Exploring developer Nihon Falcom's vast catalogue of works is a daunting prospect to undertake from almost any conceivable angle. Some of it is due to the extreme longevity of the studio; these are people who practically created and codified their chosen genres, and went on to influence countless others through that output. For having remained in the business for the past 40 years, the amount of material accrued is colossal, and even the fragmentary picture that makes up the company's image through their localized releases is an untold investment of time and dedication on part of those curious about the oeuvre. It is then prudent and necessary, in most cases, to pick and choose what to interact with and what to leave by the wayside, with regional accessibility and availability playing a part in shaping that process further. Thus the list of Falcom's modern pedigree is distilled down to a relatively more manageable selection, and the selfsame pruning process of curated releases can make the studio's creative voice seem more homogeneous than the fuller context reveals, through the reliance on endless Ys and Trails releases, with both enduring series having settled into a very consistent mold particularly in recent years.
For my own part, I've recently begun making an effort to pick and choose my way through the catalogue according to my own whims and interests, with some parts of it happily ignored, and others weighed against the pros and cons that are discernible from the outside in. It is easier to form these pre-emptive impressions when the works in question are more famous, more discussed, and more documented--whether the reception by consensus is for good or ill, the discourse around them simply existing can be applied to one's own context as needed. That is how the aforementioned evergreen series, through my interactions with them, have held no surprises within--their strengths and weaknesses were largely made apparent to me before I even had a chance to sit down with them, which isn't so much a condemnation of what they are but a testament and acknowledgement of their ubiquity in their fields. As I came up for breath from a recent dive into Ys titles, half delighted by the joys I found in them and half worn down by the frustrations that made themselves known in tandem, I needed a change of pace even if I still wanted to remain within the confines of this developer's output for the duration. That is how a game like Xanadu Next comes into the picture, as the embodied desire for something more unknown and unpredictable.
Xanadu Next is nothing like its contemporaries.
On the waters of Lake Orwell, there is an island. On Harlech Island, there are the ruins of an ancient civilization. On the creaking boat due for the island, there is a scholar aboard very interested in those ruins. Charlotte L. Wells makes her way to Harlech to investigate their mysteries and to learn of the culture they stand in grim vigil for, and she is accompanied by fellow orphan and friend, an unnamed former knight. Due to the criminalization of knighthood in the realm and the recent loss of his master and role model in life, Char's friend is disillusioned and adrift, and she hopes to distract and divert his talents toward a renewed purpose through the assistance provided in her own work. Thus they set out from the village of Harlech, the lone settlement on the desolate yet not uninhabited island, their base of operations for the duration of their stay.
Xanadu Next is an action RPG in the dungeon-crawling vein and tradition. More than an action game wearing the trappings of an RPG to lend texture to the focal action as an Ys would, Xanadu contextualizes its approach to its shared building blocks by emphasizing and arranging them in distinct ways to its peers and brethren. As a PC-based clicker, the instinct is to draw the comparison to the likes of Diablo, but through the restraint and sheer definition employed in both character-building and environmental design, a high-execution numbers-grinder is not the game's speciality; nor is it Ys's model of high-octane action gymnastics and choreography. Xanadu's pace is slower and more ponderous, its challenges less dextrously severe, and its interests laid down squarely in exploration and investigative curiosity in the textual narrative that unfolds and the play that shapes that tale. The want to go out into Harlech can be motivated by the desire to power up one's avatar in the manner that these games allow, but the primary purpose and goal of the adventure for both the characters and player is to study their surroundings for joy of new discoveries to make, whatever form those sights and sounds may take.
