40 years of Dragon Slayer: Faxanadu
40 years of Dragon Slayer: Faxanadu
Hudson Soft ended up being a frequent partner with Falcom in the console space, and this Xanadu spin-off for the NES was one of the earliest projects.
September marks 40 years of Nihon Falcom’s Dragon Slayer series, which had its original run ended with creator Yoshio Kiya’s exit from the company, but continues to exist to this day through subseries and spin-offs. Throughout the month, I’ll be covering Dragon Slayer games, the growth of the series, officially and unofficially, on a worldwide scale, and the legacy of Falcom’s contribution to role-playing games. Previous entries in the series can be found through this link.
The Dragon Slayer series has not had nearly the impact in North America as it did in Japan, and much of that has to do with how much of the series never actually saw an international release. Or, when it did, what form those international releases took. It’s all well and good that Dragon Slayer VI: The Legend of Heroes released on the Turbografx-CD in North America in 1992, because that means it’s available to play in English, but with how few of the CD-ROM add-on or combo system, the TurboDuo, sold in that region… well, not many people got to experience this Dragon Slayer iteration outside of Japan.
Legacy of the Wizard (Dragon Slayer IV) received an NES release, at least, and Sorcerian (Dragon Slayer V) an MS-DOS port handled by Sierra, but since Dragon Slayer genre-hopped and the North American releases didn’t always classify them as part of the series, either, it’s not like someone who picked one up necessarily knew that they were playing the latest in a longer series of extremely popular and influential games that they had missed out on.
The original Dragon Slayer is still yet to receive an official release in North America, so it’s difficult to play unless you’re into emulating 1980s Japanese personal computers, or you happen to have a modded Sega Saturn that can play the Japanese re-release of the game that has an English version within. And it was the same for Dragon Slayer II, known as Xanadu, which was the best-selling Japanese PC game of all-time in its day. Until 2024, at least, when Xanadu: Dragon Slayer II and its expansion, Xanadu: Scenario II both released on the Nintendo Switch through D4’s EggConsole series. The original Dragon Slayer, though? Skipped over, again.
North American audiences did not go entirely without a taste of the most popular Dragon Slayer title in the 1980s, however, and that’s thanks in part to Hudson Soft. Hudson, who would end up partnering with Nihon Falcom on the console side on more than one occasion once the PC Engine/Turbografx-16 rolled out, agreed to a deal with Dragon Slayer’s studio to develop a spin-off for the Famicom. Faxanadu is a portmanteau of “Famicom” and “Xanadu,” and is pronounced as “Fazanadu,” which is honestly just a lot of fun to say out loud. Try it and see!
Hudson both developed and published the game in Japan, but as was often the case with their international titles, another publisher was needed for localization and release elsewhere. Nintendo would step in, though, it would take nearly two years to get it to market in North America, and well over another year for them to get it to PAL territories. So, we have a Nihon Falcom series licensed to Hudson for development and release of an original spin-off game in Japan, and then Nintendo got involved so it would have an NES release internationally as well. Just to further complicate things, Mattel — yes, that Mattel — was responsible for distributing the game in PAL regions, which is why their logo is on the box for that version. Got all of that? And one more thing: Nintendo’s instant classic, The Legend of Zelda, drew plenty of inspiration from Xanadu for its design, so getting a chance to publish a spin-off to Xanadu — one starring a sword-wielding elf, no less — is a nifty bit of bringing things full circle. Especially on the heels of Zelda II: The Adventure of Link, and its side-scrolling action role-playing, an aspect of the genre Falcom spent more time with post-Xanadu.
Faxanadu didn’t try to change up Dragon Slayer formula too much — Falcom was the one constantly shifting genres, from top down action RPG to side-scrolling action RPG to platforming RPG to real-time strategy game and so on — as the goal was to basically make a home console version of an incredibly popular game, but to have it be a brand new story, too. Faxanadu, though, differs from Xanadu by making the combat occur while side-scrolling all the time, instead of just during boss fights: there’s no top-down bump combat here, which gives Faxanadu more in common with some later Dragon Slayer titles than the one it’s a spin-off from. There are also some refinements to the gameplay that make Faxanadu a more enjoyable game for those of you who maybe don’t want to deal with an early version of a morality system that would keep you from being able to level up if you ended up too immoral, or to have to consider the exceptionally deep for 1985 weapon-leveling system. Don’t worry, my fellow sickos, no one is saying those things are bad.
