I Smite for the Trees! Let's play... FAXANADU!

It is in dog years!

Now I kind of want a Ring of Dworf

Do you want to be like...THIS MAN?

No, I just want that ring.

Fun fact: Once you see this man in a one-piece swimsuit, you cannot unsee this man in a one-piece swimsuit

ffffff

Well thanks for ruining the LP for everyone, Mogri. GEEZ!

Nah, still looks like a wife-beater to me.

Hey guys, ladies, and Dworfs, it's time for Octo to wrap this crazy thing up ONCE AND FOR ALL! Because the end-game is pretty short. Anyhoo, last time The Lummox found the town of Daybreak and managed to cope with a massively long forced grind all in order to beat two wimpy bosses and earn some equipment he can't use. The whole thing was a pretty huge waste of time, really. Then he found a Ring of Dworf that opened the way to the end-game. Where we presently find him staring down a couple of birds.



The Dworf Branch of the tree is pretty straight-forward as far as things go; you start near the top of the region and everything important is on the bottom. No new enemies, just a greatest-hits compilation of all the blue and brown things already killed. On the left-most side of the top of the Dworf Branch is a tiny Dwarf Village;



Which, unsurprisingly, has absolutely nothing in it besides Dwarves, who try to kill you.



Slightly further down the Branch is this big spooky castle. The main entrance to the castle is just another monster, but hidden off to the right of that castle...



Is the games final town! The town doesn't actually have a name, and the only NPC that isn't trying to sell me anything is only concerned by telling me about the Guru holed up in Dartmoor Castle. Otherwise, The Town With No Name only serves to provide a priest to cut back on back-tracking if you die in the end-game (somewhat likely, considering), and a chance to restock on over-priced Red Potions and buy a Giant Blade, if you didn't get one in Conflate.



The straight-path through Dworf continues, full to bursting with all the non-dwarfy critters that The Lummox has already killed countless numbers of.



And another jump that plays to Faxanadus strength awful, AWFUL jump physics.

On the outskirts of Dartmoor Castle is this little shed. It's locked by a Ring-door, kind of like the gate to Dworf was, but whatever, I'm sure thats totally unimportant.



Frankly, it looks triply unimpressive next to Dartmoor Castle itself! Look at that thing! Thats Two ENTIRE screens worth of Outside! Every other dungeon got, like, a door and that was it! And it's Purple! I didn't think that Faxanadu could even DO purple! Holy Moley!



Incidentally, the only way into Dartmoor is to go over its roof and deal with a couple of screens worth of little weiner monsters on little weiner pathways that are only there to whittle down your M and P before the main event.



And WHAT a main event! Dartmoor Castle isn't the games largest dungeon (not counting its little trick), but it certainly does a fine job of illustrating that things are starting to get end-gamey; the dungeon is full of all the colors of the rainbow; Blue, Grey, Brown AND Yellow!



And the return of a few enemies that failed to return in Dworf itself. This is the first time you can actually SEE a Hover-Squid; so bask in all its glory folks.

Dartmoor is split into three levels, the upper-level is where the entrance and Boss are, and the bottom level has that Guru that that one guy in The Town With No Name mentioned, and the middle one is stuffed to the gills with Dwarves of every make and model, and it also repeats endlessly; move too far to the left and you wind up too far on the right. It might overwhelm if you were obsessive in mapping out every room, I suppose, but I don't think it really counts as being a hopelessly complex maze like that one guy in the last update mentioned.

Just like an elf to overstate things. Geez.



Oh, by the way, here's that Guru. Dungeon-based Gurus have been pretty plot-necessesary so far, and this guy is no exception;

The Guru actually explains things a bit! It seems that having an Evil Space God kickin' around the ol' homestead didn't just make the Elves opt to consider the Dwarves newfound religion to be something to justify wiping out their entire race; it also mutated the dwarves and made them go homicidal. Rather impressive for a chunk of Poison Space, really. Anyway, other then some nice exposition, this guy isn't actually useful until after we clear out the boss. Nice to have an explanation as to why all the Dwarves are, like, bees and heads hopping around on their arms or whatever.

Anyway, the first path upward that the lummox sees coincidentally leads to the path to the boss;



But first there is this thing; a giant beehive that, instead of bees, is full to overflowing with Ghosts.

Guys... I have LPed a LOT of games here, mostly weird ones. I have played, and ADORED, a game in which a guy shoots heat-seeking eyeballs at disembodied lips and I have coped with the questionable world-building of Princess Tomato.

A Bee Hive Full of Ghosts is probably the singlest strangest thing I have ever seen while LPing a game. Or otherwise.

Anyway, there is no limit to the amount of ghosts that the Beehive can spawn, so the solution is to waltz up to it and stab its brains out. You may see a bottle of Poison sitting there on the ground, and it marks the only bottle of Poison I was actually able to jump over. Which is for the best since the boss is in the next room and fighting it with any kind of handicap will be fatal.



Oh, and here's the entrance to the Boss Room. Thats right; the boss of Dartmoor Castle is SUCH a big deal you have to enter a door to fight it, rather then just having it sitting around like any old shmuck.

And now it is time for the boss fight; in the heart of the Dwarves Empire, we now fight their king; the Ur-Dwarf; the being from whence all Dwarves are derived.



And he is a pterodactyl.



Grieve; The Dwarf King is, by a STAGGERING margin, the toughest boss in the game. He fights in a pattern modeled after a Gargoyle with a few differences, first the fact that he's got a BUTT LOAD more health, hitting him in the face secure in the knowledge that he is going to die shortly before you do is not an option. Secondly, he launches his fireballs in rapid succession making it literally impossible to dodge them, and only his face takes damage, which means you have to get close, and Grieve deals WAY more damage on contact then he does with his fireballs.

