Tokyo Xanadu EX+ is an action RPG with an almost visual novel like backstory in a Tokyo school. The story bears great similiarity to Persona for sure, but so do 100s of other anime stories related to schools in Japan and so on. The story is quite well written and I especially liked that most of the characters are quite well written and have a progression arc. For many people the game might be too story heavy but I find the balance between fighting and story actually quite perfect. The battle system is quite complex and makes use of most buttons on the joypad including directional pad arrows, as I am not very good in ARPGs in general I often forgot to use half the special moves or accidentally used one when trying to switch characters or open menu, however, the normal difficulty is easy enough to enjoy the game anyways. Only the final boss fight required extra googling of instructions. Music is ok, and sounds too., and so is graphic, nothing super spectacular but works.

I think it's neat. Went in expecting a fun cliched anime story, and that's pretty much what I got, but with some unexpected extras. If we talk about how this integrates real world social themes vs Persona, this is obviously going to Persona, but that's not really what TX is trying to be from my perspective. It's basically urban fantasy LN style Cold Steel 1 and does a pretty good job at that. The world building is fairly in-depth and leaves room for series potential, and as per usual Falcom has crafted a great NPC cast—they're not going to blow you away with their arcs, but I found it pretty rewarding talking to them all and seeing how they were affected by story events, along with Falcom's crazy dedication to giving like 100+ NPCs a crapton of dialogue and personality in most of their modern games.

Graphically it's a slightly upgraded CS1/2. I personally find those some of the worst looking Falcom games (though not quite Ys Seven level), so it still leaves a lot to be desired. Morimiya is a cool city with a nice personality, and it's interesting seeing Falcom do this kind of Trails-lite world building in the real world. The main and side casts are quite good with fun, likable characters. I do like the narrative structure of focusing roughly on one party member per chapter, though it has the usual weakness of said character getting minimal focus for the rest of the game. My favourite was Shio because he's cool and has one of the better arcs. I also am probably the only one who finds the concept of ShioKou more interesting than Kou's other candidates—sadly their chemistry is barely capitalised on after chapter 5.

Speaking of which, it's nice to see this game take a step back from the galge zone. In part because I have no interest, but primarily because I think Falcom are horrid at writing player romance options. There is a very clear canon romance in the form of Shiori, and it's a pretty well developed romance that I don't have complaints with. Asuka and to a lesser extent Rion exist as well, but their teases are minor in comparison.

The story itself mostly drags its feet with padding, taking forever to get to the point for a self-contained story, but once it actually goes somewhere it gets really interesting with some wild twists and turns. It could probably benefit from stronger villains, though what we have was still very threatening and well built up. Sadly it's the worst offender of the era where Falcom games didn't know when to end, making you question the definition of a 'final' chapter. I am also of the belief that we should ban Falcom from devising true endings, as they don't seem to understand how to implement them correctly.

After story, while I'm not sure if it was wise to make the game even longer in this version, is at least great. I was surprised at the amount of new assets they made for this, it has nice vibes. The sequel baiting is interesting and I think whatever the next game they make in this universe could be interesting—hopefully not once again built on the shell of Kiseki to give themselves more time for the next Ys.

Gameplay is pretty straightforward, and it's no Ys, but still pretty fun and there's good variety in the characters. It plays well to its strength of fast-paced battles and encouraging you to speed through the dungeons. There's some surprising difficulty spikes that gave me trouble (in a good way), such as the boss of chapter 5.

Music though? Absolutely the best part of this game. You have Unisuga handling more of the soundtrack than I believe he has on any other Falcom game, and he knocks it out of the park. Sonoda also chimes in with his excellent atmospheric themes, and Jindo doesn't lack for strong contributions either. Singa's opening theme might be my favourite song from him, though I can't say I cared for his battle theme (as usual, it meshes badly with the other composers).

