Just started Tokyo Xanadu Ex+. I'm surprised this game isn't more popular on Era

[sandboxgod]

No English dub. Japanese High School setting. Persona like social events/free time. It's like a mixture of Persona and Cold Steel, in fact I feel like they straight up just reused some of Cold Steel character designs for this game.

I only completed the first dungeon so far. Combat feels weird... both characters that you get to control feel slow and chunky, there feels like a delay in their normal attacks which is throwing me off. There also isn't any difference between the two characters so far besides the element attribute, they feel like they play exactly the same. And so far they only have two attacks close range and a projectile, and have an ability to dodge... but to be fair I'm only one dungeon in so I'm sure or well I hope they give more options later on. Can't speak much for the story, but I already hate the main protag's friend.

For a forum with a pretty big Persona/Trails fanbase, I expected more people to talking about it lol.

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That's why I skipped this game. I got my fill of the high school sim angle from Persona 5. I loved P5 but I don't think I'll ever embrace a high school sim ever again

 

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[caliph95]

I enjoyed it quite a bit, but I feel it suffered in trying to exist in some kind of place between Ys and CS. It has weak action gameplay compared to Ys and a weak story compared to Trails.

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Pretty much this

It's really nothing special that hasn't been done better before especially for Falcom

 

[Pellaidh]

I've played it a bunch when it came out, and honestly it just doesn't stand up to most Ys games. So I wouldn't really recommend it to anyone that hasn't already beaten like, every Ys game that exists. And in that case, he'd probably know about Tokyo Xanadu anyway.

But purely from the gameplay perspective, it's not really a bad game. I actually liked the combat more than Ys 8. But it's just way too long, because the gameplay, story, dungeons and bosses simply don't have enough variety to make it interesting for the 50 or so hours it takes to finish it.

Unfortunately, the story and the characters are all just basically a collection of most of the worst tropes of modern Japanese LN writing. It manages to make Cold Steel seem incredibly well written in comparison. And it's not like Ys where the story can just be ignored, becuase so much of this game is so incredibly story focused. And even Ys manages to have writing that's miles ahead of Tokyo Xanadu. The random kid NPC in the video game store that's excited about other (better) Falcom games was probably the best thing about this game's writing for me. Well, some other NPCs were fine too, keeping with the Trails tradition, but the main cast just sucked.

And not having a dub personally worked against it for me, because the Cold Steel dub (and the entire localization) was one of the best things about that game.

in fact I feel like they straight up just reused some of Cold Steel character designs for this game.

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They didn't as much reuse character designs as they just straight up reused characters. Towa shows up in both games, and is just as bad here as she was in Cold Steel. She's actually even worse here, because you're supposed to believe she's an adult, on top of everything else.

 

[MrCinos]

I really liked it personally. Although I wish Normal ending was an actual ending to the game.

As with all Trails games I've spoken to every NPC at every opportunity. Here though I've enjoyed those moments a lot more than the main story. Maybe the world building isn't on the level of Trails series (then again it's just one game so far), but I feel like they have a good enough base to build more interesting stories in the franchise later.