Faxanadu (1987 in Japan, 1989 here) is a side-scrolling action-RPG set inside a giant World Tree, where the elves and the dwarves are at war and a poison is spreading up from the roots. The name is a contraction of Famicom and Xanadu: Hudson Soft built it as a spin-off of Falcom's Xanadu, one of the foundational Japanese computer RPGs.

The vertical premise is more than flavor. You climb the tree from the trunk to the branches, and each town you reach is further up it, with the fountains and the guru waiting inside. The gurus are your save points, and they hand you a mantra, which is a password you write down. That is the only way the game remembers you, and it's also the only way it remembers your gold, which it insists on calling golds.

The economics are the unusual part. Almost everything is purchased. Better swords, better armor, the magic that carries you through the back half, keys that open doors and then break, wing boots for a burst of speed, and the elixirs that are the difference between reaching the next town and not. Money comes from killing things, and the drop rate is stingy, so there's a grind at every tier. It's slow in the way the early Japanese computer RPGs were slow, and it makes arriving somewhere new feel like progress you paid for.

But the thing people remember is the mood. Jun Chikuma's score is melancholy where the genre expected heroism, the towns are dim and half-abandoned, and the whole tree has the feeling of a place that is already losing. Very little on the NES sounded or looked like this.

It's not as famous as Zelda II or Castlevania, but ask anyone who played it and they'll get a faraway look. A hidden gem with a soul.