this week i finished both hydlide and xanadu on the eggconsole releases. i'd played a bit of hydlide when it came out on switch and started it up again to do something simple i could pick up and put down for a few minutes without sound before bed, but eventually it finally got a hook in me and i wrapped it up on my work commutes one day. i wouldn't exactly say i was impressed playing it after....40 more years of games which have used its better ideas, but it was still pretty satisfying realizing how things fit together in the game and a couple things did surprise me as it went on. (i did have to look up how to get the third fairy though. don't have that druaga player brain.) the monster layouts changing and the stuff with the rivers really is pretty cool, and i can imagine those things being a bit mind-blowing in 1984. it also made me laugh when i got killed instantly by an enemy spawning behind me as i walked into one of the rooms in the last dungeon.
"i'm glad i played that, but it really isn't as interesting as xanadu."
xanadu's kind of the opposite sort of game. it's enormous and deeply foreign, like it came from a world where games work differently. (i guess it did.) i don't know the words that can convey this game to a person who's never played it. after i started playing it i read another interview on shmuplations with the game's creator, yoshio kiya. seeing him describe trying to just fit as much data as he could in the game and drawing up a whole plan for the game based on that seems so strange. one one hand, the game is clearly just copping a lot from inspirations like ultima and wizardry (which i guess is probably were some of the more exotic dnd monsters i'm not familiar with came from?), and really, in the end, most games have stuff made but then cut anyway for various reasons. so it's actually really clever? it just seems so weird.
there are a ton of mechanics in xanadu, but most of them kind of just happen while you're playing the game. which is a bit of the same feeling as saga games, but not really for the same reason...it's easy for me to feel a bit paranoid. am i wasting resources? is this weapon/spell actually becoming good? and the things you do interact with directly (leveling up and spending money/keys) are the most terrifying of all. oh, and saving. if i didn't have the savestates i probably would've had to restart the game a couple more times and played for 3-5 times as long overall. (this is already not a short game outside of using wild speedrun strats.) and the rpg and combat mechanics are fine for what they are but an obvious sign of the game's age. this is, obviously, exacerbated by the simplicity of those mechanics making most enemies, spells, attacks, etc. only different from similar ones by numbers. which grow very large!
to me the game's real appeal is the exploration, especially in the sidescrolling stages. there are some very confusing and tricky mechanics and this part of the game seems to owe a lot, again, to druaga, on top of having some generally arcadey mechanics and senses in general, as i've mentioned before with the lives and whatnot. but it goes much further than that, and i think it's impossible that kiya and anyone else who playtested the game fully understood all of the interactions and ways to get around and do things, which are wildly open-ended at most points if you're willing to use resources. and there are a fair amount of weird movement techniques (several of which are required unless you have lots of items to use) and odd map trickery even before you get into the parts of the game where you frequently get suddenly teleported elsewhere. the map system itself has an oddity where the maps are basically cylindrical (you wrap from the right edge to the left) but offset, so you'll move to a different "row" when you cross over. this leads to some very weird loops and stuff if you don't know about it, though the game also pulls out some similar tricks even without the seams in other spots. if you play this game up to level 3 you might think you're getting used to a lot of the tricks and ideas of the game, but as the game goes on, the levels keep using those ideas in slightly new ways and increasingly showcase a really interesting sense of creativity and knowledge of the game. though i don't want to downplay the amount of inescapable pits either. if you don't have a nice stock of flying or wall-breaking/walking items you're going to get stuck a lot and have to reload. you might want to reload anyway.
there is, of course, a lot to be frustrated by in this game, and the challenges posed by enemies and the environment only barely and briefly relent, over and over. fairly often xanadu feels like it's mean for the sake of it, but i think i feel that way because it's impossible for me to truly see this as a bad game. that's because each new world features both the dread of new unfair traps and the most unassuming enemies being somehow capable of killing you in one shot but also the incredible joy of seeing and slowly understanding kiya's wild creativity and cleverness in the medium. to be honest, i still have no idea how he thought the game works; the obstacles and progression are quite linear in some ways, but each little obstacle offers a number of possible approaches, each with different advantages and disadvantages.
(it does seem like a ridiculous ordeal to defeat the final boss without using the safe spot where you can bump his face while tricking him into breathing fire directly under you though. the dragon slayer is extremely weak against all other enemies at that point in the game and leveling it up is very time-consuming even if you have some gloves to grab. and then the boss still does super gigantic damage anyway.)
most people these days...are not going to enjoy this game in any circumstance. and for as well as it's said to have sold, it's hard to imagine that a lot of players beat it back then, and i'm sure it put plenty off even at the time. i spent at least 40 hours playing it (i was on the bus a lot and the switch's clock only counts when i was online as far as i know) and there's basically no variety in the tileset or music (it all got assigned to the enemies, which is honestly pretty cool. there's none i can remember which fully reuse the same sprite (with different stats/name), though there's only a few huge boss sprites. also, a large number of the enemies who generally drop food are snakes...) but if you're even a little curious about checking out weird old stuff i can't recommend this release enough. the save system alone takes off the roughest edge of just trying things and seeing how it works out, and if you become satisfied with your understanding of that part you can use the scene select to see some of the more specifically bizarre stuff in the later parts of the game. i found myself more and more captivated as it went on, and blew through the later stretches in a few days after i realized i had a ton of items i could use to trivialize non-boss fights. but the game is so complex and distant from things i'm used to i feel i still have such a small view of it. and i'm fairly satisfied despite that; i'm certainly not going to go on and play it for hundreds more hours trying to think of new things to try. but it's surreal and evocative to me, and the game's tiny hints that slowly reveal some of the less obvious pieces of its structure are extremely rewarding to tease out, even as they imply much grander schemes one could employ in the game that i can only dream of.
but so much of that is in my head, and even now, i couldn't describe it to people easily outside of a few isolated moments. describing the strategies and discoveries of this game would be like having to explain counting and arithmetic so i could teach people a little bit of simple algebra. (though, in some cases, like hydlide, it's because they're familiar enough it's almost hard to explain why they're so amazing if you haven't started from this game's ground floor.) and there's ideas far beyond that, i know! i doubt i'll ever play it again, unless i want to get real silly and try to learn the speedrun or something, but it's really something incredible. i'm deeply interested to play the later games in the series, now...like saga, it seems like kiya wasn't satisfied repeating the same ideas and continued to build and combine them in ways unlike anyone else has ever done. i've heard the next game (romancia) has a time limit, seemingly in response to the way that it's possible to play this game for a long time only to find yourself stuck because of things that happened long ago, but there's so many other things he could have also taken as lessons from the creation and response to xanadu.
i hope some more of them make it onto these releases. i had such a good time with these that i'm definitely going to be looking to check out most of the rest of the eggconsole library so far...i'm sure at this point i'd easily get my $6.50 out of most or all of them. märchen veil seems like the iffiest, haha, but it still looks kinda cool even if it might be kinda junk