Xak: The Art of Visual Stage

I played Xak: The Art of Visual Stage.

This is an action-RPG developed by Micro Cabin in 1989 for various Japanese computers, and later on it got ported to consoles - PCE-CD in 1992, and Super Famicom in 1993.

There were no English releases of Xak, but there is a fan translation of the SNES version. I played the fan translation on emulator.

This is a small little action RPG. The story takes place in the fantasy world of Wavis. You play as a blue-haired boy named Latok Kart who lives in the village of Fearless with his mother.

One day, Latok meets with a pixie named Pixie, who informs him that Latok is a descendent of the god of war Duel. In the absence of Latok's father Dork, who has been missing for a long time, Latok is the only one who can stop the evil Badou. So Latok must collect the three Gems of Xak in order to gather enough power to save the world.

The story isn't anything special. The character names are kind of funny I guess.

The game is a fast-paced action RPG, rather reminiscent of classic Ys. You can go around killing enemies with your sword, which gives you gold and EXP. And you can buy items in town when you've whacked enough enemies to afford it. You need to level up in order to beat bosses, and occasionally you'll need to talk to NPCs and find key items in order to progress.

The gameplay is pretty straightforward and simple like that.

This is a very short game, it took me around 6 or 7 hours to complete.

The game is divided into two halves. After you beat the first two dungeons, you see a mini ending sequence. Then the second half begins, which contains two more dungeons. After entering the second half, you cannot return to the first half.

...The only reason I can imagine the game is designed this way is because the original 1989 version came on multiple floppy disks, and the point-of-no-return would have marked the moment where you had to swap disks.. ...But this break point was absolutely not necessary for a more advanced SNES version, yet they ported it over this way regardless. Hmm.

The scope of the world is really small. Each of the two chapters has two small towns, two dungeons, and one connecting overworld field. And that's it. There isn't much to it.

...

The game's levelling-up system feels extremely lopsided. When you are below a monster's power level, they will kill you extremely quickly. And when you are above a monster's level, you take no damage from them at all. It's only a vague small window where you take "normal" damage from an enemy, and it won't last long before you earn enough EXP to outlevel them anyway.

This makes the game feel like it keeps alternating between being too punishing and pitifully easy very frequently. It's not a great-feeling balance at all.

The first two bosses, I crushed in a few seconds with barely any effort.

The combat also feels wonky to control. In order to hit enemies, you have to be kind of awkwardly off to one side, otherwise it doesn't seem to land correctly. And I got the strangest feeling that my sword was too short whenever I was facing downwards. Left, right and up seemed fine, but I always took damage more often whenever I was attacking from above the enemy. ...

Whenever you are overleveled for the areas you're in, enemies will harmlessly bounce against you, but this is annoying because they will gain a moment of invulnerability whenever they do this.... sometimes you can swing your sword at a weak enemy so many times, but it just doesn't work because they keep bumping into you over and over again. It's really annoying.

This game has a few usable items - healing food, and magic scrolls. There isn't a proper magic system in this game, but you can buy a lightning scroll that damages enemies nearby when you use it. I never really wanted to use them, though, because it would be too expensive to keep replacing them. Each scroll only gets one use, so I saved money for the permanent weapon and armour upgrades instead. .... I can't imagine how even more ludicrously overleveled I'd be if I also had to grind extra money to buy a steady stock of spell scrolls. .....and if I gotta grind and overlevel myself just to be able to afford them, what would they be useful for, anyway? Enemies aren't gonna be a threat at that point...

The most useful item in the game is the equippable mantle that gradually heals you whenever you stand still. This means that you no longer have to waste money on buying healing items... which is good, until you realise that the alternative is that now you have to stop and stand still for a minute every time you need to heal, which is a real pace-breaker. At later levels when you have more HP, it can take quite a while to fill up.

...Makes me appreciate how Brandish would speed everything up whenever you took a rest, haha.

No houses in any of the towns restore your HP, not even the infirmary in your hometown (it's only used for a cutscene and nothing else). So before you get the healing mantle, your only healing option is to buy and use food items. Feels a bit unfriendly for a hometown.

This game has a lot of unique characters who are only used for one extremely minor interaction, and then nothing else. The priest at the church for example, his only role in the game is to say "look at this cute dog". ...Normally churches in RPGs have a bit more going on in them than that, right?? ...I guess I'm expecting too much for a 1989 game, but it does make the game world feel a bit hollow. I didn't get this feeling when I played Ys I & II, despite it being a very similar game from the same era. I think Xak is just not as competent as Ys in setting up its world and characters. 

This game seems to have a mild obsession with alternative bad endings. At several points throughout the journey, a bad guy will ask you "Will you join our side?", and you have the option to say yes or no. If you agree, it is an immediate game over. ... I think they were trying to make something interesting here, but the way it's implemented makes it feel so shallow and meaningless. They have not spent nearly enough time developing Latok's personality for it to make sense that he would suddenly betray his quest like that. So it just feels weird and out of place.

...