Oh, there is a nominally grander, more pressing quest here, too: the knight is mortally wounded on his first excursion into the wilderness, and bound by the sustenance of local ritual and native spirits to the island's very life force, with only the mythical Dragonslayer sword able to free him from his half-life and restore the claim to his own future. The search for the sword contextualizes the ever-direr expeditions into the island and lends a personal stake for the primary avatar, but from the start of the journey the knight plays a secondary role to his compatriot and employer Char, and through that partnership Xanadu's ancient history is unraveled. The knight's job is to find any written documentation left in the ruins, and haul them back for Char to translate--an act that takes in-game time--so she can learn more of the history that is now mere folklore to the local population left on Harlech, in her pursuit of academic accomplishments and fulfillment. The tabulae and memoirs so uncovered then take on a more important status than mere incidental collectables in comparable games: they are its heartbeat that breathes life into every other act undertaken during the course of the adventure, and the stories they tell after the acquisition and interpretation go on to shape one's own understanding of the more immediate narrative that transpires.
The exploration that's mandated narratively is made as compelling as it is through level and world design that consistently cashes the cheques the premise writes. The village is always the dawn of every venture into the unknown, and though the gates that clasp closed are the same ones every time when initially setting out, monotony is not in Xanadu Next's vocabulary when it comes to defining the structure and language of its setting. A straightforward set-up for a game like this is to have an overworld made for expedient traversal connected to individual and isolated nodes with their own exploratory end-points; the sequential "levels" of the adventure, as they may. Xanadu's structure seems to be setting up for this, until it pulls the rug out from under the player and summarily returns them back into daylight from the depths, emerging from a different hole in the ground compared to the initial descent, with no particular punctuating goal reached in the interim. The new corner of an old environment gives access to shortcuts to be unlocked, which then extend to detours that sometimes double back upon the village's confines from an unexpected direction, and that's how the island continues to expand during the course of the player's investigations, unfurling like a ball of twine, interweaving its many passages into one great superstructure daunting in its complexity and thrilling in its adaptive recursiveness.
Another way in which Xanadu Next stands out is in the atmosphere imbued by its narrative style and tonal content. The storytelling mode that Falcom has settled into for long years in all of their extant franchises is one of ostensible light-hearted adventure, communicated in aesthetics and writing both. The stories told may broach serious subjects and dramatics, but they are always tempered by the insistence on relieving that tension through humour and comical asides--whether the comedy then lands or connects with an audience can be a major appeal or deterrent for each of the games the approach is employed in. But as the rule goes, Falcom deals in bright and cheerful games where idealistic youths do good as a baseline of interacting with their worlds. Xanadu Next already diverts from this purpose by scaling back the personal motivations of its protagonists, and directing them towards self-fulfillment and self-preservation; altruism only comes by the residue of selfish wants here, even if the heroic pretense is maintained. Even more importantly, cheer is nowhere to be seen in the game's world: the player avatar is disillusioned with the politics that have left him destitute and short of self-worth, the village struggles to maintain its place as a community for the lost and wayfaring in the shadow of a culture and heritage it does not understand, and venturing outside spells death for the present population. The guardian spirits able to be affixed into the knight's ruined body only join with him as his present state is a house of death, and as such they're temporary tenants entertaining themselves in his frame until the end comes. The historical documents deciphered reveal centuries-old academic frustration over historical inaccuracies and uncertainty in the chronicling of Xanadu's own past, and the private memoirs paint a picture of a burden set from birth exhaling itself on the page in a grim outlet. The way that video game humour falls flat doesn't have any opportunity to clumsily pratfall in a game as dry and morose as this, and it is to the benefit of the storytelling conveyed.
What also shapes the melancholic mood is the game's audio direction. Falcom are known for their high-energy soundtracks, in present and near-past codified into mostly electric guitar-driven rock, and again Xanadu Next could not be more different. It is a game that reinforces its own sadness through its music, an ever-present tone of lamentation texturing the tracks as the island is explored and Xanadu's history revealed. Each leg of the journey adds some new twist to the aural texture, be it awe, inscrutability, determination or a muffled quietude, but it is reliably consistent in defining the game's characteristics as much as the rest of it does, working in a compatible voice that separates it from other works in the genre. For establishing a recognizable identity in this way, when it does break off from its own conventions for a climactic scene or encounter--turning to the audio space of other Falcom works--also gives a new lease on life for those well-worn tools of the trade by recontextualizing them as newly significant instead of one high-intensity melody being drowned out by every other present.
