In Xanadu did Kubla Khan
A stately pleasure-dome decree
Where Alph, the sacred river, ran
Through caverns measureless to man
Down to a sunless sea.
I remember reading parts of this poem when I first played Kentucky Route Zero. There was a section in the game simply called “Xanadu” where this poem was referenced and it was one of the most intriguing and weird levels in the already very weird game. A couple of years later, the very same poem was referenced again in season 4 of the Fargo TV show of all places. Though only the first line of the poem was read aloud here (and though it felt somewhat out of place), I immediately recognized the words.
And I remembered.
I remembered that, a couple of years prior I had played a game that had the word “Xanadu” in its title. I remembered that it was part of a series of games that were kind of a big deal in the JRPG genre. The Xanadu game series is a relatively small collection of RPGs that were conceived as a sub-series of “Dragon Slayer”, Nihon Falcom’s groundbreaking and genre-defining franchise. Before the Trails-series, there was Dragon Slayer, going back as far as the 1980s and thus, being one of the very first JRPGs in general. Xanadu spawned as a sequel to the main series in 1985 with “Dragon Slayer II: Xanadu” and became a beast of its own shortly after. Since then, there have been a number of releases in this spin-off series, the most popular of which is probably “Faxanadu” for the NES.
Let me preface this review by saying that I played none of these games. I’m familiar with various games developed by Falcom like Trails and Ys. However, as most Dragon Slayer and Xanadu games very released quite some time before I was born, I never managed to catch up on them so far. For some reason though, I did play Xanadu Next. I cannot explain how this game caught my attention. When you go to the game’s store pages on Steam or GOG, you will find a pretty generic trailer and some screenshots that look like they were taken from a mobile game with super blocky graphics, outdated and washed-out textures and clunky controls. And you wouldn’t be too far off from the truth with that assessment. You see, Xanadu Next has a strange history. Originally released for the Nokia N-Gage in 2005, the game was ported to PC the same year with some major adjustments. Yes, you read correctly, this game originally came out on the N-Gage, Nokia’s weird phone/handheld gaming device from the early 2000s which was probably one of the most bizarre pieces of gaming hardware that ever saw the light of day. The version I played was the 2016 re-release available on modern platforms. This review is a collection of thoughts I have on the game after playing it many years ago for the first time and replaying it just recently.
So, for whatever reason, I picked up Xanadu Next for a couple of bucks when it was on sale quite some time ago and just felt like giving it a shot. It was one of these games that I approached with low to zero expectations. I knew it was a dungeon crawler with Zelda-like puzzle design and exploration, featuring an ARPG combat system. So, on one of these lazy Saturday mornings, I started playing. Right after the intro I felt that the game was special in some way. The intro itself felt strangely subtle, melancholic and simply beautiful. It was mysterious and intriguing and made me want to know more about the characters and places shown in the cinematic. But it wasn’t only the intro video that hooked me. Right from the start, the story of Xanadu Next is presented in the form of a report written by one of the characters relevant to the events that happen in the course of the game. In a way, this approach reminded me of the beginning of Final Fantasy Tactics, one of my favorite games of all time in which Arazlam Durai depicts the events of the game that were recorded in the Durai papers. And the similarities to FFT don’t stop there. The setup of the story presents a similar conflict as in Square’s masterpiece. I’m not going to spoil anything here but there is a level of political intrigue and scheming that strongly reminded me of the more politically motivated plots of the Ivalice games. I really liked how the different aspects of the story of Xanadu Next were presented. You hear about the more high-level political stuff from the locals of the town that functions as the Hub-area of the game. You walk into stores, talk to people and every now and again, they will tell you what’s going on in the capital, and how these events may impact the local people and the area of Lyndale – the princedom in which this quaint little town is situated. I also really liked how the big-scale political events are mirrored in the personal story of the protagonist and the events that are depicted in the game. Again, I’m not going to give away too much here but I definitely had the feeling that the writers knew what they were doing in the story-department.
Once you leave the town, you’re directly thrown into the action. Xanadu Next plays like a traditional Action RPG that reminded me of the older Diablo titles in some ways. You have a top-down view with an angled, rotatable camera and hack-and-slash your way through hordes of enemies in the hopes of finding gold and loot. Controlling the main character can be done in two ways – via controller or mouse. I have to say that no matter which input device you choose, controls never feel great. If you play via mouse controls, you’ll be pretty slow in most situations. Sometimes, when enemies group up on you, you’ll have a hard time getting around and avoiding them. They’ll probably surround you and there’s nothing you can do. On top of that, you’ll be clicking a lot, and I mean a lot. For every attack, you click, same goes for special attacks, spells and so on. That can get old very fast. Using a controller for movement and combat generally feels better, more fluid and easier to control. However, there’s another aspect to consider which is menu navigation. You’ll spend some time in menus and doing so with a mouse works great but poorly with a controller. What worked best for me was using the mouse for movement and combat, using left click for attack, right click for special abilities/spells and the mouse wheel for rotating the camera. It wasn’t perfect but it worked. Overall, I would say that camera and controls are flawed but work fine for the most part. There are sections of the game where the camera is fixed and sometimes that is a real pain. Enemies hiding behind pillars attacking you while you can’t do anything about it because you can’t see anything is super frustrating. Thankfully, these situations are far and few between and don’t take away from the overall experience.