Xak has a lot of really annoying event triggers, and you are often required to talk to an NPC before you are allowed to take an item, even if you find the item first. Early on in the first dungeon, you find a key, but Latok says "I don't know what this key is for, so I will just leave it here for now". ... ....ok. Listen, Latok, you're supposed to be an RPG protagonist... how can you just leave behind a key you find in a dungeon??? That's not the kind of behaviour I want to see out of my RPG protagonists!!

The game is full of annoying sequences where you find a roadblock, you need to go all the way back to tell an NPC about the roadblock, and only then will you be allowed to return to the roadblock and proceed. There's a lot of back-and-forth like that in this game, and it often feels very arbitrary. You can't just do things if you know what needs to be done, you always need to follow the game's trail of event flags in the exact order it expects. ...

The dungeon design in this game isn't anything special. It's mostly just some simple rooms with enemies, and the occasional treasure chest. The puzzles never amount to anything more complicated than finding the right key item to use to remove the next roadblock (except for the very end, where there's a rather troublesome teleporter maze). It's honestly a bit on the bland and generic side, but it's decently fun enough to explore the dungeon layouts, so I didn't mind.

This game's idea of a tricky trap is to occasionally give you a treasure chest that damages you instead of giving you an item. ... ... it's not a particularly interesting trap in my opinion, it kind of just makes me stand around to heal for a bit whenever it happens. So it's a trap of mild inconvenience more than anything else. ...This game does have one particularly nasty treasure chest that drops you into a room with no exits. If you don't have a Warp scroll with you, then you are literally trapped in this room forever. So make sure you don't save in this room, for goodness' sake.  Wow. ...Okay, game designers, I don't particularly agree with your decision here. I don't think you should intentionally put a trap that has the potential to force a player to start a new game from the beginning like that. But you do you, eh?

...

Overall the game is a fun, if fiddly, easygoing kinda adventure of killing monsters and exploring dungeons. It's not particularly special, but it is mostly harmless. ...However, I do take major issue with the final parts of the game. In fact, the final parts kind of completely ruin the game for me.

Right at the end of the game, you need to ride atop the back of a dragon. The game then becomes a shoot-'em-up stage. Kinda like Namco's Dragon Spirit arcade game, if it didn't have any upgrades or... anything else. All you get is just a simple shoot button, and some flying enemies who shoot back at you. You don't have any ability to heal yourself during this stage, even if you have tons of healing items or the healing mantle equipped. And at the end of the shmup stage, there is an extremely extremely protracted boss fight against a fire dragon, who flies in and out of the screen at pure random. You are only able to shoot upwards, but this boss frequently likes to hang out at the bottom of the screen, making it difficult to hit. And whenever you die, you have to replay the whole shmup stage from the beginning to get another chance at the boss. It's.... such a painful slog, and it doesn't help that the rate of fire from holding the shoot button is quite slow, so in order to actually rapidfire, you need to mash that button constantly.

It's such a departure from what the game was about up until this point. So far, Xak was just a relatively simple and easygoing RPG, where you could overlevel yourself past any obstacle if you needed... but now suddenly you need to be an expert at poorly-designed shmup gameplay to proceed? It's a shame.

After the dragon stage, there's one more boss fight. The final boss against Badou. And.... I also take issue with this fight from a game design perspective too. Because this boss will kill you in one hit.

No matter what. Even if you are maximum level (level 25), and have the best armour in the game (maximum of 255 defense), Badou's attacks will still kill you in a single hit regardless.

...I feel like this kind of spits in the face of the whole idea of an RPG with stats and levelling-up, doesn't it? It makes the entire game's gameplay systems completely irrelevant. You can't heal during bosses in this game (and even if you could, these 1-hit deaths wouldn't give you opportunity to heal anyway). So it's just... what is this, then? It's like suddenly you're playing a Sonic final boss with no rings, almost. (except not as well designed). It just doesn't resemble any of the previous RPG gameplay at all.

It doesn't help that the final boss has a rather extensive dialogue scene beforehand. So you need to skip a lot of textboxes every single time you die. Very often, I'd be skipping text, and I'd get about one second of gameplay before the boss's laser immediately kills me and I have to reload and skip all that text again. It is not a pleasant gameplay experience at all.

Anyway. The boss isn't actually all that hard once you know the pattern and can dodge its lasers and stuff. It's just really annoying.

The ending is not all that satisfying, because it doesn't really resolve anything. Badou is defeated, but apparently there are still other bad guys behind the scenes, and nothing has been said about Latok's missing father. The game is setting up for a sequel which will cover these things. But.... the sequel never came to Super Famicom. If I want to play the sequel, I'll have to play a different version.

Upon looking it up, it looks like the PCE-CD version of Xak I & II got an English fan translation........ this week??? Yup. on 19th October 2026, Xak I & II for PCE-CD finally got an English patch. Wow. I guess I can play the sequel at some point then. I was not expecting it to be such a recent development.

Thank you fan translators, for your extra hard work!

Anyways. I'm not gonna go play Xak I & II for PCE-CD just yet. Maybe later.