Breaking convention is also integral to the worth I see in the storytelling the game provides. As a game, Xanadu Next might be counted among a particular subgenre of works close to its spirit--works one might informally dub or categorize as tales of solitary and sullen men; the Vagrant Stories, the Record of Lodoss Wars (for Dreamcast), the King's Fields. Have faith when I name these as mostly positive comparison points to outline, but also acknowledge that these are not games that particularly care about the existence of women or are even outright hostile to their place in them. The Falcom pedigree for its own part reveals a glimmer of inspiration on occasion, but even then efforts can be undermined by a paternalistic bent to the stories told, or by an exploitative edge to dull the proceedings in ironic accordance. Xanadu Next superficially does not appear different as its premise concerns a male figure going out into the world as the so-called doer while his female counterpart stays behind in a less immediately active role. Despite this shaky foundation, the game turns out to be almost entirely concerned with the stories and voices of women in it, to an extent that the already-silent protagonist does not feel focal at all in the same narrative whirlpool manner as Adol Christin might--he is a passerby that provides a perspective on the stories told, the emotional crux situated elsewhere from his involvement. The interactions he has with women--Char, the priestess Liese, fellow explorer Agnès--are built on more unequivocally reciprocal partnerships and alliances than the rescuer and adoring rescuee dynamic that so often plagues these kinds of stories, with both parties assisting one another with their independent goals in mind all the while. Outside of the primary protagonist's point of view, the game's narrative is framed as the bookends and intermissions of an epistolary written by Char, placing her thoughts at the forefront, and the secondary, intertwining personal narrative in the ancient memoirs also focusing on the internal life of a young woman centuries past. All of these elements are not mere flavourful asides as the central narrative itself, with every twist or turn or emotional climax that it reaches for, is built on the decisions and acts of women, in Xanadu's mythical history and the ramifications that echo in the present over the course of the game. It is deliberate in the way that these narrative branches build into a discernible pattern over the course of the game, and reach their culmination with all the suggested emphasis and focus established along the way, realized in a fashion that lives up to the promised finish.
And what a finish it is. Early on in the adventure--before its real beginning, in fact--Char and the knight have an encounter with a local legend and source of tourism: Castle Strangerock, wreathed in the mists of the lake, unreachable by all that dare approach as it habitually retreats from the world as if a mirage. No mere flight of fancy or communal hallucination, Strangerock carries great import for Xanadu's past and the future of its successors, and its walls must be penetrated before the day is done. The journey to Strangerock is significant and enthralling on its own, but every prior entanglement is outdone by the castle's harsh reality: its halls are charted with a map as other locations in the game, but the intense hyperdensity of its layouts, the multi-tiered structure and the criss-crossing multipurpose of practically every room casts two-dimensional mapping tools as a a mere suggestive outline instead of an accurate navigational resource; Strangerock must be internalized as a physical location with one's own eyes and situational awareness, as no other approach complies with its complexities. It is where the last hours of the game are spent in a game that already sports a modest running time in all, and its enormity as a navigational space reflects its narrative importance, as a place in the world and the host to the climactic revelations therein. It acts as a microcosm of every thematic and structural element the game has spent its time building up to, and embodies every aspect of the game that is admirable and compelling. We talk about and cherish games that end on high notes in terms of boss encounters--the final challenges or thematic resolutions condensed into a few minutes' time of player interaction and presentation; Strangerock provides the same elation, but extended over the course of the final section of the game, finishing an already-great adventure at its strongest and most unforgettable.
