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.
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.