As for the translation... let's say that I sure hope the switch relocalisation for this game is significant, because the translation I played was bad. Ignoring the badly placed memes (which I gotta say are super minor in comparison to what I'm about to say), I counted a truly wild amount of mistranslations in all the voiced scenes alone, and in a fair amount of unvoiced scenes I had to crosscheck with the JP to make sure the TL wasn't spouting BS at me (it usually was!). Honestly I really regret playing this in English in retrospect, easily the worst Falcom loc I've experienced. Granted, coming from Aksys it's a surprise that it was even comprehensible—their Otome translations are fucking atrocious.

So yeah, was it worth playing? For me, yep, it was fun and I found it pretty great. It doesn't stand out in any area, but it makes for a fun anime game with a lot of Falcom's usual strengths. I'd certainly recommend it to anyone who enjoys anime rpgs that don't pretend to be more than they are, at least once the relocalisation for switch comes out. If I'm to compare it to Trails, which let's be honest is inevitable here, it would probably going around the middle of my rankings for that series—which puts it a good bit above CS1/2.

Also if anyone cares, there's no DLC costume for the guys. Though it's not CS4 level as the girls don't get much either.

No es un juego perfecto, de hecho con dificultad llega a ser un juego decente, pero aun así es un juego bastante disfrutable tanto por su historia como por su gameplay le cuál si bien ambos dejan demasiado que desear, aun así son lo suficientemente decentes como para poder disfrutarlos de inicio a fin

La historia es meh, típica de los adolescentes elegidos que tienen que luchar contra monstruos (cosa que no me gusto mucho ya que los monstruos son genéricos, me hubiera gustado que los jefes fuesen humanos, puesto que así se hubiera podido crear una mejor profundidad con los personajes e historias), aunque agradezco que si le dieran voz y personalidad al MC, detesto cuando los jrpg dan un simple npc vacio... Por otra parte el ost sin ser malo, tampoco es memorable y esto es extraño debido a que sé que los que lo compusieron fueron los mismos que hacen los de la saga Kiseki, pero no sé que sucedió aquí que ningún ost es realmente memorable y se sienten genéricos.

Algo que me sucedió con la historia es que si bien se nota la inspiración de Persona 4, aun así sentí que paralelismos e incluso muchas partes son exactamente igual que la historia de Chaos;Child y no sé si se habrán inspirado en esa VN para crear tokyo xanadu considerando que para cuando salió este juego Chaos;Child había salido pocos meses atrás.

Por una parte me sorprende que esto saliese en una psvita, pero, por otra parte, siento que esto fue un gran limitante en cuanto al gameplay puesto que no se siente tan refiniado como deberia. Por ahí se rumorea una futura secuela de Tokyo Xanadu y sinceramente creo que la base de esta entrega fue muy buena así que de verdad me gustaría que saliese una secuela habiendo refinado y mejorado los aspectos presentados aquí para plataformas modernas.

Por cierto, debí de haberme terminado Tokyo Xanadu hace casi 1 año, pero por diferentes motivos perdí 2 veces las partidas que empezaba...

Tokyo Xanadu is not a very good game; it also kept me playing for around 20 hours. Read on to find out why.
Tokyo Xanadu eX+ is a port of a Playstation Vita game. The game is a bit of a mix of your traditional hack-n-slash with elements from JRPGs. Like a JRPG, you will spend a lot of time walking around and talking to people, and like a JRPG, there is an intricate mass of systems, none of which you will care about because combat is so easy you could ace every battle in your sleep. The game is divided into combat sections and "walk around and talk to people" sections for that 100% generic shonen anime experience.

