Tokyo Xanadu eX+: The Need For Mid-Tier Games- Part 2 (Spoilers)

This is part 2 of a review of Tokyo Xanadu eX+. If you want to read part 1, which discusses the gameplay and spoiler-free aspects of the story, click this link here.

This part will contain full spoilers for the entirety of Tokyo Xanadu eX+. If you've played the game already or if spoilers don’t concern you, then we shall begin.

The first thing I want to discuss is the game’s overall attitude. Even for a JRPG, and even for a Falcom game, TX is an almost absurdly optimistic and non-threatening game. This is a world where every villain can be redeemed, every character with a hidden identity turns out to be an ally, every secret underground organisation turns out to be an ally even if they’re directly stated by the plot to be in conflict with one another, and where even bystanders who aren’t capable of wielding Soul Devices can help fight against the supernatural threats, the Greed. There’s also no moral complexity associated with the Greed. It feels like Falcom had ideas for a much larger world with this game, one involving three competing factions fighting against an almost lovecraftian-themed threat from a dimension they don’t understand. However, a lot of that potential complexity feels like something that’s not really expanded upon, in favour of keeping everything self-contained in Morimiya whilst only hinting at that wider world.

However, unlike in the Trails series where those hints at a wider world make it feel larger and more involved, with TX, there’s no guarantees that we’re going to get another game set in the same universe. Moreover, the plot we do have here feels largely perfunctory to me, like that wider world is something that exists only in a potential flux rather than as something that has already been meticulously planned out in advance. The game sets up plenty of worldbuilding details, but unfortunately, most of those details end up having little to no bearing on the actual plot. The fact that Asuka, Mitsuki, and Jun are from three competing organisations never seems to actually cause any internal rifts within the group, and while the game hints at characters such as Gorou or Jun potentially betraying the main cast, once the exposition is given, it quickly becomes apparent that they’re of no threat.

Right up until the credits I was waiting for a moment where the the game would unveil a twist surrounding what the Greeds actually are and what they’re trying to achieve, but as it turns out, not even the Greeds themselves seem to know what it is exactly that motivates them. The parting words of the Twilight Apostle, the final boss of the game, approximates to ‘why was I born’. What gave me hope is the character ‘Rem’, a character who allegedly knows everything about the Eclipse. However, in each of her appearances she never seems to be interested in explaining anything to the protagonists, not even after it’s all over, and as a result it her impact on the story feels pointless at best, and actively like she’s trying to bait us into anticipating a sequel at worst.

The first half of the game seems to have a very different tone from the second half. The first half feels much more like a Persona game in that the Eclipse related phenomenon seem to directly correlate with the emotional states of the main characters. For example, the first party member to join Asuka and Kou is Sora, a member of the school’s karate club. In her chapter, she’s concerned that her friend Chiaki, another member of the Karate club, is starting to ignore and become irritable with Sora. When Chiaki has an emotional outburst, she is swallowed by the Abyss. It is Sora’s resolve to try to understand and make amends with Chiaki which causes her Soul Device to manifest. As such, the Soul Device feels like a direct extension of Sora’s positive emotions, whereas the Eclipse and the Greed are positioned as entities that take advantage of the emotionally vulnerable and unstable. As such, while making up with Chiaki doesn’t directly defeat the Greed, Sora’s desire to do so feels like the force that allows her to defeat the Greed holding Chiaki hostage in the first place. From that point on, Chiaki becomes a regular side character that the game never fully forgets about, even towards the end of the game, where Chiaki aids in the battle against a large scale Greed invasion on Morimiya. Chiaki feels like a character Sora and the game completely care about even if Chiaki isn’t a member of the main cast.

This is also a case where the Eclipse feels like a metaphorical representation of the human psyche. In essence, Sora and Chiaki’s story could have been told without the Eclipse needing to be there at all. It’s really only there as a gameplay exercise for the player, and as a way for the game to simplify the emotional complexities of the characters by boiling them down into archetypes, where Chiaki’s emotional demons can become literal monsters for Sora and company to beat down. This is essentially what the Shadows are in Personas 4 and 5, and at first, the Greeds simply feel like less direct versions of the Shadows in those games.

