40 years of Dragon Slayer: Xanadu Next

Falcom placed Xanadu game rules on top of the kinds of dungeon-crawling, action RPGs it had inspired for 20 years, and the result is a spin-off you should play.

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.

Xanadu: Dragon Slayer II is one of the key games of the 1980s and Japanese game development, a title that helped to refine multiple genres, and influence and inspire vital games within those genres. It further developed the concept of action RPGs, and served as a pathfinder-style game before the days of Metroid or Wonder Boy’s from-the-ground-up console titles. Its top down dungeon design inspired The Legend of Zelda, as did its side-scrolling boss fights. There was an element of dungeon crawling to it, as well, with you starting things off in a town where you’d build out your character’s stats, and then proceed down into the labyrinth. There’s a direct line to draw between what Xanadu kicked off and the eventual introduction of something like Blizzard’s all-timer dungeon-crawler hit, Diablo, too, which is one hell of a legacy to be able to point to.

Which makes it both fitting and understandable that, when Falcom had a chance to revive Xanadu for its 20th anniversary in 2005, they chose to build on top of what Zelda and Diablo had done in those 20 intervening years. Whereas the original Xanadu was a side-scrolling action RPG pathfinder with top down combat and dungeon exploration, Xanadu Next falls more under what would later become the classic dungeon-crawler experience. You’ve got your central hub town that you return to again and again, tons of loot to collect and levels to gain, shortcuts to later sections of the labyrinth to unlock and utilize, and, of course, you can’t save while within the dungeon itself, meaning there’s always the chance, always the risk, that you’re pushing just a little too far and will pay for it.

This kind of design and balance has worked for dungeon crawling, for roguelikes, for action RPGs, and it certainly works for Xanadu Next, a game that’s been a bit unfairly lost in the shuffle outside of Japan. While it released for Windows in 2005 there, it wouldn’t see a North American release until over a decade later in 2016 — when it arrived, it seemed old, a little quaint, and not quite in line with what the people who did know Falcom outside of Japan were used to at this point, either. And that’s because it doesn’t have much of anything in common with Ys or The Legend of Heroes. This is pure Xanadu, baby: it’s not a Diablo-like so much as it’s "what would Diablo be like if Falcom made it?” Its systems are more complicated, the combat more involved and action-oriented, and there’s a level of puzzle-solving within the labyrinth that reminds you that Zelda owes a debt to Xanadu, too, and Falcom saw it paid back here. Lots of switches, pushing crates, water levels rising and falling, context-specific items required to progress and unearth secrets… you know the type.

Image credit: GOG

The result is a game that reminds you of some other games, but has synthesized those bits so well with what is an exceptionally old-school Falcom game design that it feels like its own thing. It at first, before you really dive in, might just feel like a version of Diablo that released about a decade after Blizzard put out its megahit. But once you start to see how the various systems work, how it, in very Xanadu style, lets you level up your gear and magic through the use of them, how there’s a major emphasis on keys and an entire economy based around key acquisition, how Xanadu Next is a game where you level up, sure, but also there are reasons why you want might to level down sometimes, despite the fact that all your equippable gear is tied to the stat increases that leveling up brings? Oh, yeah, that’s all Falcom, made by developers who, in some cases, grew up on their classic role-playing games, and showed here that they understood exactly what it was they were honoring with this anniversary project.

There is so much to discuss about what works about Xanadu Next, and why it excels, why it’s underrated but also not designed for a mass audience. Let’s focus on two key points that should help explain the whole vibe of the game, though, and your expectations for what it is you’re getting into if you decide to give it a whirl.

Like with the original Xanadu, keys are required for getting anywhere: you might find yourself deep within a specific portion of the labyrinth, and then run out of keys, halting your progress until you can get some more. That might require backtracking if you don’t have an item to teleport you out of the dungeon, and if you’re out of the consumable that lets you make a temporary round-trip warp point, then you’re going to have to cover some ground you’ve already covered when you return. There are two ways to get keys. The first is in the same shop that you buy potions and spell upgrades in, but there’s a catch. Whereas in the original Xanadu, the cost of keys went up every time you leveled up, here, the cost goes up every time you purchase a key. Gold is at a premium in Xanadu Next, since you get it from defeating monsters, but are also constantly purchasing new and expensive equipment — sure, you can look around and find lots of equipment in treasure chests in the labyrinth, but since skills transfer from weapons with use and become a permanent part of your toolbox this way, you’ll also want to be buying weapons instead equipping them with regularity instead of sticking to something that works until you happen upon a new weapon in a chest.