As much as I feel like there are no regrets in finally delving deeper into Falcom's catalogue like this, it has been an experience mostly characterized by the give-and-takes, the compromises made in what personally works about the studio's voice at its most alluring, and whether that's worth the heartache in other aspects. It's a relationship still in the making, and the security that a game like Xanadu Next provides is incalculably important, in ascertaining that through the dozens--maybe hundreds--of releases the studio's name is affixed to, there is at least one that I can say that I unreservedly love and recommend for everything that it is, and everything it's not.
~~~
Play this game if you haven't--for a fifteen-year-old game it's only been officially localized for the last four, and is available on PC platforms that are its native home. I played it entirely with a controller even if you have to map certain things to simulate mouse interactions--right stick simulates that well enough--and had no issues with it otherwise. Even the occasional crashes back up with a recovery autosave on the spot, a function that otherwise does not intrude upon the game.
For my own part, I've recently begun making an effort to pick and choose my way through the catalogue according to my own whims and interests, with some parts of it happily ignored, and others weighed against the pros and cons that are discernible from the outside in. It is easier to form these pre-emptive impressions when the works in question are more famous, more discussed, and more documented--whether the reception by consensus is for good or ill, the discourse around them simply existing can be applied to one's own context as needed. That is how the aforementioned evergreen series, through my interactions with them, have held no surprises within--their strengths and weaknesses were largely made apparent to me before I even had a chance to sit down with them, which isn't so much a condemnation of what they are but a testament and acknowledgement of their ubiquity in their fields. As I came up for breath from a recent dive into Ys titles, half delighted by the joys I found in them and half worn down by the frustrations that made themselves known in tandem, I needed a change of pace even if I still wanted to remain within the confines of this developer's output for the duration. That is how a game like Xanadu Next comes into the picture, as the embodied desire for something more unknown and unpredictable.
Xanadu Next is nothing like its contemporaries.
On the waters of Lake Orwell, there is an island. On Harlech Island, there are the ruins of an ancient civilization. On the creaking boat due for the island, there is a scholar aboard very interested in those ruins. Charlotte L. Wells makes her way to Harlech to investigate their mysteries and to learn of the culture they stand in grim vigil for, and she is accompanied by fellow orphan and friend, an unnamed former knight. Due to the criminalization of knighthood in the realm and the recent loss of his master and role model in life, Char's friend is disillusioned and adrift, and she hopes to distract and divert his talents toward a renewed purpose through the assistance provided in her own work. Thus they set out from the village of Harlech, the lone settlement on the desolate yet not uninhabited island, their base of operations for the duration of their stay.
Xanadu Next is an action RPG in the dungeon-crawling vein and tradition. More than an action game wearing the trappings of an RPG to lend texture to the focal action as an Ys would, Xanadu contextualizes its approach to its shared building blocks by emphasizing and arranging them in distinct ways to its peers and brethren. As a PC-based clicker, the instinct is to draw the comparison to the likes of Diablo, but through the restraint and sheer definition employed in both character-building and environmental design, a high-execution numbers-grinder is not the game's speciality; nor is it Ys's model of high-octane action gymnastics and choreography. Xanadu's pace is slower and more ponderous, its challenges less dextrously severe, and its interests laid down squarely in exploration and investigative curiosity in the textual narrative that unfolds and the play that shapes that tale. The want to go out into Harlech can be motivated by the desire to power up one's avatar in the manner that these games allow, but the primary purpose and goal of the adventure for both the characters and player is to study their surroundings for joy of new discoveries to make, whatever form those sights and sounds may take.
Oh, there is a nominally grander, more pressing quest here, too: the knight is mortally wounded on his first excursion into the wilderness, and bound by the sustenance of local ritual and native spirits to the island's very life force, with only the mythical Dragonslayer sword able to free him from his half-life and restore the claim to his own future. The search for the sword contextualizes the ever-direr expeditions into the island and lends a personal stake for the primary avatar, but from the start of the journey the knight plays a secondary role to his compatriot and employer Char, and through that partnership Xanadu's ancient history is unraveled. The knight's job is to find any written documentation left in the ruins, and haul them back for Char to translate--an act that takes in-game time--so she can learn more of the history that is now mere folklore to the local population left on Harlech, in her pursuit of academic accomplishments and fulfillment. The tabulae and memoirs so uncovered then take on a more important status than mere incidental collectables in comparable games: they are its heartbeat that breathes life into every other act undertaken during the course of the adventure, and the stories they tell after the acquisition and interpretation go on to shape one's own understanding of the more immediate narrative that transpires.
