I beat Magic of Scheherazade and Lunar: The Silver Star, and then spent most of the vacation playing Tokyo Xanadu. Just made it to chapter 7.
Scheharazade - as I said before, has a ton of interesting ideas for its early (1987!) Japanese release date. A unique theme, some time travel, randomized solar eclipses that affect the # of items you can get, a mix between action RPG and command based battles, large full-screen boss encounters, a host of 11 recruitable characters you can use in battle. But damn, the final boss was BULLSHIT with an insta-kill attack. The weakest point of this game are the BS boss fights, where they just move around randomly with no rhyme or reason and you just have to keep firing your wand aimlessly and hope for the best. There are some places where it's not super clear what you're supposed to do so it's recommended to use a guide (I leaned on FlyingOmelette's quite heavily) but I highly recommend it to fans of NES gaming who have already played through Crystalis, Faxanadu, and the Zelda games.
Lunar: The Silver Star - Those final few dungeons definitely dragged ass, the Grindery in particular felt like a Phantasy Star 2 dungeon in terms of complexity and length. With a high encounter rate and battles that you can't run from, I felt super overpowered by the end of the game, so the final battles were a cakewalk (I remember Ghaleon being MUCH more difficult in the PS1 game). The economy is also weird, for the first 3/5 of the game you feel like weapons and armor are way too expensive, so you either hope you find good loot in the dungeon or save up for a few pieces of good armor... but then about 3/5 of the way through the game you're introduced to a shop with the best armor that you can outright purchase, so once you buy that there's literally nothing else to buy for the final 2/5 of the game, where dungeons are at their longest, encounter rate is at its steepest, and enemies drop the most gold. The best healing items will be given to you for free right before you go to the final sequence of dungeons.
Tokyo Xanadu has filled a bit of gap for me this year, as I've exhausted most of Falcom's US-released library (okay, still need to do the original TG-CD Dragon Slayer, and Zwei 1... I'll skip Brandish SNES and the PSP Gagharv's though
) and am eagerly awaiting the 4 upcoming Trails releases. The way it uses a similar UI and font and even some systems makes it feel like a modern day take on CS, even right down to having Towa. I love all the little cameos and references to past Falcom games - seeing a reference to "First Steps Toward Wars", the iconic Ys 1 song, on the back of Yuuki's hoodie made me smile.
Of course, it feels like Persona, Cold Steel, and Zwei 2 had a baby - the dungeons, although repetitive, are kinda neat on how they're bite-sized and have performance grades so you're encouraged to speed run. The combat feels clunkier than Ys but at the same time, much less mashy (definitely more Zwei 2 than Ys). Enemies hit HARD although they have obvious patterns and telegraphs to their moves, so you're encouraged to dodge and play a bit defensively. Some of the boss fights were pretty epic, though the witch boss fight at the end of chapter 5 was terribly-designed... unfortunately the camera just doesn't work when you're in a tight space with multiple large enemies around. Each character feels familiar enough to use but has their own subtle unique style, so I like using most instead of sticking with one or two I like best, which is typical of me for the genre. I also like how there are limited movesets instead of having bloated movelists most you don't even bother with (i.e. modern Ys), the orbment system for Trails feels kinda bolted on in this one however, but the limited # of orbment slots and challenging gameplay makes it a bit more important to think about what orbments you might need.
The story is, ehh... it feels very low stakes even at chapter 7 and definitely has that anime series feel where everything is a small contained story. And even many of the story beats feel like a warmed over rehash of Persona 4 (fog engulfing the town, missing villagers, pop idol with issues). Each chapter has the same formulaic progression, which does get tiring but even with playing practically nonstop last week I don't really feel all too burnt out yet. I do like some of the NPCs (especially cool to see someone from Poland in the game) and it definitely has the Trails thing going on where you talk to them every day and they say something new. However, I can't really get into those typical high school student NPC substories of like someone on the track team unable to get past their plateau. The intermission at the hot spring seriously DRAGGED ASS as well.
But oh man, the music kicks a lot of ass. Feels very CSish (and a few songs even remind me of Blue Destination). I especially love this particular dungeon theme, some LTJ Bukem vibes with this one:
