RetroPiece Theater: Faxanadu

Rolling out a new blog series this year that merges my recurring RetroAchievements rundowns with a retro game review format. I'm going to try and publish two of these a month, one exploring an old favorite while the other examines a game that's new to me.

Faxanadu (Hudson Soft, 1987/89)

So, we were talking anniversaries on the last RetroPiece Theater entry, the one for The Legend of Zelda: The Wind Waker. 40th anniversaries, to be precise, which the Zelda series reached back in February. That number was also true last year for Nihon Falcom's 1985 RPG Xanadu: what began as a successor to their proto-action-adventure Dragon Slayer and then went on to become a brand that Falcom would trot out around every decade thereafter like clockwork, starting with the Legend of Xanadu duo for PC Engine CD in '94-'95, Xanadu Next for PC (and, uh, N-Gage) in 2005, and most recently with the Persona-flavored Tokyo Xanadu in 2015 (rereleased as the enhanced Tokyo Xanadu eX+ a year later, which is the version that was localized overseas). Going back to that 1985 original, though, it saw both an expansion and a modified console port shortly after its release. It's the latter we're looking at today.

Faxanadu (pronounced "fah-xah-nah-doo", as it's a portmanteau of Famicom and Xanadu) was first released in 1987 on the NES/Famicom by Hudson Soft on behalf of Falcom, which at the time hadn't yet broken into console gaming and thus wasn't yet set up for crafting ports for systems like the NES. Built purely as a 2D action RPG, similar to Zelda II, rather than the original Xanadu (which, coincidentally, played more like Zelda I) Hudson took some liberties with the content to make a game that better suited the NES platform, including a password system to replace hard saves and a general level of accessibility like losing the original game's hunger feature along with a reduction in menus and key bindings to worry about. The total package is one of the cleaner computer-to-console adaptations for the system, akin to MacVenture ports by Kemco, and ably retains the core of Falcom's typical gameplay loop of fighting enemies, building up wealth, and cashing it in for better gear and a limited supply of healing items before the player would be confident enough in tackling the next dungeon or boss in the critical path—a format familiar to fans of their Ys games as well. There's some quirks unique to Faxanadu however, such as the way the levelling system works: rather than gain stats like health or strength from going up experience levels, what you're actually doing is just raising the initial amount of money you have on you if you restart the game (after inputting the password you were given) or happen to perish. This gives you a fighting chance to get back on your feet with funds for necessary potions, or a head start on purchasing the next new piece of gear or a spell that it turned out you sorely needed. Other quirks involve fixed drops for enemies, which includes curative loaves of bread—you might find yourself farming those health top-ups as often as you might farm money for shop purchases—and a key system that, irritatingly, will re-lock doors whenever you move through them thereby demanding you have at least a few keys sitting in your finite inventory in case you need them.

Have you ever seen a guy less enthused about selling keys? Rare appearance of cigarettes in a Nintendo game too.

Turns out smoking really is bad for you, because I can't see shit here in the air polluted mid-regions of the game.

The story of Faxanadu is relatively dark, given the platform. Civilizations of dwarves and elves enjoy a symbiotic peace in the roots and boughs of a massive world tree, at least until a meteor strikes the upper branches and transforms the dwarf race into hideous monsters. The toxic influence of this extraterrestrial threat soon spreads downwards, robbing the elves of their precious fountain springs and filling the areas between towns with monstrous foes, many of which are the elves' former dwarven friends. The protagonist is an itinerant adventurer who once lived in the area and finds it completely changed upon his return, working with the Elf King and the various town leaders to gear up and take the fight to the interlopers up top. Each stage of the journey brings with it new obstacles to overcome, including the mid-section of the tree which is still filled with smoke from the fires the meteor caused, with the hero fixing problems on every layer of the tree as he moves ever onward and upwards. NES games have always had a level of abstraction due to the graphical quality, and usually don't emphasize narratives much outside of RPGs (or RPG-adjacent) like this, so building a fantasy story around a malevolent, inscrutable extraterrestrial invasion was probably pretty rare back when it was made (albeit less so once you move into the '90s, between Chrono Trigger, Final Fantasy VII, and the more recent Wizardrys). I know I wasn't anticipating some Color Out of Space business filtering its way into my sword-and-board fairytale adventure. That said, the NES sure did see a lot of xenomorphs popping up where they shouldn't be in the likes of Contra and Ninja Gaiden.

