Faxanadu (HQ Remake) - Branch (2023 Remake)
23Faxanadu was developed by Hudson Soft and released in Japan in November 1987, but wasn't released in North America until August 1989. It is a rare early Action RPG Side-Scrolling Platformer, or as some people like to call them, a Metroidvania title.
The Elven hero of Faxanadu remains nameless (though he can be named in the Japanese version). He returns home (basically naked) to Eolis in the shadow of the World Tree to find that the water has stopped flowing, the river has dried up, the flora is dying, and the water that remains has been poisoned. The first thing you should do as a naked elf is die by the hands of the first creature you see. That will give you a free trip to town and give you an item. You can go meet the king, who will explain that the Elves' fountain has dried up. In a "It's dangerous to go alone. Take this!" moment, he gives you 1,500 "golds", which isn't going to cut it. If you can get back down to 0 golds, he will keep giving you 1,500 golds for some reason. NICE! That's way better!
Our hero will battle lots of monsters platformer style, as he climbs the World Tree and visits the Dwarven mountain in his quest to turn the water back on and un-poison it. You will need lots of gear, a special sword, powerful spells, and a couple pairs of winged boots if you expect to take on and defeat the Evil One.
This game does not have a battery backup, so it uses the old school password save technology (which you'd screw up and have to revert to a previous save, even if you triple checked it). You get these passwords from Gurus in the churches. The passwords are called "Mantras". Your rank determines how much gold you get to start with when you load up a password, which isn't the greatest system, but you have to admit that it was a clever workaround.
The music was composed by Jun Chikuma (of Bomberman fame) and her arrangements were programmed with the assistance of Toshiaki Takimoto. She was given complete freedom over the project and I think she came up with a pretty charming songs.
Faxanadu was featured in Nintendo Power (#6 on their top 30 games at debut), had two episodes set in its world on Capain N: Game Master (S2E8 "The Feud of Faxanadu" and S2E13 "Germ Wars"), and was generally well received with a 7.5/10 being about the average. It was (and still is) considered a better Metroidvania title than Castlevania 2 and Zelda 2.
You can play Faxanadu today by buying a cartridge for the NES (around $10 used (loose)), emulation (save states eliminate the need for passwords), and it was released on the Wii's Virtual Console (which also eliminated the password feature).
A scholarly discussion on the game title's pronunciation:
Everyone I knew always called it fax-ANN-uh-doo, but the name actually comes from the combination of "Famicom" and "Xanadu". To get the exact pronunciation, I turned to Japanese. The katakana for the title is ファザナドゥ, or literally fua-zah-na-doh-oo (there is no empasis on syllables in Japanese). It is spelled this way because of a lack of letters to pronounce foreign words, so it would be simplfied to fah-zah-nah-doo. This is pretty straightforward and is the intended name (fah-mee-com + zah-nah-doo = fah-zah-na-doo). However, in the Captain N: Game Master episode "The Feud of Faxanadu", they call it fax-ANN-uh-doo. https://youtu.be/o9Vh0ZmPPlM?t=242 . One thing is for sure, to this day no one really agrees on what to call it.
Faxanadu was actually a sequel to the Dragon Slayer series, one of the founding fathers of the Action RPG genre (some say it was the first), which inspired series like Zelda and Ys. The sequel, Dragon Slayer 2: Xanadu, is where we get the name from. The previous games were released on the NEC PC-8801 and 9901, so Xanadu on the Famicom was a big deal and kind of goes with the same naming convention we'd see on the SNES where everything was "Super".
Two other sequels in the Dragon Slayer series would make it to American shores entitled Legacy of the Wizard (1987 NES) and Sorcerian (1987 MS-DOS, Mega Drive).
Original score by Jun Chikuma (composer) and Toshiaki Takimoto (programmer) ©1987
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