Well, that was Xexyz. Time to completion: About three hours. I must say, it was just the breezy change of pace I needed after sinking nearly forty into Battletoads!
I’d played this one a bit in the early ’90s, but I really only remembered two things about it: The hero’s snazzy helmet and that the bosses tended to resemble giant robotic sea life. That last bit always made me wonder if Xexyz had any connection to the Darius games, which share the same odd enemy theming. Apparently, it doesn’t. Thanks, Internet.
This one is an odd duck for sure. It somewhat resembles The Guardian Legend in structure, since gameplay is split between on-foot sections, where your character explores the game world and collects power-ups, and more straightforward spaceship shooting sections. The main difference is that Xexyz’s on-foot levels imitate a side-scrolling platform game like Mega Man rather than an overhead view adventure game like The Legend of Zelda and its shooter sections scroll horizontally rather than vertically.
The game is set on post-apocalyptic Earth in the year 2777. The planet is inhabited by an odd mix of humans, machines, talking animals, and winged pixies. It’s strange. Anyway, alien robots led by some dude named Goruza have attacked the land of Xexyz and kidnapped all its queens. There’s apparently, like, six of them. That’s gotta be some kind of record. You play as the techno-warrior Apollo and set out to save the world.
Xexyz has a very odd structure: Platform level, platform/shooter hybrid level, boss, shooter level, boss. This cycle is repeated six times in total. In another Guardian Legend parallel, I find the shooter gameplay to be the much more engaging mode overall. Not that the platforming is bad as such. Rather, it’s mediocre, with an overall lack of challenge and some stiff controls holding it back a bit. The shooter sections aren’t perfect, either: Your hit box is perhaps too large, there’s no auto-fire for your weapons (always a pain, literally), and more weapon options than the handful on offer would have been very welcome. Still, the shooting is where it’s at here.
Graphics and sound are serviceable, if uneven. Some music tracks and stage backgrounds are excellent, while others are just passable. The graphical highlight is definitely the boss sprites. They’re huge and extremely well-drawn.
The Atlus-developed Xexyz was originally published in Japan by Hudson Soft in 1988 and titled Kame no Ongaeshi – Urashima Densetsu (“Turtle’s Repayment – Urashima Legend”). So while the cryptic and difficult-to-pronounce international title Xexyz (“zex-iss”) is often blamed in part for the game’s obscurity, I guess I can’t blame them for wanting sometime a little shorter. In case you’re wondering, Urashima Tarō is the hero of a Japanese fairy tale. He rescues a turtle in distress and ends up having various undersea adventures as a result. A sci-fi take on this material is pretty clever. Pity that cleverness had to be jettisoned for Western audiences.
Despite the issues mentioned above, Xexyz is still worth a look. It doesn’t have the length, depth, or polish of a Guardian Legend, but it’s a solid B-list title for the NES. If nothing else, the world and characters are just so damn weird, and it’s my personal favorite game where you get to cruise around on a flying lobster. Probably. Top three for sure.
Twentieth Century Gamer 