The exploration that's mandated narratively is made as compelling as it is through level and world design that consistently cashes the cheques the premise writes. The village is always the dawn of every venture into the unknown, and though the gates that clasp closed are the same ones every time when initially setting out, monotony is not in Xanadu Next's vocabulary when it comes to defining the structure and language of its setting. A straightforward set-up for a game like this is to have an overworld made for expedient traversal connected to individual and isolated nodes with their own exploratory end-points; the sequential "levels" of the adventure, as they may. Xanadu's structure seems to be setting up for this, until it pulls the rug out from under the player and summarily returns them back into daylight from the depths, emerging from a different hole in the ground compared to the initial descent, with no particular punctuating goal reached in the interim. The new corner of an old environment gives access to shortcuts to be unlocked, which then extend to detours that sometimes double back upon the village's confines from an unexpected direction, and that's how the island continues to expand during the course of the player's investigations, unfurling like a ball of twine, interweaving its many passages into one great superstructure daunting in its complexity and thrilling in its adaptive recursiveness.
Another way in which Xanadu Next stands out is in the atmosphere imbued by its narrative style and tonal content. The storytelling mode that Falcom has settled into for long years in all of their extant franchises is one of ostensible light-hearted adventure, communicated in aesthetics and writing both. The stories told may broach serious subjects and dramatics, but they are always tempered by the insistence on relieving that tension through humour and comical asides--whether the comedy then lands or connects with an audience can be a major appeal or deterrent for each of the games the approach is employed in. But as the rule goes, Falcom deals in bright and cheerful games where idealistic youths do good as a baseline of interacting with their worlds. Xanadu Next already diverts from this purpose by scaling back the personal motivations of its protagonists, and directing them towards self-fulfillment and self-preservation; altruism only comes by the residue of selfish wants here, even if the heroic pretense is maintained. Even more importantly, cheer is nowhere to be seen in the game's world: the player avatar is disillusioned with the politics that have left him destitute and short of self-worth, the village struggles to maintain its place as a community for the lost and wayfaring in the shadow of a culture and heritage it does not understand, and venturing outside spells death for the present population. The guardian spirits able to be affixed into the knight's ruined body only join with him as his present state is a house of death, and as such they're temporary tenants entertaining themselves in his frame until the end comes. The historical documents deciphered reveal centuries-old academic frustration over historical inaccuracies and uncertainty in the chronicling of Xanadu's own past, and the private memoirs paint a picture of a burden set from birth exhaling itself on the page in a grim outlet. The way that video game humour falls flat doesn't have any opportunity to clumsily pratfall in a game as dry and morose as this, and it is to the benefit of the storytelling conveyed.
What also shapes the melancholic mood is the game's audio direction. Falcom are known for their high-energy soundtracks, in present and near-past codified into mostly electric guitar-driven rock, and again Xanadu Next could not be more different. It is a game that reinforces its own sadness through its music, an ever-present tone of lamentation texturing the tracks as the island is explored and Xanadu's history revealed. Each leg of the journey adds some new twist to the aural texture, be it awe, inscrutability, determination or a muffled quietude, but it is reliably consistent in defining the game's characteristics as much as the rest of it does, working in a compatible voice that separates it from other works in the genre. For establishing a recognizable identity in this way, when it does break off from its own conventions for a climactic scene or encounter--turning to the audio space of other Falcom works--also gives a new lease on life for those well-worn tools of the trade by recontextualizing them as newly significant instead of one high-intensity melody being drowned out by every other present.
