Wonderful things can happen when you go on a long journey. Of course, sometimes the journey sucks. And sometimes coming home sucks. For the guy in Faxanadu, it's the coming home part. And you get to be him. Yay!
You're an elf who comes home to find that the streets of his home town at the base of the World Tree are almost deserted. The gates are locked, the walls are crumbling. What's going on? It turns out that the elves' longtime friends, the dwarfs, have gone crazy and started attacking the elves. They've also been turned into monsters, but you don't find that out until later; you just spend most of the game assuming that "dwarf" is the catch-all name given to the hopping gremlins, crawling spiky things and miniature dragons you're fighting. Also, the elf fountain water has stopped flowing, which sucks because it's their source of life. The elves have sent many men to figure out what happened, but none of them came back. So the king figures, hey, if our best warriors couldn't do it, let's send the random guy who's been out of town and just came back. That's why he's the king, bitches.

THE GAME
Faxanadu is a side-scrolling pseudo-RPG. Well, it's shown in profile, at least. It can actually scroll left, right, up or down, in the screen-by-screen way made famous by the original Legend of Zelda. There are no bottomless pits; they all lead somewhere. You jump around on platforms, go through doors, climb ladders and kill things with your dagger/sword/magic, gaining experience and "golds" from the things you slay. You can visit the gurus scattered about (mostly in towns) to get mantras (passwords) and gain titles based on your XP, which sets how much gold and XP you get to continue with when you die or use a password. This is actually pretty awesome; if you're a paladin and you spend all your money and then die, you get to continue with 13000 golds free! The golds are money, idiot. You can buy stuff with them, including weapons for fighting, armor to reduce damage, shields to reduce damage from projectiles, magic for killing things at a distance, keys for unlocking doors, potions for refilling life on the road, and dried meat and doctor's treatments to refill life and magic in town.

There are other more specialized items that you can buy and/or find for doing things like flying or being invincible, and some other token items that only serve as plot devices to keep you from going to certain places until you complete this dungeon or talk to that guy. I won't bother listing them. Most of them are rings.

There are many different enemies, obviously. I think five of them qualify as "bosses," though you'll encounter three of them as incidental enemies after your initial exposure. I'll discuss those at length. Just keep in mind that there are also all manner of jumping goblins, crawling eyestalks and flying squids, all of which drop either golds or life-giving bread when killed. Some types drop golds and some drop bread, and they always drop the same thing; it isn't random. If you see a ghost flying around, you can kill it with confidence that it will yield bread. So anyway, bosses.

SMALL DRAGON: It tends to stay at the bottom of the screen, where it shoots a stream of fireballs. Then it'll fly up and back down really quickly, wash rinse and repeat. Ideally, you'll want to be on a platform on the edge of the screen, above its fireballs, where you can wait for it to fly up and hopefully hit it with magic. In practice, you'll have to get real good at jumping fireballs. Its head is its only vulnerable spot, so you have to jump to hit that, too.

BIG WORM OR SNAKE: I can't even remember if this was a boss, because it's so easy to kill. Just jump and hit it in the head.

UGLY STOMPY THING: Again, it's head is its vulnerable spot. It hops toward you, then jumps to crush you, then jumps back to repeat. So you hit it when it jumps at you. Pretty simple, really.

BIG DRAGON (aka DWARF KING): It flies up and down, shooting fireballs. It sounds like the small dragon, but it's quite different. Avoid the fireballs and hit it a bunch, I guess. I'm not really sure, because I found a nice little cheat (which I think is actually part bug) the first time I tried fighting it. I'll leave that for you to discover, but it's fairly obvious.

EVIL ONE: ???? ...Oh, fuck that. This isn't GamePro magazine. I'll give you one word: Tilte.

THE GOOD

  • I like how they justify the password system by calling them "mantras," which can restore you from injury.
  • If you set aside the jumping control, the enemies and the re-locking doors, Faxanadu's overall "map" is pretty well done.
  • The occasionally poor translation is amusing, such as the "golds," and when shopkeepers ask you, "What would like to sell?"

