Tokyo Xanadu eX+, (ie the PS4 version) was just what the doctor ordered. It's been a while since any full length, non-walking sim or non-VN game has truly captured my attention, even within my preferred genre. I was initially grabbed by the similarities to Persona 5 (which are mostly superficial, fwiw), but stayed for the surprisingly satisfying battle system and the characters.

Set in modern day Japan (if memory serves, the in-game calendar is 2015), a high schooler, Kou, discovers he has the ability to fight monsters in another dimension when one of his friends is taken through a portal. He's joined by a classmate already acquainted with these areas--called "eclipses" per game terminology--to clear the area and rescue the friend. However, the normal eclipse activity is ramping up, both in frequency and severity, and Kou finds himself at the center of an increasingly dire situation as the city starts catapulting towards disaster.

I would consider it a fairly typical JRPG/anime-type of storyline. Does a good job of advancing the characters and providing pretty dungeons to crawl and clear, but I doubt most players will find it to be the draw to the game. No, the draw--at least for me--is the daily life segments. Wandering around the city, talking with friends, shopkeepers, teachers, random people on the street. Every single character you encounter in the game can be interacted with and each gives you a unique bit of dialogue.

There's a rough split of the types of people who populate the city: People with names, and people with descriptions ("Shopper" or "Mother" or something like that). The latter provide some character and texture to the city and its events. The former, however, get filed among Kou's acquaintances. Each gets their own profile in the menu, and as you continue to interact with them through the game's progression, their profile fills out. But who cares about profiles? No, the real draw is seeing their own little story arcs develop. They don't mean anything in the game's main narrative, but they mean something to them. The man who is always at the shrine, fretting about being single. The grandma worried about her grandson who doesn't have a job or goals for the future. The student in the library who is trying to write a novel but has writer's block. A few of these culminate in little quests for Kou to solve, but most of them just exist in their own little world--little tidbits in the game to get you emotionally interested. And the game does give a bit of a reward for your curiosity: sometimes you'll interact with an otherwise innocuous character and they'll give you an item. Of course, this is just rare enough that you're going to have a very frustrating game if you're only interacting with characters to GET something (I think the walkthroughs will tell you which characters to interact with when if GETTING something is all you're interested in), but it is a fun bonus.

The dungeons are fairly well spaced through the narrative. In the early stages there's one per chapter, but once you think you have a grip on the formula each chapter takes, it shakes things up. Longer chapters, multiple dungeons. Most of the dungeons are fairly short--able to be knocked out in 5 to 10 minutes. That does change a bit in the last few chapters, but fortunately none of the dungeons feel like a slog.

I suspect players most interested in the fighting aspect of the game will come away disappointed. Other than a couple of deaths in the first few chapters, I didn't die at all. I forget if the game let me choose a difficulty setting at the outset, but if it did, I would have selected whatever the normal setting is. In most games, normal gives me a helluva fight. I love games, but I'm not good at games--normal is about as hard hitting as I can go. Honestly, the only reason I died early on boils down to three reasons: 1. Still learning controls and timing, especially with the dodge. 2. Too few characters (once you get three people on your team, the third slot provides a slow--but crucial--health regen). 3. Not a lot of health potions built up in your inventory. Once you have those things cracking properly? Most players should be able to blaze through these foes. The bosses are significantly harder, with lots of health and hard hits, but they require the same skills as regular baddies: landing hits, dodging attacks. I really liked the feel, and juggling my team for health regen vs fight impact is the kind of decision making I like. In fact, I would consider this really good combat, it just isn't really challenging the way core gamers like.

What I did find challenging is the weapon upgrade system, which is done via various shops located around the city. Some shops operate purely on cash, some via "combining" existing upgrades, and some by trading unrelated items. So there are upgrades, that to get them, you have to backtrack four shops to buy the base materials, then trade those materials for lower tier upgrades, then trade those upgrades fort he item you actually want. Fuck that. I'm not scrambling around just to add a few more ticks to my attack power. If I've got everything already? Great, I'll get that upgrade.

Weapons aren't the only upgrades affected by messy shopping. While you can buy health potions, it's definitely more cost effective (and fun!) to make your own. While at least the recipe tells you the ingredients you need, the stores that carry those ingredients are scattered across town. And some of the ingredients are only found in the eclipse (or at an eclipse-related vendor). However, unlike with the weapon upgrades, it's pretty easy to just do one loop around town, buy a bunch of different ingredients, and make whatever potions you can out of those ingredients.

Seems to me that shopping would be massively streamlined if every shopkeeper accepted cash. Yes, it could be fun if some of them also accepted trades for their wares, but ultimately, item acquisition shouldn't be an irritating puzzle that requires an actual, handwritten shopping list and a diagram across the map to accomplish.

That's not an insignificant flaw, and it is the biggest reason I can only rate this at four stars instead of five. But at the same time, at no point did I feel like my upgrades weren't powerful enough for the dungeons I was clearing. So it's more a sense of missing out on fun things, than annoyance of being hindered at the game.

But honestly, for as much as I hyped the characters above, my LEAST least favorite part of the game was the character of Mr. Gorou. He's a teacher at the school. The one whom the girls try to impress. He eventually joins our crew of eclipse battlers AND IT'S SO AWKWARD. There are times when the whole group is running around the city. Seven high school teenagers and, standing tall beside them, MR. fucking GOROU. You want to be assistant advisor or whatever? Fine. You want to run into the eclipses and fight evil? Be my guest. But these are not your friends. You should not just be hanging out with them. Advise from afar, not knee-deep in. Like, if you ever went to church as a teenager, and you're there at church talking with you friends, and the pastor comes over? And you're like, sure we can small talk for a bit, but the pastor just continues to stand there and you don't know how to tell him to leave? That's what Mr. Gorou is doing. I grew to hate him with a fiery burning passion.

OK BUT THE GAME'S REALLY GREAT AND I WANT YOU ALL TO LOVE IT LIKE I DO.