Faxanadu - NES

I have an odd nostalgia when it comes to Faxanadu and I'm not really sure why. In my head I remember it from my childhood, I remember the first few screens and almost nothing else. The thing is, I have absolutely no idea why. There's a possibility that I rented it as a kid, but I don't specifically remember it. I also honestly only remember the first few screens, really the first town, after that I couldn't tell you one thing about the game. So either I rented it and played the first few screens and that's what I'm remembering or I've somehow invented the nostalgia in my head. Either way, it's about time I actually played and beat this game I remember parts of oh so well.

To show how little I (possibly) remember of this game, I didn't realize it was a side scrolling RPG in the vein of Legend of Zelda: The Adventure of Link. Honestly I've always kind of enjoyed that genre, I loved The Adventure of Link as well as Castlevania II. After learning this I was rather excited to get into Faxanadu.

Faxanadu isn't as good as either of the games listed above, but it still is a rather solid game. The story is a little light, but that applies to about 90% of all NES games so I can't really hold it against it. It doesn't add anything huge to the genre, and borrows nicely from the big names. It's basically in every way just kind of average. That's not necessarily a bad thing, I've enjoyed a lot of games like that, but Faxanadu isn't never going to reach that status of a game that just sticks out in your mind as a shining jewel of a particular genre.

One of the things I did enjoy about Faxanadu was the way it handled experience points and gold. In quite a few games I've played they've had it where if you die you lose XP or Gold or perhaps both, and in Faxanadu you do as well... but with a twist. There are experience levels in the game and when you hit that you maintain that level with XP and Gold if you die. It's hard to explain, but let's say you need 2000 XP to hit level two and 3000 XP to hit level three if you have 2300 XP and die you don't lose all your XP, you just go back to your previous level, so 2000 XP. It works the same way with Gold as well, you just go back to the set amount of Gold for your current level. So like above, you die and come back with 2000 XP as well as perhaps 500 Gold instead of dropping back to zero or just constantly losing some. It was an interesting way of handling it. It also is unfortunately rather exploitable. With a little bit of grinding I was able to hit the highest level which meant that when I died I came back with 15000 Gold. This meant that I could just buy all the armor and items I wanted and when I ran out of money I would just save and restart or die and come back with 15000 more gold to buy the rest of what I needed. Sure it was exploitable, but I always enjoy something new if it works.

Did Faxanadu meet my nostalgia memory requirements? Kind of. I still remember it in my memory, but what I played and what I remember didn't quite meet up. The first part was still how I remember it, but as I said nothing else rang any bells. Part of me wonders if I never really played it as a kid. There's a good possibility I played a little bit of it as ROM as a teenager or something and that's what I'm remembering it from.

Overall Faxanadu was fun, but nothing really to write home about. There weren't a whole lot of side scrolling RPGs (that I remember) so any game in that genre that is even somewhat decent is a welcome edition to my gaming library. Faxanadu was a decent game if you are a fan of the genre or even the RPG genre in general. If you like those types of games you should give it a try, but it's not amazing enough that I would suggest it to everyone.

Squid.