So, how does Xanadu Next keep you motivated to play besides rewarding you with loot and gold? Well, for me it was all about exploration. There’s always stuff to find like new equipment, special key items or so-called guardian cards that give special bonuses and which can be leveled up as well. The game has a Metroidvania-like approach to exploration. You will constantly find places where you cannot proceed unless you have the right item. So, you better start taking notes of things to check out later because the game won’t mark these places on your map. The map, that is displayed in the left corner of the screen, shows you a very basic outline of the current level which can guide you to new places you haven’t been before. However, it has no markings and becomes completely useless in multi-level dungeons (looking at you Castle Strangerock) since it only has a flat 2D design. Exploration is still very fun and rewarding but be aware that you will probably have to backtrack every now and again. There are maps online that can help you with that and especially in the later sections of the game, I was not ashamed to use them.
In addition to exploration, one of the core motivators for me was how the game handles skills and equipment. As in many JRPGs like Final Fantasy IX, Xanadu Next binds abilities to weapons, that you find and buy throughout the game. By using those for a time and raising your proficiency level, you learn the skill innately and can use it with any other weapon henceforth. I love this system. It pushed me to experiment with different weapons and skill. I’m usually one who sticks to one strategy or set of equipment if it works. Often times, that leads to me missing out on some good gear, that would make a game easier or more fun for me. In this game however, I was constantly swapping out weapons, checking new abilities and trying out different combinations. One little anecdote here: It took me about 8 hours to realize that “passive skills” had to be dragged into the skill bar on the top of the HUD just like active skills. Naively, I thought any passive skill learned would be applied automatically at all times. But, when I learned “One-handed”, a skill that lets you one-hand any two-handed weapon, my character kept using both hands. That’s when I knew I hadn’t used any of my passive skills at all up until this point :D Another thing that kind of bugged me was that, for using special items (e.g. rings that can poison the enemy), you have to drag them into the item bar which only has 4 slots. The thing is, there are some key items that you only need in special situations like activating a portal or breaking a wall. I found it somewhat annoying to always having to swap items as you need to use them quite often. So yeah, menu navigation and item selection aren’t the smoothest or self-explanatory at all or maybe I’m just a doofus :D
Since we’re talking about things that “bugged” me, let’s briefly address the issue of bugs. There were a few and although there wasn’t any major game-breaking stuff, I did have to restart the game every now and again to get rid of them. Basically, there were 3 distinct bugs that kept happening:
1. Text keeps hanging in the air – This happened only a few times when leaving the weapons shop for instance and the dialogue text would simply not go away.
2. Character spinning like crazy :D – This was funny as hell. Some kid in the town kept rotating like it was on drugs. Also, in one of the later dramatic cutscenes, one of the main characters did the same thing which had me burst out laughing :D
3. My favorite one – Sometimes the game would start displaying collision boxes as wireframes over certain objects. I even had that happen in a boss battle which let me predict some of their attacks.
So, I hope I could illustrate why I like Xanadu Next so much. It’s definitely a janky game which has its flaws like outdated and blocky graphics, janky camera and clunky controls, bugs, tedious menu navigation and a map that could use some additional features. On top of that, the game requires you to do some grinding every now and again which can become quite tiresome. But Xanadu Next just oozes charm. I just loved exploring this world and finding pieces of lore in the form of stone tablets and memoirs. I loved how the protagonist’s sister would then translate these tablets and reward you with little lunch packages she made for you. I loved the town’s people like the dancers in front of the shop or the guy in the weapons store commenting the events of the game. I loved the fact that I always felt like I was unravelling a mystery that lay dormant for hundreds of years. Some characters quite literally slept for centuries after being cast into stone and I loved how, one by one they were awakened and offered more bits of lore and backstory. All in all, this is one of the few, if not the only game, that kind of remind me of Vagrant Story. It just has a very similar vibe when it comes to story progression, exploration, skill progression and so on. It even has similar box puzzles and they are just as annoying as they were in Vagrant Story :D I haven’t talked much about the music but, as you can expect from a Falcolm game, it is absolutely stellar. If you’re looking for a special kind of dungeon crawler full of mystery, wonder and subtle storytelling and can keep up with the jankiness of it all, Xanadu Next is for you. It’s a hidden gem if I’ve ever seen one.
A stately pleasure-dome decree
Where Alph, the sacred river, ran
Through caverns measureless to man
Down to a sunless sea.
I remember reading parts of this poem when I first played Kentucky Route Zero. There was a section in the game simply called “Xanadu” where this poem was referenced and it was one of the most intriguing and weird levels in the already very weird game. A couple of years later, the very same poem was referenced again in season 4 of the Fargo TV show of all places. Though only the first line of the poem was read aloud here (and though it felt somewhat out of place), I immediately recognized the words.
And I remembered.
I remembered that, a couple of years prior I had played a game that had the word “Xanadu” in its title. I remembered that it was part of a series of games that were kind of a big deal in the JRPG genre. The Xanadu game series is a relatively small collection of RPGs that were conceived as a sub-series of “Dragon Slayer”, Nihon Falcom’s groundbreaking and genre-defining franchise. Before the Trails-series, there was Dragon Slayer, going back as far as the 1980s and thus, being one of the very first JRPGs in general. Xanadu spawned as a sequel to the main series in 1985 with “Dragon Slayer II: Xanadu” and became a beast of its own shortly after. Since then, there have been a number of releases in this spin-off series, the most popular of which is probably “Faxanadu” for the NES.
Let me preface this review by saying that I played none of these games. I’m familiar with various games developed by Falcom like Trails and Ys. However, as most Dragon Slayer and Xanadu games very released quite some time before I was born, I never managed to catch up on them so far. For some reason though, I did play Xanadu Next. I cannot explain how this game caught my attention. When you go to the game’s store pages on Steam or GOG, you will find a pretty generic trailer and some screenshots that look like they were taken from a mobile game with super blocky graphics, outdated and washed-out textures and clunky controls. And you wouldn’t be too far off from the truth with that assessment. You see, Xanadu Next has a strange history. Originally released for the Nokia N-Gage in 2005, the game was ported to PC the same year with some major adjustments. Yes, you read correctly, this game originally came out on the N-Gage, Nokia’s weird phone/handheld gaming device from the early 2000s which was probably one of the most bizarre pieces of gaming hardware that ever saw the light of day. The version I played was the 2016 re-release available on modern platforms. This review is a collection of thoughts I have on the game after playing it many years ago for the first time and replaying it just recently.
So, for whatever reason, I picked up Xanadu Next for a couple of bucks when it was on sale quite some time ago and just felt like giving it a shot. It was one of these games that I approached with low to zero expectations. I knew it was a dungeon crawler with Zelda-like puzzle design and exploration, featuring an ARPG combat system. So, on one of these lazy Saturday mornings, I started playing. Right after the intro I felt that the game was special in some way. The intro itself felt strangely subtle, melancholic and simply beautiful. It was mysterious and intriguing and made me want to know more about the characters and places shown in the cinematic. But it wasn’t only the intro video that hooked me. Right from the start, the story of Xanadu Next is presented in the form of a report written by one of the characters relevant to the events that happen in the course of the game. In a way, this approach reminded me of the beginning of Final Fantasy Tactics, one of my favorite games of all time in which Arazlam Durai depicts the events of the game that were recorded in the Durai papers. And the similarities to FFT don’t stop there. The setup of the story presents a similar conflict as in Square’s masterpiece. I’m not going to spoil anything here but there is a level of political intrigue and scheming that strongly reminded me of the more politically motivated plots of the Ivalice games. I really liked how the different aspects of the story of Xanadu Next were presented. You hear about the more high-level political stuff from the locals of the town that functions as the Hub-area of the game. You walk into stores, talk to people and every now and again, they will tell you what’s going on in the capital, and how these events may impact the local people and the area of Lyndale – the princedom in which this quaint little town is situated. I also really liked how the big-scale political events are mirrored in the personal story of the protagonist and the events that are depicted in the game. Again, I’m not going to give away too much here but I definitely had the feeling that the writers knew what they were doing in the story-department.
Once you leave the town, you’re directly thrown into the action. Xanadu Next plays like a traditional Action RPG that reminded me of the older Diablo titles in some ways. You have a top-down view with an angled, rotatable camera and hack-and-slash your way through hordes of enemies in the hopes of finding gold and loot. Controlling the main character can be done in two ways – via controller or mouse. I have to say that no matter which input device you choose, controls never feel great. If you play via mouse controls, you’ll be pretty slow in most situations. Sometimes, when enemies group up on you, you’ll have a hard time getting around and avoiding them. They’ll probably surround you and there’s nothing you can do. On top of that, you’ll be clicking a lot, and I mean a lot. For every attack, you click, same goes for special attacks, spells and so on. That can get old very fast. Using a controller for movement and combat generally feels better, more fluid and easier to control. However, there’s another aspect to consider which is menu navigation. You’ll spend some time in menus and doing so with a mouse works great but poorly with a controller. What worked best for me was using the mouse for movement and combat, using left click for attack, right click for special abilities/spells and the mouse wheel for rotating the camera. It wasn’t perfect but it worked. Overall, I would say that camera and controls are flawed but work fine for the most part. There are sections of the game where the camera is fixed and sometimes that is a real pain. Enemies hiding behind pillars attacking you while you can’t do anything about it because you can’t see anything is super frustrating. Thankfully, these situations are far and few between and don’t take away from the overall experience.
