Xanadu: Dragon Slayer II (Falcom, 1985, PC-88)

Here's some gameplay from the sequel to Dragon Slayer, Xanadu: Dragon Slayer II. My thoughts on the game: With the original Dragon Slayer easily being my GOTY of 1984, naturally I was hyped to play the sequel... which unfortunately did not quite live up to its predecessor. You can have some fun, sure, but the game feels much more limiting and and it is much easier to get stuck, by for example locking yourself inside one of the dungeon room as the door locks behind you and you have no more keys. Another issue was the fact that I could not for the life of me figure out how to level up, and the side scrolling view makes the world that much harder to travel. In the original, your success depended all on how you played it and there were quite a few different strategies you could use to traverse and explore the map, like a combination between Breath of the Wild and Minecraft, but now your possibilities are much more limited and the world and your success in the beginning is entirely dependent on how you place your stats, as favoring some stats more than others may make the game unbeatable. You may not be able to open chests, you may be too slow to even fight, you may not be able to use magic at all... the list goes on, which means that there is no real room for "your" build, there is only "the one" build that actually makes the game beatable. I get that the game in its time was huge and influential in Japan and especially for JRPGs, but in my opinion, it is inferior to its predecessor, which leaves me a bit disappointed.