On the Open World Possibilities of Faxanadu
The NES title wasn't meant to be a MetroidVania, but they made it one anyway.
The genre really should be called “Faxanatroid.” Sure, the latest 2D Castlevania games I played were in the 16-bit generation, so perhaps I’m just showing my age. However, every game I’ve played in that series had demarcated stages and linear gameplay. Sure, the Metroid series earned its keep in the portmanteau MetroidVania, games that describe huge 2D open worlds where you both can and at times need to backtrack into areas you’ve already discovered to complete necessary tasks to complete the game. Metroid felt every bit as revolutionary for how much you could explore as The Legend of Zelda, and when Super Metroid rolled around for the Super Nintendo, that paradigm got blown out of the water like hapless merchant vessel running awry of a depth charge. It’s not a stretch to call Super Metroid the greatest video game ever made, even though I would put it third on its own system. The Legend of Zelda: A Link to the Past and Chrono Trigger are masterworks in their own genres. But as far as setting the bar for an entire genre, nothing really comes close to Samus Aran’s return to the planet Zebes.
Perhaps the reason Faxanadu isn’t as ingrained in the lexicon is because it didn’t have the myriad sequels or franchise potential as the other two games in that portmanteau. That game itself was a spinoff of an early successful franchise of computer games called Dragon Slayer. These games were “action role-playing games” in the style of the Zelda series. More accurately, The Legend of Zelda was more an action RPG in the style of Dragon Slayer. Faxanadu had no such pretensions of presenting a 3D world with the graphics the system had available. It was in every respect a 2D platform game.
Unlike, say, the Super Mario Bros. series, there was no real demarcation between levels. The entire world was as it was, whole. Theoretically, you could go all the way back from the Dwarf Fortress of Castle Fraternal to the starting point at the trunk of the World Tree, Eolis. For a game that felt so linear, the mere idea that you could backtrack like that was, in a word, mind-blowing. It wasn’t like Metroid, where backtracking wasn’t just possible but essential. In every sense of the word, Faxanadu is a game with a linear map, a linear story. There’s no reason to go back to Eolis unless you somehow spend all your money and take advantage of a bug in the game where the King gives you starter cash if you’re at zero, no matter what the circumstances. But you can, and that temptation is enough for the best gamers, the ones who are curious and inquisitive, to backtrack and spend hours on mindless tasks before tackling the real problems.
If a game is meant to be linear, perhaps that’s enough to disqualify its influence. It’s a philosophical debate for sure, one that could be fascinating in the right hands but pedantic and annoying in others. It’s authorial intent vs. consumer interpretation, and I’m not sure it’s worth having. That being said, the door being open is too tempting for people to follow through. The real question becomes “is there a reason to backtrack?” The answer to that question is a resounding “no,” with one exception. Magic Armor and the spell Death are cheaper in a shop between the starting point of Eolis and the first town you reach in the game. It’s a piddling exception that will not mean much when you can actually purchase or need those items. Certainly, the few hundred-gold difference in price isn’t worth going ALL THE WAY BACK to near the beginning and expending that much more effort.
The only reason, then, to backtrack is because you want to, which is a valid reason to do anything in life as long as it’s not hurting anyone. The amount of time one spends superfluously playing a game is proportionate to how good the gameplay is. It’s why The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild, a game that ostensibly could take 50 hours to defeat, sees players like, well, myself, log in upwards of 200 hours. You don’t need to spend hours cooking or completing every Sheikah Shrine, but it’s fun,
That’s why Faxanadu is one of my favorite games for the Nintendo Entertainment System. It took the best parts of another game I fancy quite a bit, Zelda 2: The Adventures of Link, and blew them up to make a whole game with classic RPG elements built in. The drawbacks mainly deal with the controls, but they’re easy to get used to. The nameless hero in Faxanadu can’t jump over enemies as easily as other protagonists in other platforming games, which makes retreat-and-heal strategies a bit trickier. Once you get bearings on how you can and can’t jump, the game becomes one of the best-playing and ambitious games in Nintendo’s 8-bit library.
Basically, you are an elven traveler returned home to your kingdom to find it ransacked and dilapidated. The King lets you know that the reason for this is that the dwarven people with whom the elves share the World Tree have cut off water supply to the rest of the kingdom. Rescuing the water is but a fraction of your objective in this game, as the dwarves have become increasingly hostile to their neighbors. You find out that while the elves and dwarves have never been friends, they had a peaceful equilibrium that was shattered one day out of the blue. At your disposal, you have melee weapons, starting out with the humble, short-range Hand Dagger, armor, shields, and offensive magic spells. With these tools, you must set out to restore the water supply to the elven capital of Eolis below. This comprises the first third of your quest.
The second and third acts of the game deal with the increasingly belligerent dwarves. As you continue further into the tree, in the misty middle portion and in the tangled and gnarled branches, you find out that a meteorite crashed into said tree, and some dwarves started “worshipping” it. Not coincidentally, as worship of this meteorite passed a tipping point, the great King Grieve of the Dwarves transformed into a giant avian creature who breathed fire and stole all the elves’ sacred treasures, the Battle Helm, the Battle Suit, and the Dragon Slayer sword. Once you defeat King Grieve and retrieve the final treasure, the sword itself, you must penetrate the fortress of the travelers who came crashing in on that meteorite. That’s right, the interracial tension between elves and dwarves was due to alien possession.
For most people, that premise might feel farfetched, but for a video game made in Japan in the late ‘80s, it’s par for the course. I would say the game passed the test of time, but once again, the curse of Nintendo’s short-sighted corporate greed has prevented people from playing the game legally if they weren’t savvy enough to keep their NES and game cartridge working or if they bought the ROM of it from the Virtual Console shop on the Wii. It is not one of the games they’ve added to the NES Online library, and it’s a shame because it’s one of the finest platforming action RPGs ever made. I wouldn’t say it’s a hidden gem, because every time I post about it being an “underrated” title, people flood my notifications column on Twitter with likes and RTs. Enough people know about it and have played it, enough that maybe saying it was a foundational “MetroidVania” is not as hot a take as one might think it to be.