So, what’s the solution then, if you don’t want to buy keys if you can help it? Bones. Monster bones. You get access to a knife that can carve keys out of bones, and, sometimes, you get monster bones as a drop after defeating them. You end up carving literal skeleton keys out of the bones of your enemies in order to continue to progress in the dungeon, where you’ll find more monsters to carve up into keys. This is both exceptionally metal and a great game mechanic that you’ll want to utilize as often as possible, lest you be unable to afford that armor you really need just as much as a key if you’re going to keep diving deeper into the ruins. A later bone knife, which is much more expensive to acquire, can occasionally allow you to carve two keys out of a single bone — it’ll save you money and some trips back to town in the long run, so it’s worth the investment, and comes with the bonus anticipation of hoping you managed to make two keys with one click of the mouse, as well.

The second key point doesn’t involve keys at all, but does involve the game’s leveling system. There’s a monster you’ll encounter well into the game, called the Lich. The first time you face one, the Lich is a big event enemy, with the doors of the room locking you into a relatively small space in which to fight this guy who takes an awful lot of abuse for a non-boss enemy. Later on, you’ll end up in rooms that are just lousy with the guys. It’s not the whole making a miniboss into a regular enemy thing that’s alarming here. It’s what the Lich does that should make your eyes bug a little.

The Lich can summon undead foes, in significant numbers, to attack you. They can also fire off a magic attack at you that, if it hits, will give you a 10-second countdown before it kills you. The only way to stop the countdown and avoid an otherwise guaranteed death is to hit the Lich with a melee attack. Which wouldn’t be that bad, save for one very important detail left for last to maximize impact: if the Lich hits you with its melee attack, it knocks down your level. And it does not come back after the fight.

A look at both the inventory screen and your character’s stats, as well as one of the church’s utilities, the ability to distribute bonus points.

If the Lich hits you multiple times with melee attacks, guess what? You lose multiple levels. This would be bad enough on its own, because your stats are increased in two ways when you gain a level: first in an automatic way, and second with you distributing X number of bonus points to specific categories. Which makes you much weaker in multiple ways when trying to take down the Lich that was already giving you enough trouble that it struck you in the first place. On top of that obvious issue, however, is another, which is that the gear you can equip is restricted by specific stat growth thresholds. Which means that a Lich can hit you, rendering your weapon useless, and if you don’t have another one to equip instead… well, the Lich won, because you’re not going to take it down hitting one of them repeatedly for the minimum damage, and even if you do manage to come out on top, you’re still down a level or two or three, and who knows how many precious items you had to burn to stay alive.

Now, this might all sound like a disaster, but there’s more here going on than has been explained thus far, as well. For one, leveling down is something you can optionally do in this game, and there are reasons to want to do so. So you can redistribute your already allocated points, or because there’s an item you can eventually pick up that actually causes you to gain more bonus skill points per level. Which means that, if you level down sufficiently, you can level yourself back up into a much more powerful version of whatever level it was when you decided to go backwards. The Lich, in this regard, can be merely an annoyance, since there are ways for you to end up better off than when you first encountered it. However, with the right planning, you can also keep the Lich from ever laying a hand on you in the first place. With the right skills learned from the right weapons, you can imbue any weapon you’ve equipped with certain characteristics, such as the ability to freeze foes, and not just the blade that skill came ith. That, in conjunction with freezing spells, can keep the Lich rooted in place, unable to melee you when you go in from behind and start wailing on it to maximize damage, and make your way out of the encounter unscathed, and efficiently so.

Galsis is back, which is what Galsis does, and what the titular Dragonslayer is meant to take care of.

