To celebrate Christmas this year, I’ve posted a very special installment of the Metroidvania Chronicles: Faxanadu. You may be wondering what is so special and seasonal about Faxanadu, since it has doodly-squat to do with Christmas, winter, snow or gifts. And the answer is, nothing whatsoever. But I got the game for Christmas back in the day, so it gets the nostalgia nod. It’s not quite a Christmas tradition, but it’ll do. Mainly because no one else is even updating their sites this weekend. Tenuous retro-navel-gazing is better than none, right? Well, OK, that’s probably debatable.
Oh well, at least you got the mandatory “golds” joke out of the way fairly early.
Yeah, I aim to please.
Yay. I have no life.
I see the header for Faxanadu has an up close picture of your Mii lineup. On the right end, is that… Freddie Mercury?
Great, now I’ve got Faxanadu music stuck in my head! (Seriously, thanks, I really like that music!) And fortunately, I have absolutely no credibility to squander by saying that I replayed Zelda II and Faxanadu each way more times than Zelda I.
Seriously, are any of the Dragon Slayer-related games anywhere near as good as this? My limited experience leads me to believe that the answer is no.
Faxanadu. The only memorable thing about that game is the beast and worst thing about it was the H’s in the game looked like N’s.
Oh, and the character portraits were addicted to blinking.
I remember getting so angry at the save guru’s patronizing talk about remaining calm after you’ve just died that I threw my NES controller across the room.
Faxanadu may well have precipitated the initial cases of console violence.
Thanks for updating this series; I really enjoy the entries.
LOL! Faxanadu is the only game MORE brown than twilight princess! (I hate you Raroo)
I liked best the thing where the best spell was “Tilt” or something. It’s confusing and somewhat underwhelming to see the little mote of light drift downward diagonally and then shoot up off the screen, leaving you with a sense of “Whatthefuckwasgoodwiththat!?!??!“
Wow, you got games for Christmas?
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I insist that my best NES experiences consisted of ZeldaII and Star Tropics, but we all know how well that goes over around here.
I put Faxanadu at 38 when I made the list of my top 50 favorite NES games. It has its problems, but it had a great sense of exploration and interesting monsters.
I made that list about a year and a half ago and have played more games and changed my mind about some games since then so I should probably update it at some point.