Devil May Suck

In the combat portions of Tokyo Xanadu, you take control of three characters and fight your way through a dungeon. You control one character at a time, but can cycle through all three characters. Each character has an elemental affinity; part of the gameplay is matching up character elements with monster elements (e.g. a fire character is going to be strong against fire monster).
Combat is a pretty standard 3d hack-and-slash. Your moves consist of a light attack, ranged and heavy attacks (mapped to the same button!), a dodge roll, and a jump. You also have three Devil Triggers in this game, each with a separate meter. One of them just unleashes a very powerful attack, one of them summons another one of your team members to assist you, and the most powerful one unleashes a slow JRPG cutscene that deals massive damage, unless you are fighting a boss, in which it deals damage equivalent to about three of your normal attacks.
The combat sections of the game feel like they were designed by people who flunked game design 101. All of your character's movements are slow and awkward. Attacks do not stagger enemies consistently. In just about every other hack-n-slash game I've played, you can stagger normal enemies with attacks and can even stunlock them--in fact, figuring out how to stunlock enemies was a key part of being able to beat Devil May Cry for me. Here, enemies will stand around normally and play a stun animation whenever the game feels like it. There is no visual feedback from your attacks, which makes them feel weak and unimpactful.
If the attacks are weak, the dodge roll is awful. In a lot of hack-n-slash games, your dodge gives you a set of i-frames (invincibility frames). For example, in the Dark Souls games you are only invincible during certain parts of your dodge roll; in Blades of Time, you are invincible during your entire dodge. In Tokyo Xanadu EX+, you have no i-frames during your dodge with one exception. If you perform a "perfect dodge," then you get a small window of i-frames. However, whether or not you perform a "perfect dodge" is a matter more of luck than skill. There's nothing in the enemies attacks that clearly telegraphs when hitting the dodge button triggers a perfect dodge, so figuring out the "perfect dodge" isn't a matter of intuition. And it isn't a matter of reflexes; triggering the perfect dodge isn't a matter of just being fast enough to recognize when an attack is headed your way and dodging it accordingly, it's a matter of hitting the dodge button at the precise moment that the devs intend you to hit it, whether or not it makes visual sense. It's like playing a rhythm game blindfolded.
Woe unto he who decides they will use the dodge on his own. Enemy attacks come in two varieties--attacks that are so slow and predictable that you could literally just run away from them instead of using the dodge button, and attacks with splash damage that has a larger radius than the dodge. Yes, there are attacks in this game that are essentially unable to be dodged--unless you trigger the perfect dodge by hitting the dodge button at the precise moment known only to Toru Endo and Nobuhiro Hioki.
Worse yet, characters do not have i-frames when they spawn in. Whenever one character dies, one of your support characters spawns in at the exact place the first character dies. This means that a character can get hit with an attack and die, the next character spawns in, and then that next character is hit with the exact same attack because they spawned in the wrong place at the wrong time. Giving new characters i-frames is such a basic game design feature that it's unreal that it wasn't included here.
The game has weird difficulty spikes; like a photo negative version of Salamander/Life Force, the dungeons are ridiculously easy, but some of the bosses are ridiculously hard. You will breeze through a bunch of low-level demons only to get destroyed by a boss hitting you with an overpowered splash damage attack. Falcom's idea of making the game hard is making every enemy attack deal massive amounts of damage; however, since most normal enemy attacks are easy to dodge, you have to turn the difficulty up all the way to make fighting through dungeons instantly, only to turn it back down when you get to a boss. Every boss has a massive HP bar, which makes fighting bosses less an exciting test of skill and more a war of attrition where you spam the same few moves, hit the dodge button at exactly the right time, and circle strafe around the boss for what feels like an hour.
Dungeons are boring both in form and function. Each dungeon is a set of dull-looking corridors with an occasional "puzzle" (read: hit a switch and a door opens) and a few rooms that require you to clear out all the monsters in them before you can proceed. The dungeons are linear in spatial design and ugly in visual design. The worst part is that they don't have any kind of theme (except for the Witch's Castle of Thorns); I don't know what they are supposed to be or represent. They just feel like a bunch of random assets that were thrown together to give the game some combat. Compare this to, say, Marlow Briggs or Blades of Time--both of these had rather linear levels, but they visuals made it clear what kind of place I was in and how I was progressing. Or, compare the game to Devil May Cry, which not only had good-looking visuals, but also had a non-linear level design.
The game has an abundance of stat systems, none of which I care about (I'm not a big fan of RPG elements in real-time action games), and most of which haven't seemed to have made a huge difference in the 20-ish hours that I've played the game. The one exception is cooking, which, according to the internet, is helpful for making more powerful healing items. I do not like cooking in real life and like it even less in video games, so I haven't touched it in the game (the more fool I). I'm not a connoisseur of RPG systems and can't really say anything about this game's particular tangled web of systems other than that the menu for upgrading your weapon looks cool, but is extremely confusing. [1] And in general, the UI in this game often looks good, but could use some streamlining.