Xanadu Next can be difficult, but only if you stubbornly refuse to engage with the language the game is speaking to you. The Lich is absolutely, if you rush right in, the kind of enemy that could get you to close out the game amid a string of obscenities. Instead of panicking and doing everything you can to ensure victory, though, just take your L, lose, and try again with a plan this time. Attack from a distance until you can’t, then freeze the Lich, and attack it from behind, ducking away again before it thaws out. Damage in Xanadu Next is location-based, meaning, you score more critical hits and significant damage when you attack an enemy from behind than if you approach them from the front. Which means there’s always incentive to stun or freeze your opponents in a fight as much as possible, which means you want to work on building up a large pool of skills to equip that do those very things, whether as a special attack or as a passive buff on your gear. If you’ve been playing Xanadu Next the way it wants to be played up to the point where you first meet a Lich, you might even defeat it before you even know that it’s the kind of horror show Dragon Slayer originator Yoshio Kiya would have been proud to put into one of his own games, the kind of nightmare that people would praise for showing up in a Souls title in the present.

It’s this kind of reactive combat structure that makes Xanadu Next’s combat significantly different from that of Diablo, whose overarching game design this dungeon-crawler certainly borrows from. You’re much more active in this game, figuring out where you need to be, unable to ever really just spam attacks quickly because you’ll regret standing in place long enough to do so. Each spell has a specific number of uses before you have to recharge it with a magic potion or resting at the inn back in the town (or, it refills, along with your hit points, when you level up), and those potions only refill one spell; active skills follow similar rules. While you can learn dozens of these, you can only equip four skills and spells at a time, meaning, you need to figure out what works best in what situations, the apply the appropriate attacks, spells, and passive buffs before tackling it. You can change what’s equipped at any time, but it’s a little tougher to do so when you’re in the middle of getting your ass kicked, is all.

You find Guardian cards to equip throughout the game, and they’ll also level up through use. These can increase how quickly you learn weapon skills, or allow you to gain more experience, or even increase how many bonus points you’re awarded when you level.

You learn the skills that are inherent to a particular weapon through repeated usage of those weapons. A percentage tracker is shown when you hover over a weapon in your inventory, and when it hits 100 percent, you learn the skill associated with the weapon, and can permanently choose it from among your pool of skills. While you were reaching that 100 percent figure, your attacks with the weapon also increase in strength: it’s based on your familiarity and proficiency with the weapon, a la the original Xanadu. Which means there are moments where a new weapon might be weaker than your equipped one, but if its base damage is more powerful than the one you already have one, it’s one you’re going to want to equip once you’ve wrung everything out of the currently equipped weapon that you can.

Your spells do not level up through use, but instead you buy or find more powerful versions of spells you already know. Weaker versions of spells are effectively useless against higher-level enemies, but if you can upgrade from a level 2 ice spell to a level 3, those foes will go down just as easily as early game opponents fell to your level 1 attacks. These scrolls get real expensive, so, like with the potential armor and weapons you can find in the labyrinth itself, you’re going to want to make sure you’re fully exploring in the interest of saving some gold for other needs. There are times, though, where you simply can’t wait to stumble upon something, and so instead you should buy it: don’t make the game intentionally difficult for yourself if you’ve got what you need to make yourself stronger. Just don’t make a habit of always buying your way out of every scenario, because eventually you’ll regret not having the cash for some absurdly priced axe with a killer skill you really want.

Another equippable that grows more powerful as you wear it are the Guardian cards. These are all passive, and reward you with some boon or another while they’re on. They can help you learn weapon skills faster, or grant you more experience per foe, or even award you additional bonus points after a level up. You can only swap out your equipped Guardian at the church in the town, so don’t forget to make checking out your acquired Guardians part of your routine when you return from the labyrinth. They level up a couple or a few times, depending, and their effects are more pronounced the higher their level. There are also some statues you can interact with in the labyrinth that automatically grant your equipped Guardian level: remembering where these are in proximity to your fast-travel warp points can be helpful, since it can let you immediately level up a brand new Guardian you want the full effects of, or play catchup with an older one you’d been letting gather dust back at the church.

The way Xanadu Next plays with scale works so well. When you finally reach what looks like a small open door seen in the distance, it’s towering over you, too.

The game starts to open up in its dungeon design when context-specific special items start to show up. The winged boots that let you float over small gaps you couldn’t normally cross. The magic spectacles, that show you hidden routes and pathways and staircases. Items like this open up the potential of the environmental puzzles, and is where the game’s greatest nod to Zelda comes in, but it’s also a throwback to Falcom’s own past, especially on the Ys side. Like with spells and weapon skills, you can have a few different items equipped at a time that will grant you passive or active abilities and buffs, which is where you’ll end up putting the winged boots and so on. Make sure they’re always in your inventory, because you never know when you might come upon a puzzle or secret passageway that requires the use of these kinds of items.