I got the urge to try Faxanadu for the first time after watching Jeff Gerstmann play it on his Ranking the NES show (it's doing pretty well at #31 as of writing—top 50 is nothing to sneeze at in a list of over 700 items after all) as I've been hunting down older Falcom games of late—even if this is an edge case—and I was gladdened to discover that Faxanadu hasn't aged all that badly at all for an 8-bit RPG, excepting a few obtuse mechanics and some inexplicably well-hidden towns. You have to "bank" new experience levels by visiting the priests (or, well, Nintendo would prefer you refer to them as "gurus") in town to register new titles, but once you've done that and recorded the password you'll always have something of a safety net whenever you die/resume, and there's no game overs to worry about either. The combat and platforming can be a bit finicky at times owing to a lack of air control on jumps and how easy it can be for some enemies to smack you around before you can rally and take them down: your armor options do little to mitigate damage from tougher foes, though you can at least buy shields to deflect projectiles (albeit with a small amount of chip damage passing through). You can also buy inexpensive red potions for full heals whenever necessary, an elixir that takes affect if you should lose all your health (like Zelda's fairies), and a few other power-ups that you're as likely to come across on the field than buy—sometimes randomly after defeating all the enemies on screen—which include some flying boots (needed for a few puzzles, though useful for shortcuts too), an hourglass (pauses everything but bosses, but at least deprives those bosses of their ranged attacks), a glove (boosts attack), and the ointment (makes you invulnerable to harm; if you can figure out how to get to the boss before it wears off, that's basically a freebie). Learning enemy patterns, discovering item spawns, and being as economical as possible with potions means there's plenty of avenues for improvement if you're stuck at any one spot in the game: I appreciated that it had that sort of harsh learning curve that can be mastered by putting your resourcefulness to work, rather than simply grinding until you can waltz right through any opposition.

Most of my conversations with this guy went like this. Quit speaking in tongues, you vaguely religious weirdo.

Though you start as a weedy hobo, it's not long before you're packing some serious steel. Of course, enemies can still kill you pretty quickly if you're not careful.

Faxanadu's achievement set is a relatively sedate one so I won't be bothering with the usual categories this time. The majority are for story critical dungeons and bosses, a handful for more optional fare like a few bonus dungeons or mid-bosses that aren't strictly necessary for progression, and a single missable achievement that tells you about a free suit of the most expensive armor that can be found in the same town where that armor is bought. If anything, highlighting it as missable meant helpfully getting that tip out there, though I guess it might be a bummer if you didn't check out the set ahead of time (though, really, you should check out the missables at least; the RA site even lets you filter achievement sets for just the missables if you don't want to spoil yourself with the rest). As with most RA sets the achievements are sorted into the order you're likely to acquire them in, so that alone provided all the guidance I needed. I was also glad they didn't insist on beating the game in a single playthrough, given how easy it is to simply copy a password from somewhere else—though the set creator did account for this a bit, as all the equipment- and spell-related achievements required that you had to buy and equip them for the achievement to activate, not just wear all the stuff that character had on them after loading that external password. Either way, it's a nice if not too challenging set to pursue as an accompaniment to a regular playthrough, rather than something that's going to make everything unnecessarily harder by way of time trials or no-damage boss fights. I guess you'd call it a "tourist" set: one that complements a normal, possibly blind playthrough rather than modifies it for the sake of those already familiar with the game looking for a more challenging spin to sink their teeth into. As a Faxanadu neophyte, though, it was just what I needed.

Do we have a concept page yet for "Incredible Hulk endings"?

That'll do it for Faxanadu and for the March RetroPiece line-up both. Next few games coming up all share a theme so I might just toss them together into one bumper entry midway through April. Apparently we all have to be more economical these days. See you then, retro pals.