Oftentimes, Hudson would spin off a successful port into their own series — the NES Wonder Boy port that became Adventure Island obviously became its own major success, the port of Tehkan’s Star Force led to Star Soldier — but that’s not what happened with Faxanadu. It was a one-and-done, although, the relationship between Hudson and Falcom continued, with Hudson doing plenty of heavy lifting along the way that would benefit both parties. There was the 1989 combo release and port of Ys Book I & II to the PC Engine CD-ROM and Turbografx-CD, which Hudson handled publishing duties for on their own console, developed by Alfa System, which worked almost exclusively on the Turbografx/PC Engine with Hudson in its early years. Hudson published Ys III on the Turbografx-CD as well, and outright developed Ys IV: Dawn of Ys after petitioning Falcom for a new entry that the studio was in no place to provide themselves.
The Turbografx-CD and PC Engine CD-ROM became a regular home for Falcom’s games, whether licensed to or ported by or published by Hudson, and in more than one case that’s the best console version of a particular game to play, too. And all of this began with the 1987 release of Faxanadu.
It helps that Hudson clearly understood what made for a compelling side-scrolling action RPG. It might have been easier on players in comparison to Dragon Slayer II, but Faxanadu is still a challenging experience that will test your reflexes and knowledge of the logic of 1980s video games. Don’t let that make you nervous about it if you haven’t played before: there’s nothing “wrong” with Faxanadu that a trip to a FAQ or guide can’t fix. You wouldn’t even need to follow that guide religiously, just long enough so that whatever very 1987 thing in the game made you go “huh” is solved, or to preemptively find out that you don’t need to go into the optional tower that houses the pendant because there is a bug in the game that actually starts you off with the effects of that pendant already in play, and acquiring the actual physical object will for some reason remove those effects. Game bugs can be pretty funny, you know. Don’t get the pendant. See? Problem solved, and fast.
Faxanadu isn’t especially long per our more modern action RPG conventions, but it’s still longer than platformers of the day tended to be, and certainly in line with platformers that were also action RPGs from its time, too. You spend an awful lot of time in Faxanadu lining up the perfect jump from one platform to the next, or the perfect jump attack, or finding your way through an environment or dungeon where you have more than one choice for which direction to go. You won’t have much range in your arsenal at first, but stronger swords also tend to be longer, and you’ll learn a variety of magic spells to help you out, too. Combat never opens up quite as much as in a more modern action RPG, but it’s about much more than getting as close as you can and hoping you hit the attack button at the exact right moment, too.
Early action RPGs like this are fascinating to consider, as they have so much in common with today’s retro-ized Metroidvania-style games, just without necessarily having all of the same elements we’d consider to be part of that experience. Metroid and Castlevania get all the credit, but games like Xanadu and Faxanadu and the Monster World era of Wonder Boy deserve a whole bunch of recognition for getting the genre to where it is today, where games like 2021’s Ender Lilies can exist with very similar screen-to-screen gameplay elements to titles from over three decades ago. There’s a timelessness to this sort of thing, despite how you can certainly date the game due to its visuals, localization, occasional lack of explanation, and the sound.
Don’t let the sound being mentioned alongside those other items make you think anything is wrong with it, though. It is very much of its time in the sense that it’s an excellent example of what could be done with chiptune music. A couple of years back, Kotaku published a Morning Music column focused on Faxanadu, which, despite having a soundtrack on the short side — we’re talking like 20 minutes of music total that you’ll keep hearing again and again throughout your adventure — manages to be full of songs that instantly stick in your head.
You can thank June Chikuma for that, as she was able to balance atmospheric sounds with driving tracks featuring notable drum beats, with the space in between those beats filled with multi-layered chiptune sounds. That sort of thing wasn’t necessarily easy to pull off in an enjoyable way on the NES, because of the hardware limitations the system had. Sound effects and music would often override the other, since the system could only produce so much sound at a time: writing tracks that layer chiptune drums with two other instruments that weave in and out of each other, and having that all match up with the gameplay and manage to sound great, makes for a lovely audio experience. It’s something the Famicom (and especially the Famicom Disk System) had an easier time doing — it’s part of why the drum work in Earthbound Beginnings/Mother is so noticeable — but isn’t necessarily something you would always hear on the NES version of tracks. Take the theme for Eolis/The Kingdom, for example:
Keep Moving is another that manages to throw a whole bunch of instruments and sounds at the wall in a track that will stick in your head even when you aren’t playing Faxanadu anymore:
It’s all catchy, though, from the themes that play while you’re shopping to those you hear while walking around a village, and the boss theme has the appropriate level of danger reflected in it for the situation you find yourself in. Again, for what is basically 20 minutes of music in total, there is so much here, and that’s a good thing since you will have to spend at least a little time grinding for gold or standing around trying to figure out where you need to go next both inside of and outside of the dungeons.