Xanadu Next as a whole is full of top-notch design, but it’s the final part of the labyrinth, Castle Strangerock, that stands tall over the rest. It’s exceptional, a lengthy, complicated, and multifaceted dungeon that’ll both test all the skills you should have acquired to this point, while introducing newer challenges, as well. It’s masterful, and it ends with a series of significant boss fights that feel like the proper reward for all of the already high-quality boss battles you’ve had to this point, in that the game is continuing to ask a lot of you in recognizing patterns and potential weaknesses to capitalize on. These are large, arena boss fights against massive creatures, not just slightly bigger enemies with more hit points to take down, the kind of stuff you'd expect from Falcom if you’re familiar with their game in this area. And each one is so satisfying to take down, once you’ve figured out the trick to doing it.

When you finish the game, you’ll be awarded a rank and various scores based on your performance. How long it took you to complete it, your level, how many skills you learned, how many treasures you opened, how many healing potions you used, how much damage you took, how many deaths you suffered, even how many times you saved. Which means you’re going to look at it and go, “hey wait a second, am I bad at this?” even if you felt pretty good about how things went down. The game is short enough — like, a fraction of the time it takes to complete the original Xanadu — that you could put in a few replays and not be tired of it, and maybe even have learned more about how it all works in the process. I’ve gone through it twice now, and am already looking forward to a third down the road. That it’s also a $15 game you can find on Steam or GOG in the present, one that’s routinely discounted, only makes this replayability all the more appealing.

Whether you play once or multiple times, you’ll become intimately familiar with Harlech Island. That’s the location the game takes place on: you’re stuck here, because you died there. That’s right: you show up as a former, disgraced knight, hired by a scholar named Charlotte who wants to investigate the ruins found on the island. Within an hour or so, you die. You’re brought back to life by way of an old magic, but it ties you to the island forever… unless you can find the legendary Dragonslayer sword, and reclaim your life for yourself. You die but then the story keeps going? See, I told you FromSoft fans would love this game’s whole deal.

Not coincidentally, you’re killed by someone else who hopes to wield the Dragonslayer, after the two of you get into a bit of a scuffle over who has the right to be checking out all these ruins. The more you play, the more the game world’s present and past reveal itself to you: the sages are actually from a distant past, from a time period where the heroes of the day failed to defeat the legendary dragon king, Galsis. As no one showed up as the hero of legend to wield Galsis’ bane, the most the sages could do was banish him, temporarily: he’s making his return now. Good news, everyone: you can wield the Dragonslayer, so Galsis’ clock is ticking. Much of the narrative is told through translated journals and stone tablets that you find and give to Charlotte: you’ll be rewarded not only with some more story and Xanadu lore that ties this game into the existing Xanadu, but Charlotte will also make you progressively tastier lunches that heal more and more hit points, as a bonus for giving her these works to study.

You can kind of figure out what’s going on before the cutscenes can tell you this way, though, not all of it. It does a good job of painting a more detailed picture for you if you want it, though, and if you don’t? At least you’ve got those lunches.

Xanadu Next originally released on the N-Gage, but that version of the game was developed concurrently with the Windows edition. Falcom published the N-Gage edition, but it’s a different game with a different story, developed by a different studio. The canon Xanadu Next, as it were, is the Windows release, which came out in Japan in 2005, and worldwide in 2016. While it shows its age on the graphical side, the large-scale character portrait artwork is excellent, and unlike much of what you see today, from Falcom and otherwise. It strikes that wonderful balance between eastern and western RPG character designs, which is fitting for a game like this one, which borrows from Diablo, sure, but is also a spin-off to a game that got its own inspiration from the likes of Wizardry and Ultima.

Don’t be fooled by how it looks, or think that there’s not enough going on here to justify playing it in a world where Diablo spawned plenty of imitators: Xanadu Next has significant depth, and is Falcom’s attempt at building on top of the kinds of games they themselves inspired or influenced. It’s as great of a title as it is a tribute to the game it’s spun out of, and it’s a shame that more people haven’t given it a shot despite its low price point and easy availability. There’s something special here, for those who take the time to discover what that is.

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