The winning strategy is to go in with as many Red Potions as possible and hope that all that together is enough to let you outlast him since you can not, at all, dodge his fireballs.



And, between my going in with six of them and abusing save-states if I accidentally took a headbutt while trying to stab him, I was able to eak out a win.

And I was rewarded with the Dragon Slayer Sword, the Great Powers of which give the Lummox the insight to know that a Helmet goes on the Head, and that a Battle Suit is a Suit for BATTLE.

And disappointingly, the Dragon Slayer sword is only one sword to the Giant Blades three, and is not appreciably stronger, really. And the Battle Helm/Suit isn't that much of an upgrade either, but what the heck, this is The Lummoxs End-Game attire, so lets just accept it.

But now he can take out the damned Squids with three hits instead of Every Hit Ever. So thats something nice. Anyway, lets see what that Guru has to say now that we've killed a Pterodactyl and gotten a nice suit.







Ol' Priesty opts to give a little more exposition as a reward for regicide; turns out that King Grieve was very slightly more sane then his subjects and hid the Dragon Slayer from their Evil Space God (who, as it turns out, was very creatively named The Evil One) by hiding it in his giant pterodactyl self. Or else thats another mistranslation and he was protecting The Evil one by keeping the Dragon Slayer hidden within his pteroble self. Whatever, not important, he's dead and I got his stuff, and the Priest forks over a Demon Ring and tells me to head off and kill that Evil Space God once and for all.



Oh, and on my way back to the Town With No Name to restock on Red Potions, my Mantra popped up to remind me of itself, and I respawned back in town. Oh well... saved me a walk.



Anyway, that shed just before Dartmoor Castle was actually the entrance to the Evil Ones Shrine; and the Demon Ring lets The Lummox walk on inside like he owns the place.

The Devils Outhouse is defintiely the toughest dungeon in the game; it's layed out in a 5x4 grid, and the perimeter sections all loop back around, effectively making it Infinitely Large. The gate to the Evil One is in the upper left-most room, before things start repeating, but to get there you need to take a pretty windy path through things, loaded with bosses and hard-to-dodge monsters. Though if you get up to The Devils Outhouse with a pair of Wing Boots, you can use them to skip 95% of the dungeon by flying up and to the right two screens and up one from the entrance.

I didn't have any boots left, so I had to hoof it.



And Hoof I Did. Nothing much else to say about the Devils Outhouse, a LOT of monsters, but nothing new or exciting. Except that weird Tentacled Groucho Face thing.

And in that door guarded by the Skeleton and the Spry Torso is it, the Final Boss. Mr. Bad Guy. The Monster at the End of The Book. The Great Cosmic Evil capable of destroying Yggdrasil itself and corrupting an entire species into group of indescribable monsters...



As one might expect from a God of Evil; he is a skull on stilts.



The Evil One is actually rather a bit easier then King Grieve; he sloooooowly walks forward on his stilts while horking fireballs at you. Due to Faxanadu being as Faxanadu is, his fireballs are a lot harder to dodge then they should be considering how slow they move, but with only a handful of Red Potions you can still handily outlast him. Only The Evil Jaws of The Evil One take damage and, despite the signifigance given to the Dragon Slayer, anything is capable of hurting him.



Point in fact, a fireball to the noodle knocks him back to the opposite side of the screen, just like it does to any other chump.



Anyway, as is the Lummoxes favorite strategy, standing around breakin' faces is the ideal technique for dealing with a Cosmic Messenger of Evil and he soon explodes, and as soon as the debris from The Evil Ones explosions settle, we leap, with no screen transition whatsoever, back to the Elf Kings throne.





The King says "Hey! Good Job! Now get out of here, you rascal" Conveniently side-stepping the fact that the entire Dwarf Race are not indescribable monsters and you killed their ruling class.

And then The Lummox walks away from Eolis in a more colorful reversal of the games intro. Where the screen stays until such point as you press reset or turn off the machine. You know, whichever.

And THATS FAXANADU!

Not... not really worthy of a lot of the nostalgic fawning it gets, honestly.

huh, so that's the end of the game? No credit roll or "Congladulations"? How abrupt!

Thanks for the LP and stuff!

I have weird nostalgia for all of the NES games I owned, since we didn't have that many of them. Thanks for the LP, Octo!

OCTO YOU DID IT

I'm amazed you actually did. Famiconaxidu is a butt and playing it is like playing a butt. Your dedication to your craft is inexhaustible.

Even though you cheated how could you cheat?! This LP has been invalidated. Do it over.

My favorite thing about OctoPrime LPs is that there is a functionally infinite pool of bad-to-mediocre NES games to choose from. He will just keep doing this forever.

You monster

And once you're done with the NES you can get started on the C64, young man.

I hate you! You're not even my real dad!

The King Grieve fight isn't so bad, you just really made things harder on yourself by not having the magic Tilte. It has an upward angled fire arc that makes it super easy to hit the bosses with and it hits like a truck.

Now I never have to play this game!

Thanks Octo!

What's next?

Smorking!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Glad to see you finish this game. It will take time, but memories will fade and nostalgia will return to this game as it used to be. I understand you will leave to continue your LPs. What a restless guy!

Thanks to you Octoprime, I know all the "fax" about "Faxanadu!"

HA HA HA HA HA

And then you can do the NES Dragon's Lair.

I... I was considering Dr. Chaos, actually.

Good job, young man! Dr. Chaos sounds like just the thing for you, since you refuse to do an LP of The Immortal.