Faxanadu doesn’t hit you over the head with story, but Hudson made sure that you would know what was going on even if you didn’t have access to the game’s instruction manual. You control an unnamed elf protagonist, and the former allies of the Elves, the Dwarves, have seemingly gone mad and begun attacking them. A meteor struck beneath the World Tree, poisoning the source of water for the peoples who live under and within it, and the evil entity that emerged from this meteor also twisted the Dwarves into unrecognizable creatures before attacking the Elves with them. You’ll still need the help of the Dwarves to restore the World Tree and defeat the the Evil One before it’s all over, though, as the only sword that can damage that power is in the possession of the Dwarf King. A specific sword for one specific evil being? That’s Dragon Slayer, baby.
You spend the game climbing this tree, which is so unimaginably large that entire cities and dungeons and towers and castles and ecosystems exist on it. Think of it as the reverse of descending into the labyrinths of Xanadu. This allows for environmental shifts while also letting you experience different dungeons, optional and otherwise, and getting the occasional moment where it becomes very clear by your surroundings that you are inside of or on top of an exceptionally large and magical tree. Graphically, Faxanadu doesn’t have a ton going on, but in terms of world-building and environments and design and all that? There’s plenty of note here.
The game does not save (at least, the North American version lacks this ability), but does feature a password system. As you level up, you’ll occasionally earn new titles, which basically serve as benchmarks for what level and how much gold you’ll have in your pocket when you resume playing from a password. The titles mean more than just that, though, as you need to sometimes be a certain rank in order to access certain information, or weapons, or what have you.
Password systems can be annoying since you have to input them, but for something like Faxanadu, they also do serve to make the game basically have a proto-cloud save system. In my most recent Faxanadu playthrough, I bounced between the physical NES cartridge and a ROM that is on my Playstation Portable, and didn’t lose any progress in the switch because I’d just utilize my most recent passwords to go from console to portable. In a weird way, that makes it a more flexible game than the Wii Virtual Console release, which removed the password system in favor of saving, but lacks any of the other kind of emulation perks we’re used to by this point over a decade later, like save states and the like.
Somehow, this game isn’t available anywhere these days. The rights to it might very well be held by Hudson Soft’s purchaser, Konami, as the former published it initially in Japan, and it’s hard for me to imagine that Nintendo still holds the rights to something that was licensed to Hudson by Falcom, that Nintendo only published internationally. Regardless of which giant company has them, though, or if they are indeed still split up, Faxanadu only received a Wii Virtual Console release, not a Wii U or Nintendo 3DS one, and it’s not one of the titles you can play through the NES portion of the Nintendo Switch Online service, either. I don’t know who to blame for that, but it’s fine, I can be annoyed at Nintendo and Konami and Falcom for it, and either way, it’s an extension of problems the former companies have with making their larger histories easily available, and Falcom for focusing pretty much exclusively on re-releasing games they developed for computers.
It’s worth grabbing a Faxanadu cartridge if you have a working NES — you’re only going to spend $10 to do so, and then you’ll only be limited by how long the cartridge and NES manage to keep working instead of by how long whichever publisher decides to make it available to you digitally. There is, of course, the same option there always is if a publisher isn’t making their games available for purchase, but at least in the case of Faxanadu, we’re not talking about a super rarity that will cost you multiple times what the cartridge originally went for, or a game that sold so poorly that reproduction copies are your only means of being able to afford it. Faxanadu did well and was published as a first-party game on a highly successful console: there are cartridges to spare out there, so get yourself one and experience the only official piece of Xanadu: Dragon Slayer II North America had received for decades.
This piece was published in its original form as part of a celebration of Hudson Soft, in March of 2022. It has been updated here for Dragon Slayer’s anniversary, and republished to account for research, experience, and changes in game availability that’s occurred since that time. The original has been updated to reflect these changes, as well.
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The soundtrack/score to this game is insane, thank you for recognizing it