Faria (NES) Playthrough - NintendoComplete
296A playthrough of Nexoft's 1991 action-RPG for the NES, Faria: A World of Mystery and Danger.
Faria is one of those games that I'd imagine a lot of people have never heard of, but I'd also venture to guess that it's a game that's still remembered (fondly or otherwise) by most who played it.
Faria is only the second console game to be made by Game Arts (following their 1985 conversion of Thexder for the Famicom), a company far better known to modern day fans for the Lunar and Grandia series. It mashes together the common staples of 80s console RPGs, featuring an overworld, towns filled with NPCs, random encounters, a real-time combat system, and labyrinthine dungeons, all topped off with a healthy dose of grinding for levels and gold. But for as familiar as that might make it sound, Faria isn't quite like any other NES game built on a similar template. It doesn't feel at all like Dragon Warrior, The Legend of Zelda, The Magic of Scheherazade, or Crystalis, which is probably both its greatest strength and its greatest weakness.
The gameplay isn't anything new or innovative, and it's not nearly as polished as the games it draws its greatest inspiration from. That being said, Faria succeeds in a way that many of its contemporaries do not - its sense of humor gives the game a sense of personality that was sorely lacking in most 8-bit console RPGs.
For example, your first major task is to rescue a kidnapped princess. Nothing new there. But, when the king hands you her "childhood portrait," you're shown a drawing of a caterpillar - a fact which everybody seems to accept without question. There's also a quest that has you searching for medicine after an entire town eats bad caviar and the residents have all fallen victim to the Hershey squirts. You fight a boss that is literally a giant pair of scissors, and the character portraits do their best to leave you completely bewildered - soldiers wear the number 04 plastered across their faces, old men have eyes that point in opposite directions - it's all surreal, and it worked well enough to keep my interest throughout in spite of a few of its unfortunate design choices.
The biggest offender is the combat. There is a fair bit of grinding to do, and the battles feel chaotic and haphazard. The controls are twitchy (and become even worse when you get the speed boots later on) and you have to be perfectly lined up to score a hit on enemies. The enemies themselves jerk about unpredictably, they usually shift themselves just before you can land a hit, and they can pinball you around with little effort. Worse are the hard-hitting invisible enemies that remain hidden in battle until you find special glasses... which doesn't happen until you're about 3/4 of the way through the game. It also doesn't help matters much that leveling is slow, equipment is expensive, and the game actively punishes you for running from battles by randomly taking experience points, gold, or even pieces of your equipment.
The difficulty balancing thankfully does shift over the course of the adventure, mainly because you'll become so overpowered that the final few areas become a total cakewalk. The game's first hour or so is the hardest part, so if the demoralizing challenge has put you off of Faria in the past, you might take comfort in knowing that it does get better as you go on.
The dungeons were the bits that I enjoyed the most. The towers are massive, and instead of focusing on puzzle-solving like in Zelda, these battle gauntlets emphasize navigation. They're all made up of multi-floor mazes that absolutely *demand* that you make maps as you explore the layouts.
Faria, just like Ys, takes its design cues from the Japanese PC game mold. Without a map (or a walkthrough, I guess), you'll spend hours wandering in circles, cursing the lack of any meaningful landmarks. I get a kick out of pulling out the graph paper tablet and keeping meticulous notes when I'm playing 80s RPGs, and Faria scratches that itch nicely for me. If that doesn't sound like your idea of fun, it'll probably just bore and frustrate you.
It can be difficult to appreciate a game like Faria in 2020. It's a clear product of its time, and like most NES RPGs, it hasn't aged gracefully. It was a flawed but solid game in its time, and if you enjoy these types, you'll probably have some good, geeky fun with it like I did. Thirty years have since passed, though, and I think most people now would have a hard time seeing Faria for what it was in its prime, and I can't say I'd blame them.
But if your inner-child perks up at memories of keeping game journals, there's still a ton of nostalgia-fueled fun to be found here.
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No cheats were used during the recording of this video.
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