![]() What is a complaint however is that a majority of the interconnected rooms have locked doors a la Legend of Zelda with silver keys required to unlock them but unlike the other series you’ll need to buy them and they only ever get more expensive. This isn’t a complaint but more of a statement of “keep your eye on the ball” otherwise it will cost you time but yield money and experience as Xanadu really does zero hand holding which is nice. While one is nothing more than a nuisance, the other one can throw a wrench in your gears as you search for your way forward. Now while the part of forgetting to light it up with a fireball was on me the second time around, it can be the difference between being able to move forward and being able to head back to town quickly. Thankfully our “near death” hero does not have a time limit. It took about an hour of running around and trying other things and looking everywhere else before remembering that I could simply use a fireball to light my way forward. Using fireballs on them in the dungeon has the same effect as long as you remember that you can do that and it’s not some other trigger. That is until you forget about things such as fireballs that you’ve used to light braziers to open up a shortcut back to town. Passages and pathways may be blocked by monsters or other intriguing devices that require a bit of legwork but on the overall these parts aren’t what will hold you back. Set up in a variety of interconnecting “rooms”, there will be multiple environments with ever increasing powerful monsters that stand between you and the clues you search for. Leaving town through one door does not necessarily mean that you’ll come back from that direction. The small town that you arrive in not only acts as a hub for resting and commercial purposes, but it also acts as an exploration nexus with various shortcuts that can be opened up to make exploring easier. Sometimes it’s a dialog trigger, and sometimes? It’s a fireball. It is completely possible to be stuck running around in circles for a while looking for exactly what you are missing. Now while most of the time the dialog will simply just add a bit more to the world you find yourself in, there are moments in which someone tells you exactly what you needed to hear in order to keep moving such as someone having a key to a locked door. ![]() There is zero hand holding and like some of the other older RPGs talking to everyone is not simply important, but sometimes mandatory in order to figure out what the next step is. On a gameplay and exploration front, Xanadu Next follows the path of having the player find their own way. ![]() Told of a legendary sword with immense powers that could heal him and not require the tentative bond with the spirits, he sets back out in order to find both it it and possibly the one that left him in this state. ![]() ![]() There’s a catch however as being so close to death’s door the spirits could leave at any point and without them, he won’t survive or ever be able to leave the island. With his life saved just a breath away from death, a priestess performs a ritual to bind a guardian spirit to his in order to allow him more than basic movements in which those alone are a strain on his body. Given control of a young blond man that you name yourself, he soon finds himself left for dead after exploring ruins of an island in search of a clues to a mysterious castle that only appears in the mist. Instead of the usual red haired and often amnesiac Adol who sets out on a new and wondrous adventures however, Xanadu is much darker in its approach. If Xanadu had to be compared to anything else that Falcom has developed it could be said that it somewhat resembles the Ys series. While it shows its age a bit in regards to graphics and character designs (which gives it an awesome retro feel by today’s standards), it was interesting to try something different from Nihon Falcom which is known for both the Ys series and the Legend of Heroes (Trails in the Sky and of Trails of Cold Steel). Xanadu Next is an RPG from over a decade ago that released on PCs and the N-Gage over in Japan while only now seeing a worldwide localized release. ![]()
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