    THE BAD

  • Faxanadu uses a type of jumping I hate, which I will call "Castlevania Jumping." In Castlevania Jumping, once you jump, you have no control until you land. You can attack, but that's all. You can't change direction or stop your jump short, and that's a real pain when you're trying to jump forward to catch a ladder, because you'll often fall off the opposite side of said ladder. You have a choice between jumping straight up and jumping forward, but you can't jump up and then move forward, so as to carefully jump onto something in front of you. You also can't control the height of your jump; you always jump as high as possible with the lightest tap of the A button. All stupid.
  • You also can't crouch, which sucks when there are enemies (including the first ones in the game!) that are too low to the ground for your dagger to reach. Your swords and magic can reach them, so upgrade fast. It also means you can't duck under things, or lower your shield to block low-flying projectiles.
  • The enemies you can't actually hit that you encounter in the first town are the tip of the iceberg. Terrible enemy placement plagues this game; it is indeed its hallmark. If you see a ladder leading up to another screen, there will be an enemy at the top that can hit you before you get off the ladder and into an attacking position. Many ladders leading down have enemies at the bottom, too, and don't think you can just push A to fall off the ladder and get there before the enemy prepares itself for you like you can in other games. There's even one part where you have to walk through a corridor too low to jump in, opposed at the opposite end of the screen by a projectile-shooting enemy. Some doors have enemies in front of them, and if you come out of that door, you get hit. Sometimes, when you enter a new screen, there will be an enemy placed so close to the edge of the screen that you'll be hit and knocked back to the previous screen before you can react. I got stuck at one part, because I was climbing into a new screen up a ladder next to an open pit, and there was an enemy at the top that would always run over, hit me and knock me down to the screen I just came from (where, by the way, the enemies had respawned). In games like Dragon Warrior or Final Fantasy, where you don't actually have control of your movement in combat situations, you expect and don't mind taking damage without recourse. In a game like this, where you always have full control of your character, you expect to be able to avoid damage, and the placement of enemies here simply precludes you from doing that. It's bizarre, maddening, and becomes laughable. I don't think I've ever seen a game with such bad design in this way.
  • Given the placement of enemies, projectile weapons (which is to say, magic) are a godsend. It's always great to be able to shoot things from a distance. That said, the game contains no portable magic-refilling items, nor do you find anywhere to refill your magic outside of towns. If you're in a dungeon and you run out of magic, tough shit. You'll just have to live without it, because you won't be refilling it anytime soon.
  • Stores are chores. The text scrolls pretty slowly, and you can't speed it up. The shopkeeper starts by saying, slowly, "Hello. I sell tools (or keys). What would you like?" Then you get to choose "Come here to buy" or "Come here to sell." Then he asks, again slowly, "What would you like?" Then you get to choose a single item. Then he slowly says, "Thank you for shopping." Then the dialogue ends. If you want to buy multiple items, you get to go through all of this over and over again.
  • Like most games of this sort, keys vanish when you use them. But unlike most games of this sort, the door doesn't stay unlocked. You unlock a door. You go into the dungeon. You die. You get sent back to town. Now you have to buy another key to get back into the dungeon? Why?
  • Man, is this game's story disjointed. You start by trying to get the fountains and springs flowing again. Then you find out that the dwarfs have started attacking. Then people start talking about a meteorite? And then you finally get told that the dwarfs have been transformed into monsters? Like, no one could have filled you in on that back when you first started fighting them? I know I just assumed that dwarfs were monsters of all types. I've finished the game, and I still don't know who exactly the final boss was. They just call it the "Evil One," but what's that? An alien? A demon? What relevance does it have to the story? You never really find out; it's just the monster you have to kill to win the game.
  • The ending be mad anticlimactic, yo. But that's really par for the course when dealing with NES games.

    TIPS & TRICKS

  • After you start the game, talk to the town guru to get the Ring of Elf... and then kill yourself. You'll start at the guru's place with full magic and life.
  • Faxanadu has a fairly famous "cheat." At the beginning of the game, the king gives you 1500 golds. Every time you talk to him when you have no golds, he gives you 1500 more. So start by buying a dagger and the deluge spell, and seven Keys of Jack. Then go get 1500 more golds from the king. Then sell six keys for 50 golds each (you'll need one to get out of town). You'll now have your dagger, your magic, the key to get out of town, and 1800 golds. You can save them for later, or (my favorite) buy seven Red Potions and then kill yourself, continue (with no golds), then go see the king and get 1500 more.
  • If you ever find yourself real low on golds, try killing yourself. Like I said earlier, you'll restart with an amount of golds based on your level, and it may well be higher than the amount you had when you died. Also, your life and magic will be refilled. Don't try this from behind a locked door, though, because you'll have to buy another key to get back.
  • Here's a password that'll get you right to the end of the game. Or at least to the last town, with all the items you need. It actually gives you an extra hand dagger, and I don't know why. I don't remember buying an extra one. But it doesn't matter, because you won't be using it.
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    FINAL ANALYSIS
    You'll be curious, and you'll play this game. And I won't blame you. You'll also find that it sucks. And I won't blame you.

    Thumbs down for Faxanadu.

    SCREENSHOTS


    So I guess I'll just climb this ladder...


    Hey look! Ugly Stompy Thing is at the bottom of this ladder.


    So I guess I'll just climb this ladder...


    What do you think the chances of me jumping over that poison without touching it are?


    This is where I got stuck.


    So I guess I'll just climb this ladder...