Faxanadu tips

Early on, there's a nice, little exploit to take advantage of the elf King's behavior patterns before leaving Eolis (the starting town). You can see it in this video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Lmj_yTnoW2E . I only really recommend buying the following from Eolis: Hand Dagger, Deluge Magic, and 2 of Key J(ack). If you're the nervous type, you , can also re-kill yourself to get some Red Potions (160 gold each) and an Elixir (320 gold) to maintain your health until Apolune, but honestly, the tiny ground-bound snail-looking critter (Zozura) is easy enough to beat with Deluge and drops a small bread EVERY time it dies, even if all you do is just move about screens to get it to respawn. It'll always do it, meaning HP shouldn't be that big a worry, and you'll need the space later on. After you get your essentials, you can die to get your next 1500 gold, saving it for a Small Shield (800 gold) and any necessary Hospital treatments (250 gold each, but restores ALL your HP and MP) and additional copies of Key J in Apolune (140 gold here). After checking in with Apolune's Guru, your respawn point is saved as Apolune. After exiting that town, avoid combat and maintain your MP until the Tower of Trunk, where you'll be able to utilize the mattock exploit in the video below. It isn't always guaranteed every time as it only has roughly 25% chance of occuring, but it will thankfully happen fairly often, as far as my own attempts have proven. All you need is two or three (one to break the path to get to Forepaw and the others to rebreak the path to get back to the pricey shop). Two if you only want the Magic Shield OR the Death Magic, and three if you want both. If you accidentally make the wall respawn by leaving the screen when you didn't want to, then you'll have to get another Mattock. It's pretty fucking stupid and I don't know why Hudson made it behave this way. Regardless, after you get to Forepaw, visit the guru to "save" your progress/respawn point there. At this point, you should grind until you rank up to Veteran Rank. It's not that hard as plenty of the monsters to the left and right of Forepaw give decent experience values without too much trouble. Once you reach Veteran, your Starting Gold stat will be 3500. sell or discard anything EXCEPT that second (and third) unused mattock(s), even any Red Potions and sets of Key J you may have re-bought, you don't need them while doing this. As Forepaw is your respawn point, you should be able to easily use this handy trick. Equip the unused mattock but do NOT use it. Now, if you don't have 2800+ gold, die, then buy Wing Boots with your 3500 starting Gold. Die again, and buy another pair of Wing Boots. Keep this up until you max out your item window (8 slots if you only have 1 extra mattock (the one equipped) or 7 slots if you have 2 (the one equipped and the other spare)). As you die again to come back with 3500 gold, sell all of your accumulated wing boots for 1400 each (for a grand total of 11200 if you had 8 sets of boots, 9800 if you only had 7). This will give you enough to buy either the Magic Shield or Death Magic without additional money grinding on monsters. After buying one, get yourself killed to get back to Forepaw, without the need to use another mattock for the way back. If you had wanted to get both the shield and magic, then just reuse the wing boots selling exploit again and use your third mattock from before to once more bust the wall way back to the shop. It is time consuming, but the benefits are fairly nice. I personally find the Large Shield and Thunder to be a waste of money, especially at the points of the game you get them at. So, despite the time-consuming nature of this exploit, it isn't bad at all for the point of the game you can do it at, compared to what the game deems you SHOULD be doing.