Breaking convention is also integral to the worth I see in the storytelling the game provides. As a game, Xanadu Next might be counted among a particular subgenre of works close to its spirit--works one might informally dub or categorize as tales of solitary and sullen men; the Vagrant Stories, the Record of Lodoss Wars (for Dreamcast), the King's Fields. Have faith when I name these as mostly positive comparison points to outline, but also acknowledge that these are not games that particularly care about the existence of women or are even outright hostile to their place in them. The Falcom pedigree for its own part reveals a glimmer of inspiration on occasion, but even then efforts can be undermined by a paternalistic bent to the stories told, or by an exploitative edge to dull the proceedings in ironic accordance. Xanadu Next superficially does not appear different as its premise concerns a male figure going out into the world as the so-called doer while his female counterpart stays behind in a less immediately active role. Despite this shaky foundation, the game turns out to be almost entirely concerned with the stories and voices of women in it, to an extent that the already-silent protagonist does not feel focal at all in the same narrative whirlpool manner as Adol Christin might--he is a passerby that provides a perspective on the stories told, the emotional crux situated elsewhere from his involvement. The interactions he has with women--Char, the priestess Liese, fellow explorer Agnès--are built on more unequivocally reciprocal partnerships and alliances than the rescuer and adoring rescuee dynamic that so often plagues these kinds of stories, with both parties assisting one another with their independent goals in mind all the while. Outside of the primary protagonist's point of view, the game's narrative is framed as the bookends and intermissions of an epistolary written by Char, placing her thoughts at the forefront, and the secondary, intertwining personal narrative in the ancient memoirs also focusing on the internal life of a young woman centuries past. All of these elements are not mere flavourful asides as the central narrative itself, with every twist or turn or emotional climax that it reaches for, is built on the decisions and acts of women, in Xanadu's mythical history and the ramifications that echo in the present over the course of the game. It is deliberate in the way that these narrative branches build into a discernible pattern over the course of the game, and reach their culmination with all the suggested emphasis and focus established along the way, realized in a fashion that lives up to the promised finish.
And what a finish it is. Early on in the adventure--before its real beginning, in fact--Char and the knight have an encounter with a local legend and source of tourism: Castle Strangerock, wreathed in the mists of the lake, unreachable by all that dare approach as it habitually retreats from the world as if a mirage. No mere flight of fancy or communal hallucination, Strangerock carries great import for Xanadu's past and the future of its successors, and its walls must be penetrated before the day is done. The journey to Strangerock is significant and enthralling on its own, but every prior entanglement is outdone by the castle's harsh reality: its halls are charted with a map as other locations in the game, but the intense hyperdensity of its layouts, the multi-tiered structure and the criss-crossing multipurpose of practically every room casts two-dimensional mapping tools as a a mere suggestive outline instead of an accurate navigational resource; Strangerock must be internalized as a physical location with one's own eyes and situational awareness, as no other approach complies with its complexities. It is where the last hours of the game are spent in a game that already sports a modest running time in all, and its enormity as a navigational space reflects its narrative importance, as a place in the world and the host to the climactic revelations therein. It acts as a microcosm of every thematic and structural element the game has spent its time building up to, and embodies every aspect of the game that is admirable and compelling. We talk about and cherish games that end on high notes in terms of boss encounters--the final challenges or thematic resolutions condensed into a few minutes' time of player interaction and presentation; Strangerock provides the same elation, but extended over the course of the final section of the game, finishing an already-great adventure at its strongest and most unforgettable.
As much as I feel like there are no regrets in finally delving deeper into Falcom's catalogue like this, it has been an experience mostly characterized by the give-and-takes, the compromises made in what personally works about the studio's voice at its most alluring, and whether that's worth the heartache in other aspects. It's a relationship still in the making, and the security that a game like Xanadu Next provides is incalculably important, in ascertaining that through the dozens--maybe hundreds--of releases the studio's name is affixed to, there is at least one that I can say that I unreservedly love and recommend for everything that it is, and everything it's not.
~~~