So, how does Xanadu Next keep you motivated to play besides rewarding you with loot and gold? Well, for me it was all about exploration. There’s always stuff to find like new equipment, special key items or so-called guardian cards that give special bonuses and which can be leveled up as well. The game has a Metroidvania-like approach to exploration. You will constantly find places where you cannot proceed unless you have the right item. So, you better start taking notes of things to check out later because the game won’t mark these places on your map. The map, that is displayed in the left corner of the screen, shows you a very basic outline of the current level which can guide you to new places you haven’t been before. However, it has no markings and becomes completely useless in multi-level dungeons (looking at you Castle Strangerock) since it only has a flat 2D design. Exploration is still very fun and rewarding but be aware that you will probably have to backtrack every now and again. There are maps online that can help you with that and especially in the later sections of the game, I was not ashamed to use them.
In addition to exploration, one of the core motivators for me was how the game handles skills and equipment. As in many JRPGs like Final Fantasy IX, Xanadu Next binds abilities to weapons, that you find and buy throughout the game. By using those for a time and raising your proficiency level, you learn the skill innately and can use it with any other weapon henceforth. I love this system. It pushed me to experiment with different weapons and skill. I’m usually one who sticks to one strategy or set of equipment if it works. Often times, that leads to me missing out on some good gear, that would make a game easier or more fun for me. In this game however, I was constantly swapping out weapons, checking new abilities and trying out different combinations. One little anecdote here: It took me about 8 hours to realize that “passive skills” had to be dragged into the skill bar on the top of the HUD just like active skills. Naively, I thought any passive skill learned would be applied automatically at all times. But, when I learned “One-handed”, a skill that lets you one-hand any two-handed weapon, my character kept using both hands. That’s when I knew I hadn’t used any of my passive skills at all up until this point :D Another thing that kind of bugged me was that, for using special items (e.g. rings that can poison the enemy), you have to drag them into the item bar which only has 4 slots. The thing is, there are some key items that you only need in special situations like activating a portal or breaking a wall. I found it somewhat annoying to always having to swap items as you need to use them quite often. So yeah, menu navigation and item selection aren’t the smoothest or self-explanatory at all or maybe I’m just a doofus :D
Since we’re talking about things that “bugged” me, let’s briefly address the issue of bugs. There were a few and although there wasn’t any major game-breaking stuff, I did have to restart the game every now and again to get rid of them. Basically, there were 3 distinct bugs that kept happening:
1. Text keeps hanging in the air – This happened only a few times when leaving the weapons shop for instance and the dialogue text would simply not go away.
2. Character spinning like crazy :D – This was funny as hell. Some kid in the town kept rotating like it was on drugs. Also, in one of the later dramatic cutscenes, one of the main characters did the same thing which had me burst out laughing :D
3. My favorite one – Sometimes the game would start displaying collision boxes as wireframes over certain objects. I even had that happen in a boss battle which let me predict some of their attacks.
So, I hope I could illustrate why I like Xanadu Next so much. It’s definitely a janky game which has its flaws like outdated and blocky graphics, janky camera and clunky controls, bugs, tedious menu navigation and a map that could use some additional features. On top of that, the game requires you to do some grinding every now and again which can become quite tiresome. But Xanadu Next just oozes charm. I just loved exploring this world and finding pieces of lore in the form of stone tablets and memoirs. I loved how the protagonist’s sister would then translate these tablets and reward you with little lunch packages she made for you. I loved the town’s people like the dancers in front of the shop or the guy in the weapons store commenting the events of the game. I loved the fact that I always felt like I was unravelling a mystery that lay dormant for hundreds of years. Some characters quite literally slept for centuries after being cast into stone and I loved how, one by one they were awakened and offered more bits of lore and backstory. All in all, this is one of the few, if not the only game, that kind of remind me of Vagrant Story. It just has a very similar vibe when it comes to story progression, exploration, skill progression and so on. It even has similar box puzzles and they are just as annoying as they were in Vagrant Story :D I haven’t talked much about the music but, as you can expect from a Falcolm game, it is absolutely stellar. If you’re looking for a special kind of dungeon crawler full of mystery, wonder and subtle storytelling and can keep up with the jankiness of it all, Xanadu Next is for you. It’s a hidden gem if I’ve ever seen one.