Submission #379: Walker Boh's NES Faxanadu in 37:30.42

Faxanadu time!

This game is actually awesome and highly underestimated. You play as this hero who comes home to his village to find it deserted. You'll learn that the dwarfs (!) is behind this evil in the world (a very good friend of mine always told me that dwarfs are evil ;P guess he was right).

For the gameplay. There are loads of stuffs you need to plan ahead and that took me most time. This is because you must do quests and obtain certain items to proceed in the game. Since I don't want to backtrack at all it was even harder because then I had to plan ages ahead which keys I need and so on. And here's the next problem, money! In order to obtain swords/keys/magic/you-name-it you mostly needs to buy them. So this is why I fight the first boss over and over again. Also you might notice that some coins get suck in the wall there. This is the prize for killing him really fast but he still gives me a good 400 golds which is way more then enemies at this point. So it's worth it.

I do some more stops to collect money but it was worth it and I think I found pretty much the best places for collecting.

Next hard step to plan is the energy/mana meter. Since I don't want to waste time and money on either dying or to refill my life I had to plan where to take damage or to waste mana. That's hard in a 37 minutes run! Ok, I do refill twice in order to get some mana but it was totally worth it. Else some boss battles would have taken much more time and would have been awfully harder.

Hmm. I don't know if there are much to add. This run is quite long but it's almost non-stop action. One thing though, if I jump and slash an enemy in mid air I will stop there. This can't be avoided and since I have to kill almost every enemy this take some time.

I also takes damage where I can profit for it. Either to save time or to do something else. Also I couldn't find any glitches except this one. When being hit OR flying on a ladder you will stand on it instead of climbing. This saves overall lots of seconds.

Oh and the third time I use the wing boots is because it's necessary. See that little block that's is on the "ceiling"? I can't get past that without the boots. So getting those at that point did save me quite some time. And the trick to get those boots is that every third time you enter a certain screen the enemies will drop something. That's why I go back n forth there.

There is one more trick that I use all the time. If you stand close to an enemy you can hit it twice with the range of your sword. I use this as much as possible but in some cases it wasn't just possible. For example if I am one block above the enemy, then it's not possible to do this.

I think that anyone that have played this game will enjoy this ;) It's a kinda hard game because if you start to take damage you can lose big amounts pretty fast. And also I skip loads of items that would normally be very useful to have. Like armors and stuff.

Also after the last town money is useless. However I can't just skip all the enemies so I had to collect some more. Guess that is good afterwards ;)

I think that was it.

I almost forgot! I want to thank TNSe for some information and great support!

Edit: I do not use the money refill trick in the beginning of the game because it would waste time (Im pretty sure anyways) and it would look uncool. This is because if you were to die first to get full energy and mana that would take time. When you die this text comes up "Don't have negative thoughts bla bla bla" and then you are set in the church again meaning I have to walk a few screens extra. After that you can go to the king and get your money. Then you need to get exactly 0 golds to be able to revisit the king in the opposite side of the town. This would take an awful time walking to him and talking to him. After that I need to buy one last thing I couldn't afford before and that would leave me with 1100 golds. That's the only good thing about this strategy because then I could have killed the first boss 3 times less but I kinda doubt it should be faster. And even if it were to be faster which I doubt I choosed not to do this because I think it's cooler to have almost no energy at some parts of the game. Hope all this made sence and explained my start of the game.

Enjoy it!

/Walker Boh

Bisqwit: Time to publish it...