For the following chapters, this definition of the Eclipse mostly rings true despite growing in complexity and involving the real world a little more directly, affecting more people who don’t have anything to do with the emotional turmoil at play. Yuuki’s chapter revolves around his arrogance and his isolation from his family, and the Eclipse takes advantage of a phone App he develops, a device known as the God’s App, which essentially serves as a representation of Yuuki’s arrogance. The God’s App initially functions as a simple horoscope app that secretly steals data from the user’s phone in order to make its predictions. The Eclipse starts infecting the App like a virus, however, and starts handing out predictions to users that directly result in them getting harmed, with these predictions always coming true. The Eclipse also Kidnaps Yuuki’s sister, and Yuuki is forced to acknowledge that his app has accidently caused harm to people, that he isn’t the smartest person in the world, and that he’s been treating his sister poorly by isolating himself from her and not attending school. This resolve is what earns him a soul device, allowing him to save his older sister and make amends with her. But even here, we can see that the Eclipse has become a necessary part of this narrative. Because were it not for the God’s app causing harm, Kou and co would never have had to track down Yuuki in the first place. Moreover, Yuuki’s sister doesn’t end up in the eclipse due to her own failings, rather, she ends up in there simply because the God’s App happens to give her a prediction that causes her to end up in the Eclipse. As such, the Eclipse can’t be seen as a reflection of her emotional state. And since Yuuki isn’t kidnaped by the Eclipse, it makes the Greed’s decisions feel somewhat arbitrary, like they only took advantage of the God’s App because it was a convenient method of them causing some havoc, and not as a result of emotional self sabotage on the part of any one human or even a collective of people. This trend follows for the next few chapters following Yuuki’s introduction.

It’s after Shio’s chapter that a lot of the thematic ideas built up around the eclipse start to fall apart. While the Misty Witch’s invasion develops Asuka and the chapter following that introduces and develops Rion, their development starts to feel completely divorced from what’s happening with the eclipse, and while the gameplay structure remains intact, the narrative structure and overall tone starts to undergo what feel like some significant changes. The Greed’s invasion of Morimiya starts to feel less indirect. Whereas previously they were taking advantage of the emotionally vulnerable, hacking apps, or providing drugs to street gangs, with the Misty Witch chapter the Greed start making direct and noticeable impacts on the world that can’t be written off as urban legends. They start to become an alien threat that is directly altering the properties of the physical world and attacking innocent civilians directly. The fog starts kidnapping and attacking people indiscriminately, and the school ends up being completely changed by the Witch’s arrival in the real world. If it weren’t for Asuka’s Men In Black style memory wiper, there’d be no way for the government or the underground organisations to hide the existence of the eclipse from the general public. As a result the Greed start to feel more like a group of monsters or an invading army than a metaphorical representation of, well, anything. This only escalates as the game continues, eventually culminating in gigantic towers appearing throughout Morimiya and students directly having to fight of monsters that exist in plain sight.

So if the Greed don’t represent humanity’s emotional vulnerabilities, (or, indeed, their greed) then what do they represent?

After a lot of thought, the only answer I can come to is that the Greed only seem to represent a monster, an enemy. They’re simply a regular monster that you might find in a JRPG, a foe to fill space. Only they’re even less coherent then that- a monster in a JRPG is essentially just an animal, and like all animals, they’re driven by a desire to eat to survive and to protect their turf. They don't really think that deeply about anything. Yet the Greed do seem to possess a form of sentience, an ability to form elaborate plans, to speak languages, the ability to possess an ego, and a desire to want to protect and understand their own existence. But only one Greed in the entire game explains that what they’re doing stems from a desire to continue their own existence, that what they’re doing is necessary to protect themselves, which would be Shiori, the Princess of Doom and Kou’s childhood friend. A character who serves as a mostly inconsequential side character until near the end of the game.