Class Effect

Combat is one main part of the game. The other main part is the story, which is a shameless ripoff of Bleach if Bleach was the dullest slice-of-life anime ever made. You play as Kou, a sigma male who is adored by every young lady in the high school, but ignores them all and instead spends his time on the grindset, doing part time jobs after school. [2] The game is divided into multiple episodes which each act as a semi-self contained story arc. It's a pretty cool idea. Unfortunately, most of the episodes are pretty bland and filled with lots of dialogue that never goes anywhere. I kind of enjoyed just aimlessly walking around and talking to NPCs, but I can't in good conscience describe it as must-play experience. Most of the characters are anime cliches with paper-thin personalities and no development. There are at least three girl characters who are all so similar to each other that I could not keep them straight, and most characters could be summed up in one sentence.
Dialogue makes use of all the bad cliches of JRPG writing--characters talk for paragraphs while saying nothing, then dramatically pause between sentences. The localization is absolutely terrible. At least the notorious 90s JRPG localizations had some funny jokes in them. This one is just bad. The translators peppered the script with Americanisms and profanity that I am 100% sure was not in the original script; at one point a character inexplicably lapses into a bad Southern accent. Despite being tailor-made for Americans, the script has absolutely terrible lapses into broken English, my favorite being the repeated exclamation "Free stuff, get!" [3] Characters will also randomly put quotation marks around words; I'm still not able to figure out why this is the case.
There's a kind of relationship system where you can get "friendship shards" by completing dungeons and then use these to unlock friendship episodes, similar to the side-stories in Scarlet Nexus. Completing a friendship episode "strengthens your bond" with that character, which has some combat effect that was never obvious to me. People have compared it to the Persona games, but I've never played those abominations, so my closest point of comparison is Mass Effect if the characters were one-dimensional anime stereotypes instead of sexy aliens. Much like Mass Effect, I spent all my time outside of combat talking to the hot girls, with limited results. Perhaps this game simulates high school a little too accurately.

He on honey-dew hath fed, And drunk the milk of Paradise

Why did I play this game so long? Well, it's a fairly simple and repetitive game, so it felt like a good palette cleanser. The story felt kind of relaxing--sure, it's a mindless pastiche of shonen anime, but it's very wholesome. It seems like it was written by, for, and about people who would be appalled at the thought of downloading music from Limewire, much less sneaking off to smoke a cigarette underage. American fiction about teenagers is almost uniformly mean-spirited, so it is nice to see something that is so unabashedly optimistic, even if it is poorly-written. And the Dreamcast-esque graphics were nostalgic for me. [4]
But these are not the real reasons I played the game for around 20 hours. The real reason I played this game so much is the music. No, not the music in the game. The music in the game is dreadful. It sounds like bad Sonic Adventure music. I turned that music off and played Spotify in the background. Any game where you can kill monsters while listening to Sade is worth playing just a little bit.

[1] It reminds me of the Sphere Grid in Final Fantasy X, another form-over-function UI disaster.
[2] Based.
[3] Though, to be fair, "Free stuff, get" is kind of my philosophy of life and explains why I have so many games in my library.
[4] Honestly, I would welcome a return to 2001-era graphics if it meant more 2001-era gameplay.

