In my near decade long tenure of writing about video games, a few words and phrases that now make my head tilt like hearing an untuned guitar. Dabbling in discussions in the plethora of retro gaming groups, you may be bound to see posts involving key terms like:

- Overrated

- Underrated

- Hidden Gem

It's all well and good, but when I see critically acclaimed games like the first Metroid declared as a classic nobody talks about, my eyes roll with enough frequency and speed to generate their own gravitational pull. If you ask me (which people don't do often, because it would grant them the disservice of hearing me talk), completely overlooked games in the NES library are titles like The Guardian Legend (reviewed here before), Totally Rad, and the topic of this week, Faxanadu.

There's no way that I can conjure the metrics to prove this, I can make a pretty safe assumption that a hearty number of westerners glossed over Faxanadu on game rental shelves and KayBee Toys because it has one of the most unassuming covers for the Nintendo Entertainment System. They say to not judge a book by its cover, but if a picture is worth a thousand words, the box art for Faxanadu is as fluent in English as Milton from Office Space. Mediocre color scheme, an emblem with what looks like the tree Yggdrasil looming over a city laying in the midst of a barren wasteland. Technically, it's a pretty appropriate alliteration of the story of the game, but it's hard for this to grab one's attention. Just speaking for myself, I've seen this game everywhere, but because there aren't dinosaurs, lasers, dinosaurs WITH lasers, or military soldiers on the box art, it wasn't until maybe 1994 that I finally decided to play Faxanadu. It ended up being on of the more surprising NES games.

Published and developed by Hudson Soft (publishing rights in the US were by Nintendo, Faxanadu belongs to a series of games in the Dragon Slayer series. The Dragon Slayer games were produced by Nihon Falcom, one of the bigger names in Japanese role-playing development. That name has become more familiar with western audiences with the rise in popularity of their JRPG series Legend of Heroes: Trails of Cold Steel and the long running Ys franchise, which has maintained steady notoriety. 

Faxanadu starts off with your unnamed protag (in the Japanese version, you can name your hero) returning to his hometown to find it nearly deserted of townsfolk, its wells dry, and flora completely absent. The first few tasks you have to do upon entering town is to speak to everyone. Faxanadu is unique in that Legend of Zelda-esque manner where you gather your supplies to truly get started. And that includes everything. Speaking to the King, you're given 2,800 gold to buy a basic weapon, some magic, keys, and potions to proceed. You are awarded experience points and can level up, which earns you a title any time you hit an EXP milestone and return to speak to a Guru. He'll bestow a new title ("Rookie", "Peasant", "Warrior") along with a password that will determine how much gold you'll retain when starting a game from a save point. Similar to the aforementioned Ys games, it's up to you to restore the fountains and rebuild hometown which has been blocked up as a result of the war between the Elves and Dwarves cutting off access to the three fountains.

This is a very progressive action RPG for its time, Faxanadu's meta is pretty easy to get a grasp on. It's a pretty hard title, too. grinding early for gold to get necessary healing items is paramount. Some enemies do drop loaves of bread that replenish health, but the last thing you'd want to do is get stuck having to make a long pilgrimage back to a town and hoping to survive. The password system isn't the worst in terms of length, but it's one of those games that has uppercase and lowercase letters, as well as numerical characters. And this is before smartphones and camera phones, so imagine being absolutely sure you wrote the password down correctly, only to not be clear if you wrote down a lowercase L or a capital I.

The graphics are decent, I do like a lot of the monster sprites and designs. The backgrounds and the dungeons have a drudging eeriness to them that I appreciate. As you progress further, it feels like the colors get more intense. It sums up the nature of the game well. I have a problem with the protagonist, he doesn't have the same darkened outline around him as the monsters do. This makes him inadvertently blend with some of the backgrounds, and I find it to be more than distracting. The size of the sprites are in the Castlevania range. There's plenty of comparisons I can make between Simon's Quest and Legend of Zelda II: The Adventure of Link.

When it comes to gameplay, it shares similarities with the aforementioned. Faxanadu gives you a basic attack (I constantly try to crouch, which you can't) and an item slot that uses secondary equipment. Pressing up on the d-pad and "B" uses your magic while down+B uses equipped assist items like Wing Boots. General movement feels adequate. Progta can gain momentum to almost a running animation that can be resourceful in clearing jumps. Jumping from platform to platform gets annoying. It can be really stingy and most jumps are landed by the pixel. Doesn't take a long time to get the hang of, but can be a touch annoying.

I'm going to call Faxanadu the "Dark Souls of the NES", I'm so sick of hearing statements like that. This is a pretty cool game that I think a modern fan of action role-playing games can relate to and may even find some enjoyment by visiting this one. Getting started can feel meticulous, but it snowballs and once you get going, it can be quite addictive. Faxanadu is still a pretty affordable game, as it's very common on used reseller shelves.