Shiori’s story is the closest the game gets to characterising the Greed. It’s explained that during the Earthquake ten years prior to the start of the game, Shiroi was killed. However, Shiori’s dying wish expressed a desire to live, because she felt that Kou, who was witnessing her death, wouldn’t be able to handle losing her. Her dying wish was heard by the Twilight Apostle, the very Greed that was causing the Earthquake, and chose to attach itself to Shiori and rewrite reality in Morimiya so that Shiori never died in the first place. However, Shiori is apparently ‘dead’ outside Morimiya, meaning Shiori can’t leave the city. As such, the Greed part of Shiori has been opening Eclipses in Morimiya with the intention of having the Eclipse taking over the entire world, just so that the ‘lie’ as she puts it can encompass the entire world, and she can exist everywhere. While there are issues with the twist that I will be discussing in just a second, the more I think about it the more it feels like one of the more interesting ideas put forth by the plot. It suggests that the Greed in some respects reflect and react to humanity, and it places a lot of the supernatural drama on a more grounded level, as something that’s directly reflective of Kou and Shiori’s relationship. And it forces Kou to think about whether he’d want to live in a world where Shiori exists but he has to endlessly fight off the eclipse, or a world where he has to admit that the past ten years have been a fabrication. If nothing else, the voice actors really do sell some of the drama, and Shiori disappearing is one of the only times in the game where we actually see Kou lose his cool.

However, unless I missed something incredibly subtle, this twist is never really foreshadowed at any point in the game until the moment it’s explained to Kou and the player. There are even ways I could imagine the game foreshadowing the twist. As an example, at the start of the game Asuka is a transfer student from America, and outside Morimiya Shiori is considered to be dead. As a member of Nemesis, the secret organisation fighting the eclipse, she might know something about what really happened to Shiori. However, Asuka seems to be just as much in the dark as everyone else. As such, the twist feels fairly underdeveloped, like it was something the writers came up with at the last second. It should be noted that the original Vita game ended with Shiori dying- however, eX+ adds an epilogue where she is fully resurrected. It makes me wonder if Falcom received fans complaining about the ending, wishing that Shiori was revived. While I can’t say for sure why they revived her, the decision to do so nonetheless undercuts any drama that the original ending might have held.
As an actual character, Shiori doesn’t really have any relevance in the game’s story outside of getting kidnapped by the Eclipse early on and being somebody you can occasionally talk to in free time events, so the supposedly strong connection Kou and Shiori have is something the player doesn’t really experience for themselves. If you’re like me, you can easily forget about Shiori during the game’s midsection. Because of this, I never felt I had been given any narrative or gameplay incentive to view Shiori’s free time events over any of the others, meaning that her lack of development becomes something of a self-fulfilling prophecy. This is an issue the characters Towa, Gorou, Ryouta and Jun share as well, since they’re also not relevant until the end of the game. Arguably, Towa never does anything of significant importance either, at least not a role that any other character could have filled. At least Ryouta provides some comic relief.

I also want to briefly touch on Jun, who I consider to be the largest waste of potential in this game. Early on, Jun is introduced as a character known as the White Shroud, a figure with a hood obscuring his face and voice, who is playable in two of the game’s side stories. His holy iconography suggesting that he works for the church, his cold and indifferent demeanor, and his incredible strength from a gameplay and narrative perspective make him a very intriguing character. It’s also suggested that the church he works for is one that is aiming to fully destroy the Eclipse, which could have led to some conflicts regarding the late game twists with Shiori. And overall, the White Shroud is framed as someone who will become an eventual adversary to Kou and the X.R.C. One of my favourite lines from the White Shroud is when he states ‘I feel so empty’ whilst watching an Idol concert on a monitor from atop a tall building. He’s framed as someone who is separated from the modern world, doesn’t understand it, and has a disdain for it.
Jun, however, is completely different from the White Shroud. He’s a timid, kind boy who appreciates spending time with his friend. When Jun is revealed to be the White Shroud, the Shroud’s personality seems to vanish completely, to be replaced with Jun’s. Jun’s persona isn’t revealed to be an elaborate act, this whole time he was being completely genuine with his friends despite working as a cold-hearted holy knight on the side. It’s suggested that it’s the time he spent in Morimiya which slowly changed his perspective over time, but that doesn’t explain why the White Shroud wasn’t reflecting any of Jun’s learned kindness mere weeks before the unveiling of his identity. Gorou suffers from a similar problem, being a character who is framed early on as somebody who might turn out to be an enemy of the X.R.C, whose teacher persona turns out to have been completely genuine this entire time. I know Falcom are capable of betrayal narratives, I know they love them, in fact. Trails of Cold Steel has one of the best examples of an ally betraying you that I’ve ever seen in a JRPG. When two characters are set up as potential rivals, them choosing to join the main characters without any resistance whatsoever just immediately deflates the tension and make some of the plot feel pointless in retrospect. And I’m not entirely sure if this deflation of tension was intentional on Falcom’s part. Honestly, I’m not really sure what they were intending with many of the ideas put forward by the plot- it feels like someone on the team had tons of ideas for good worldbuilding, plot twists, and character moments, but for whatever reason, most of those ideas were pushed to the side in favour of finishing up the game in a very straightforward, and honestly quite lazy fashion.