TLDR: Tokyo Xanadu eX+ boasts numerous elements of multiple JRPG franchises that I love, including Trails, YS, and Persona. However, this game falls short of the merit that each of those games achieve in my eyes due to my standards for those games that I love.

There are definitely some preexisting factors present in my enjoyment of this game. It probably doesn't help that I had very recently played both YS IX and CS 3 consecutively just a couple months ago. Despite loving both games, I guess I got what I may coin as "Nihon Falcom Fatigue". Having this fatigue made everything about the gameplay from its combat to its social sim just feel like an unpolished mix of Persona, Trails, and YS.

This game is still decent and can be enjoyable. I will also admit the narrative did creep up on me and I suddenly became invested in the 2nd half despite holding much less interest long prior. It's a good game, but a game that would have you missing/preferring to play the very games that inspired it.

TLDR: Great gameplay, amazing soundtrack, solid cast, mediocre graphics, bad plot.

I expected to hate this game. It's derivative of two series I love a lot by the same developer; Trails of Cold Steel and Ys. However, on paper it seemed to be removing the aspects of Cold Steel I liked such as turn based combat and deep world building and injecting elements of Ys onto that. In some ways, my expectation was spot on. However, Tokyo Xanadu surprised me with its smart game design.

I was in love with dungeon crawling in this game from the get go, it's somewhat simplistic mechanically, however each stage gives you a couple of incentives to get S ranks including speed, hitting weaknesses, collecting all treasure, getting high combos, taking no damage etc. While these requirements were at times too lenient, it made me constantly switch my party around for the best combinations and play through each stage with urgency. Each of the dungeons and bosses have fairly unique gimmicks, and never stagnate too quickly. There's a high density of amazing dungeons and bosses as well, with some even being unlocked on ng+, which by themself make the game worth replaying at least once. My only complaint is the leniency of S rank conditions and I wish there were further restrictions on healing items on higher difficulties.

The combat itself is fairly basic, with each character having three special moves, an ex attack, and a super. Around the mid game, you stop gaining new abilities outright, but each chapter rewards you with a new character to experiment with, and the equipment system allows you to further personalize each character. Ultimately, I found the simplicity benefited the game because it led to me approaching challenges more straightforward, rather than outright subverting them. Unfortunately the end game does become far too easy though. Due to the aforementioned elemental kill bonus, it's pretty dumb to stick to only one character so I had pretty even playtime through the whole cast.

The sidequests are good; not taking up too much time while also giving fairly good rewards throughout. Some have completely new areas tied to them which is nice but there are a fair few reused ones which is more annoying. However, I collected everything and talked to every NPC, and completed every quest without getting bored.

Graphically, it's a vita game and a lot of the character models kinda suffer as a result. All the female party members share the same mold, with only a couple textures to differentiate them. The amount of reused assets and animations from Trails of Cold Steel are staggering as well, and they probably will bother you if you're a fan of that game. Overall, not the best but serviceable graphics.

The soundtrack is Unisuga at his peak. This was his best era frfr.

Translation is mediocre, with a lot of clear jokes inserted by the tl team and quite a few typos.

Unfortunately, as I run out of things to talk about we're gonna have to mention the plot. If bad story is a dealbreaker for you in JRPGs, don't buy this game. The story is essentially every bad Falcom anime game trope combined into one; it's a cookie cutter contrived thematically confused mess. There are reveals that just come out of barely anywhere to give irrelevant characters a reason to exist. Factions without clear definitions manipulate the events behind the scenes and do whatever the plot needs them to, and throughout the game they abuse poorly thought out vagueness and misdirection. The main events from chapter to chapter are very loosely connected and don't lead to a satisfying unraveling of events, it's more like power rangers. The final chapter and epilogue are especially bad, though the after story ties things together in a comprehensive way.

