racketboy.com

y'all should try the original Xanadu mwahahahaha

My understanding was that Faxanadu was 100% Hudson, merely Falcom licensed and inspired.

marurun wrote:My understanding was that Faxanadu was 100% Hudson, merely Falcom licensed and inspired.

Some sites say it was developed by Falcom, some say Hudson and Falcom co-developed, some say Hudson developed. I'm not really sure myself.

I can’t find any official credits for the game, but Jun Chikuma is regularly (un)credited for the music, and she was Hudson through and through. HG101 indicates that Falcom actually selected Hudson to do a Famicom version of Xanadu rather than Hudson simply licensing the property.

With the exception of Faxanadu, Falcom’s other early NES releases were all ported by Compile, up until Ys I and II, both of which it appears Falcom did in-house.

Weird.

Falcom let Hudson do all their stuff on PC Engine except Xanadu I and II. They seem to pick and choose which titles they do themselves pretty carefully.

marurun wrote:With the exception of Faxanadu, Falcom’s other early NES releases were all ported by Compile, up until Ys I and II, both of which it appears Falcom did in-house.

Falcom developed Legacy of the Wizard themselves too. Does seem random.

So, I decided to do a little digging, and found a blog post from Iwasaki Hiromasa's personal blog. He was put in charge of Ys I & II for the PC Engine. It's a pretty fantastic read, although he admits that ~21 year old memories potentially have some holes. During his free time, while working on the debugging for Susanoo Densetsu--apparently his first major project, and wow does that explain a lot about the game--he would slink off into an area of one of the development rooms on the fourth floor of Hudson's HQ in Hokkaido to play Ys II. He was asked by someone at Hudson, who could apparently move mountains, named Nakamoto, if he wanted to make a port of Ys II since he liked it so much. To which Iwasaki Hiromasa replied that he would do it, if he could make both I and II into one CD-ROM game, because they would work so well together as a single game, and the CD-ROM format would afford the space for all sorts of enhancements.

So, Nakamoto takes young Iwasaki down to Falcom headquarters, where they met with Katou Masayuki (Falcom's founder and president). Here's the relevant part: Iwasaki mentions that Falcom and Hudson did not have a very good relationship at the time, because Hudson had been given the Xanadu license to make a port of the game for the Famicom, and instead made something that hardly even resembled what it was supposed to be based on. At the time (Japanese) people expected a port of Falcom's flagship title, and reception of Faxanadu was anything but good because of how it betrayed the expectations.

To quickly summarize the rest of the story: Katou Masayuki told Nakamoto and Iwasaki that they could have the license for some exorbitant sum of money that Iwasaki imagined was, in Katou's mind, enough that he figured it would make Hudson give up on the license, but even if it didn't, would still pay plenty of bills. So, Nakamoto immediately accepted the licensing agreement, and the rest is history. Iwasaki goes on to say that the nerds in accounting complained that they wouldn't be able to recover the expenditures, and were told to 'sell more CD units to recover them.' In the end, the relationship between Falcom and Hudson was saved by some mystery man (at least to me) named Nakamoto, and a punk kid with little more than some nonsense RPG on his resume.

Exhuminator wrote:

marurun wrote:With the exception of Faxanadu, Falcom’s other early NES releases were all ported by Compile, up until Ys I and II, both of which it appears Falcom did in-house.

Falcom developed Legacy of the Wizard themselves too. Does seem random.

Not all that random, since Kiya Yoshio would have been personally involved with Legacy of the Wizard/Dragon Slayer IV, and Legend of Xanadu - Dragon Slayer VIII. (Those two started their lives on home consoles.)

pierrot wrote:Iwasaki mentions that Falcom and Hudson did not have a very good relationship at the time, because Hudson had been given the Xanadu license to make a port of the game for the Famicom, and instead made something that hardly even resembled what it was supposed to be based on.

Looks like you've cleared the mystery up with your fantastic detective work. Awesome job man!

Exhuminator wrote:

marurun wrote:With the exception of Faxanadu, Falcom’s other early NES releases were all ported by Compile, up until Ys I and II, both of which it appears Falcom did in-house.

Falcom developed Legacy of the Wizard themselves too. Does seem random.

I have read in several places that Compile actually did the NES port of this. And that one Japanese devs book I shat all over in my review pretty much confirms it. (I trust the content of the author's interviews, I just thought they were horribly unprofessional and nearly unreadable in places.)