The problem with being a critic is that in order to have any credibility regarding what you’re talking about, your points have to be interesting, backed by evidence from the source material, and above all your points have to be honest. But as honest as I’ve been regarding Tokyo Xanadu, the truth is, none of those criticisms really make me dislike the game. As I mentioned at the start of part 2, there’s something fascinating about how optimistic the game really is. Morimiya City is a place where everybody supports each other, where no unhappy turn in the lives of these characters can’t be overcome, overturned, or undone. For as much as I might dismiss a character like Shiori or Towa, the game certainly doesn’t dismiss them. In fact, the game world is filled with tons of unique NPCs, all of whom have their own names, designs, lives, and stories that you can follow over the course of the game just by talking to them. Some of them have rewards and sidequests associated with them, but most of them don’t. And there’s far more named NPCs in the game than there are generic ones, even the shop owners have their own personalities. The game even gives you a log with which you can track the information you’ve gathered about everyone in the school and your town. Naming each NPC is completely unnecessary, but the sense of community spirit the game builds overtime carries an infectious sort of energy, a kind of energy that makes its talks about friendship and perseverance in the face of disaster feel real and tangible. Many JRPGs may only talk about caring for the world and its inhabitants, all while only giving characters who are directly relevant to the plot any real attention or thought. To me, that love and attention paid to the game’s NPCs counts for a lot, even if I don’t personally care for each and every one of them, or even most of them.

Lastly, this brings me to the title of this article ‘The Need for Mid-Tier Games’. What do I mean by that exactly? Well, as I’ve demonstrated with all my criticism, I feel as though Tokyo Xanadu would only be worth about a 6 or 7/10, if number scores were something that actually meant anything anyway. But I feel like we’ve reached a point in our culture where we typically only give notice to the media that are the absolute best, or at least the most popular. AAA games are banking all their investments on high budget sequels, and even Japanese developers are looking to make their new games as polished and as perfect as possible. This is a good thing for the most part, as it results in games like Persona 5, a ridiculously polished effort that I feel sets a new standard for JRPGs. But Persona 5 took over a decade for Atlus to make… we certainly can’t expect a Persona 5 every year, or a new Xenoblade title, or a new Final Fantasy. 2017 was an outlier of a year when it came to excellent games, certainly not the standard we should be expecting every year.

This is why games like Tokyo Xanadu are important, as they refocus our expectations, they provide something for us to play while we wait for those 10/10 releases. And sometimes we just want to play something that’s different from those top tier titles, even if the mid-tier titles aren’t revolutionary. I certainly feel like Falcom could have done a better job with this title. But I can’t say I hated my time spent with the game. Scratch that, I actually had a really good time. Falcom as a developer feels like they’re stuck in the PS2 and Gamecube era of JRPGs, where developers made the games they wanted to make on a small budget. That’s the era I grew up in, so efforts like Tokyo Xanadu and the trails series make me feel somewhat nostalgic.

Tokyo Xanadu is rough, it’s a little lazy and somewhat derivative. But it feels like a human effort. It’s earnest and full of ideas both big and small, both realised and unrealised. And above all else, it has a big heart.