That being said, I like almost all of the characters. Kou, the protagonist is a pretty basic self insert but he's emo so I like him. Sora is a pretty admirable wannabe martial artist. Yuuki is a little shitter who takes the gamer stereotype a little too far sometimes but his dry humor and distate for physical affection are enjoyable. Shio is a bro. Gorou is a good parallel to Kou and a solid mentor. A majority of NPCs and supporting characters are memorable enough throughout the journey, with fun anecdotes and details that unravel throughout.

Though I think the greatest character in this game, and its story's main achievent is the deuteragonist: Asuka Hiiragi. Her story arc is the typical loner, but it's really believable considering her circumstances and she manages to create interesting conflict without coming across as tryhard or edgy. She's understanding and supportive but doesn't make excuses for herself or anyone else and as the game went on I grew to appreciate her gradual growth and attitude shift.

Ex+ is definitely the best way to play, its new stuff is the best part of the game; the side stories help to lean the gameplay story split further towards gameplay, and the after story is great.

Overall worth playing if you want an unexpectedly good action rpg with some Falcom charm included. I'm going to be replaying this game every few years, and the only way I don't recommend it is if great story is a must for you.

Another game that took me a few years to beat. Tokyo Xanadu is an interesting experience solely because there isn't a single remarkable thing about it. It's an action-RPG dungeon crawler with light life sim elements that takes the form of perhaps the most generic thing imaginable. Every character is an overplayed anime trope, and none develop beyond it. You get the ice-queen exchange student, the NEET, the idol, the bad boy with a heart of gold, the student council president, a teacher with a secret, a loud best friend, and not one, but TWO, childhood friend characters designed exactly like all the rest of them are. They are serviceable characters, nothing to really hate, but nothing to latch on to. The story as well is incredibly basic, with no interesting twist to set it apart from every other Persona-style “teens fight creatures from another world” type narrative. The bland story mixed with low energy presentation and voice acting makes this a dull game to play half of the time.

The other half, the gameplay, is pretty darn fun. The dungeon crawling is great to play, the combat feels great and there is a ton of variety in playstyles from the many party members, each playing differently from the other. There wasn’t a single playable character that I didn’t enjoy using, which is a feat some RPGs I like way more can’t even accomplish. The dungeons themselves are short and simple, but it works in their favour, and there is a large emphasis on maintaining your combos, which involves whacking enemies and interactable objects. Keeping a combo up for an entire dungeon was always a fun challenge. The enemy variety was also pretty solid, most doing a great job of keeping me on my toes. Bosses are a standout as well, being great tests of your combat skills, though they are pretty basic in their designs. The life sim aspect was decent, as well. The game does a great job of tying it into side quests, so you’re encouraged to do as many as possible, which is a great system. I can’t say I found any of the characters interesting though, so it made the “social link” scenes pretty forgettable. The music was alright as well, though I can’t say this type of JRPG music is really my kind of thing. A lot of songs in Falcom’s games blend together for me, but none of is bad at all, and in this game, there are quite a few great tracks.

This definitely feels like the kind of game where a story was attached to an idea for a combat system. The story is so basic and uninteresting that it really impacted my enjoyment of this otherwise pretty fun game. Unfortunately, I wouldn’t recommend this game unless you’re a die-hard Falcom fan or starved for more Persona-like games. It’s a fine experience, but not one everybody should be rushing out to play.

Tras hacer esta tercera partida para obtener el platino, tengo que preguntar: ¿por qué son tan putamente embarazosos los diálogos? ¿Quién ha escrito esto? ¿Por qué motivo? Los diálogos en este juego son tal cual los que aparecerían en el típico anime de temporada que solo le gusta a los que solo salen de casa para comprar Monster Energy y chocolate.

Esta mierda es inaceptable, el guión de este juego hace que los personajes sean mucho peores de lo que en realidad son. Por favor, hablad como una persona normal que me quedo inaceptablemente calvo.

El juego más anime del año