Tokyo Xanadu eX+ review: Back at it again at Morimiya Academy

It doesn’t get much more old school than Falcom in RPG history. This studio has grown more popular worldwide in recent years with growth in series like Ys or The Legend of Heroes/Trails, but it has been cranking out groundbreaking, monumental games since the 80s on PC platforms that never left Japan. Part of that history is Xanadu, which is tied to Dragon Slayer, which funnily enough is also a branch on the same tree as Legend of Heroes. It’s messy, but a fun way to spend some time wiki-diving.

It all goes back to Dragon Slayer

As Falcom was carving out a presence worldwide and starting to gain ground with titles like Trails of Cold Steel, it went back to Xanadu with Tokyo Xanadu on the Vita in 2015. This title looks more like an action-RPG take on Persona than any previous Xanadu entry, and came off as experimental and rough around the edges compared to its turn-based siblings. It was also poorly localized, which on top of the Vita’s relative obscurity as a platform ensured the game would be an oddity at best. A re-release for PC and PS4, adding “eX+” to the title, adding more stuff, and cleaning up the localization, saved Tokyo Xanadu from the jaws of obscurity and elevated it to more of a cult status. There’s even a sequel coming!

During this time, Falcom has grown, Trails has blown up more, and even Ys is holding its own out there in a crowded JRPG space. Falcom has also gotten more comfortable with releasing its games on Switch, developing them in-house and hoovering up that massive, alternative audience. Now it’s Tokyo Xanadu’s turn to get a third chance at life, with a new port of Tokyo Xanadu eX+ to the Nintendo Switch. But there’s more to this release than just being a cool port of a weird Vita game. The localization has been redone, something that was literally a life mission for some of the folks involved.

Demons really hate high schools, huh?

With the new localization, Tokyo Xanadu’s storytelling really starts to sing. The weird thing about this game is there’s a hump to get over in its opening hours. You play as Kou Tokisaka, a grumpy, shaggy-haired high schooler who gets wrapped up in a gnarly paranormal mystery that threatens all of reality as we know it. A Scooby Gang develops around Kou, and he and his friends rise up to battle this existential threat using special, spiritual weapons that allow them to hop into metaphysical dungeons and not get mauled by demons. Sounds pretty generic, huh? For several hours, it kind of is. Until it isn’t.

Tokyo Xanadu seems to deliberately front load its story with a laundry list of Japanese high school video game RPG tropes, from the setting, to the scenario, and especially to the characters. There’s the sweet childhood friend, the cranky girl who delivers exposition, the delinquent with a good heart, the nerd, so on and so forth. But starting with Kou, each character gets a ton of screen time both for their individual stories and their development as part of the group, such that all of these tropes are subverted and discarded. If Persona is defined by its “social link” systems, Tokyo Xanadu makes all that side content part of the main story.

By the end of the game you really get to know these characters, understand who they are and why they find motivation in these circumstances. And you get to know them as part of the group, as these characters all bounce off each other and learn from one another over the course of several chapters and dozens of hours. Falcom is notorious for in-depth, detailed, and well-constructed writing that’s structured to sustain an audience’s long-term interest. A series like Trails is known for absurdly ambitious world-building. For Tokyo Xanadu the real-world setting makes that part unneeded, so nearly every authored development is in service of the characters. It’s good stuff, and makes the previous localization seem almost criminal in hindsight.

More buttons isn't always better

While Tokyo Xanadu’s writing is firing on all cylinders, the action gameplay isn’t something you can simply relocalize. While Falcom has a long history with action-RPG mechanics, especially with Ys, Tokyo Xanadu feels uncharacteristically rough. The eX+ version helped, adding complexity to a surprisingly simple set of options. But on a fundamental level, the combat is a little fumbly and awkward. There’s a stiffness to it that never really gets ironed out, even as the game gives you more buttons to press over time. There’s a lot of nuance with elemental weaknesses, character equipment, and various levels of meter management that all feel good and exciting to engage with. But the basic attack strings and dodge rolling do a bad job carrying everything else.

As I approached the third ending (yeah, it’s one of those), I had grown tired of how repetitive combat felt. I had solved it, and was largely brute forcing my way through the bosses by guzzling potions and playing recklessly. Late game enemies and bosses got stronger and faster, easily outmaneuvering my plucky crew of high schoolers. Meanwhile, dodging still felt clunky and unreliable, and spamming big moves lost more and more impact. If the story wasn’t so compelling, and if I wasn’t so close to the end of a 50-ish hour investment, I may have dipped out early.

Hopefully, when the Tokyo Xanadu sequel rolls out, there will be a lot of lessons learned here, and the combat will feel less like someone tried to squeeze the turn-based out of a Trails game with a hammer. Not every action-RPG from Falcom needs to be a frantic explosion of button-mashing and heavy metal like Ys, but a little more fluidity to the basics would go a long way. But considering we’re talking about a new Switch version of a 2015 Vita game, what we have here is relatively impressive.

The new localization alone, despite the very infrequent handful of errors, is worth revisiting Tokyo Xanadu if you have played it already. There are a few performance hitches and the visual fidelity isn’t as clear as on PS4 or PC. But Tokyo Xanadu eX+ on Switch is still easily the definitive version of one of contemporary Falcom’s strangest games. It has problems a simple re-release can’t fix, but is full of cool and interesting ideas nevertheless. If you’re looking for something new there are bigger, blockbuster JPRGs that would be easier to recommend, but if you want something a little more out there, there isn’t much quite like Tokyo Xanadu.

Tokyo Xanadu eX+ is available now on Nintendo Switch (and technically PS4, and PC, with the old localization). A code was provided by the publisher for review.

Lucas White

Contributing Editor

Lucas plays a lot of videogames. Sometimes he enjoys one. His favorites include Dragon Quest, SaGa, and Mystery Dungeon. He's far too rattled with ADHD to care about world-building lore but will get lost for days in essays about themes and characters. Holds a journalism degree, which makes conversations about Oxford Commas awkward to say the least. Not a trophy hunter but platinumed Sifu out of sheer spite and got 100 percent in Rondo of Blood because it rules. You can find him on Twitter @HokutoNoLucas being curmudgeonly about Square Enix discourse and occasionally saying positive things about Konami.