Edit: to clarify, indications are that Compile programmed the NES version, but Falcom may have still been very involved in the port. Seems in this case it wasn't a Compile title licensed from Falcom, but more of a Falcom title where Compile was contracted for programming work.

1. Shantae 1/2 Genie Hero (Wii U)
2. Blek (iOS)
3. Bloo Kid 2 (3DS)
4. HarmoKnight (3DS)
5. 3D Fantasy Zone II W (3DS)
6. Fantasy Zone (SMS/3DS)
7. 3D Fantasy Zone Opa Opa Bros. (ARC/3DS)
8. Fantasy Zone II: The Tears of Opa Opa (SMS/3DS)
9. 3D Classics Twinbee (NES/3DS)
10. Rainbow Bell a/k/a Twinbee (ARC/DS)
11. The Legend of Zelda:Breath of the Wild (Wii U)
12. The Guardian Legend (NES)
13. The Clash at Demonhead (NES)
14. The Goonies II (NES)
15. Day of the Tentacle Remastered (iOS)
16. Mario Kart 64 (N64/Wii U)
17. Drancia Saga (3DS)
18. Chain Blaster (3DS)
19. Color Commando (DS)
20. Ace Mathician (DS)
21. Jump Trials Supreme (3DS)
22. Dragon Quest VII (3DS)
23. Fairune II (3DS)
24. RBI Baseball (NES)
25. River City Tokyo Rumble (3DS)
26. Dungeons & Dragons: Chronicles of Mystara (Wii U)
27. Arkanoid vs. Space Invaders (iOS)
28. Device 6 (iOS)
29. Transformers: Human Alliance (Arcade)
30. Metroid Samus Returns (3DS)
31. A Ride Into the Mountains (iOS)
32. Super Mario Run (iOS)
33. Legend of Kusakari (3DS)
34. Banjo Kazooie (N64/360)
35. Go! Go! Commander Video (iOS)

Go! Go! Commander Video (iOS) is a very basic, completely free endless runner starring a Commander Video from the Bit.Trip game series. In it, you tap for short jumps and tap slightly longer for long jumps. You also collect gold to unlock other characters, who all play identically, and hats, which are purely cosmetic. Honestly, it is kind of a crappy game, but I found it strangely addictive. So addictive, in fact, that I took the time to unlock everything. I am also, apparently, the 58th best player in the world out of the 83,973 people who downloaded the game. I have mixed emotions about that.

First 50:

51. Oniken - PC
52. Strife Veteran Edition - PC
53. The Mummy Demastered - Switch
54. Super Mario Odyssey - Switch
55. Wolfenstein II: The New Colossus - PC
56. Etrian Odyssey V - 3DS

Etrian Odyssey V is a bit of a return to the roots of the series. It gets rid of the overworld travel of IV and the sea travel of III in favor of just having five floor stratums that you dive through. It does keep some of the fun of multiclassing, though. However, instead of you picking a second of the existing classes, instead the classes have a base three and one of two advanced trees they can select. So, for example, the Fencer's two advanced trees are used to either focus on going for chain combos (follow up attacks) or to focus on evasion tanking (which was surprisingly effective, since all attacks can be dodged). The game also has added a race system, where there are four races that each can only select certain classes (which are disjoint sets). Each race also has a series of skills they can learn which correspond to things like increased mining returns, a bit of resistance to bind skills, and unlocking higher tier union attacks. All of these race skills are single point skills.

Another aspect that has been improved upon is all the random dungeon events. While previously these would be something that would help or hurt you, now they also give you an experience bump. So it's actually to your advantage to trigger a known bad one. Many of them can have their bad effects avoided if someone in your party has a particular race skill (e.g. one that gives you quick reflexes and an evasion boost). So I ended up being excited whenever I found one of these, as I knew I'd get some kind of reward by the end.

I mentioned it briefly, but they've updated the boost system again. Now the way it works is that each character builds a gauge through taking actions. When that gauge is at 100% they can initiate a union attack. This will trigger before regular actions and not use up your turn. Each union attack requires a certain number of people to use, including the person initiating. While the other people engaged in the union do not need to have a full gauge, it will deplete their gauge. The first four are given to you for free and are the same across races; after that you have unique unions for each race. A few of them are quite powerful; they replicate the EO2 class skills that were oh so good. But Atlus has learned; there are zero items that restore the gauge so you can't spam the good stuff.

I don't think EO5 does anything that would get someone who wasn't already a fan of the series into it, but if you are a fan then it's a fantastic entry.