in your game that you’re showing off to the makers of Ultima. Copyright and licensing in video games in the 80s was truly the wild west.

Both Xanadu and Xanadu Scenario II are available on the Switch as of 2024, through D4’s EggConsole service. It’s the first time either game was released in North America, and while they aren’t in English, all the information you need to play the game is. Just be warned: Xanadu is very much a game from 1985, even if it’s the kind of highly ambitious title that ended up influencing everything from Wonder Boy to Zelda and Falcom’s own later titles. If you’ve got the stomach for that, though, then grab your sword and enter the labyrinth. There’s a dragon needs slaying.

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