FARXANAM (Axis Mundi I)

Poll Results:
66% felt the name was pronounced Farks-AN-em
33% felt the name was pronounced Far-ZAN-em
Thank you for participating.

Nihon Falcom is one of the most boutique of Japanese developers out there. Seriously, they make SNK look like Coca-Cola. In probably my favorite episode of the Retronauts podcast [link] , their uniqueness was confirmed beyond doubt by the observation that they are a Japanese PC developer that does not produce porn games.

Their best known franchises include Xanadu, Ys, and Legend of the Heroes. As you can guess, the game that inspired the title of this piece was Xanadu, specifically...

FAXANADU

I never actually played this game when it came out, and the only reason I ever knew it existed is because it was featured on Captain N: The Game Master, and Lords Above only knows how accurate a portrayal that can be. Hell, they even pronounce the X as KS. _{(Actually, I did just revisit the episode... where do I start? Better question, should I start at all?)} The reason for this conflation, for those of you who don't know, is that the title is a portmanteau of Xanadu and Famicom, the Japanese name for the NES.

The whole idea of a "world tree" is practically universal, pervading a myriad of myths and religions. It's a curious phenomenon that even got the attention of Edgar Rice Burroughs, who introduced the idea of a life-bearing fruit in Synthetic Men of Mars. I even wrote a play about the Greek populace being introduced to the idea of purgatory, which was portrayed as a near-infinite forest surrounding a giant, central tree where people could either make the arduous climb toward Heaven or take the easy way out and slide down the roots into Hell. Yeah, I wrote plays in high school about God introducing Calvinism to Ancient Greece in order to teach a lesson about faith to the spirit of Destiny. What did you do?

The hardest part was the top of the tree, which I'm still not completely satisfied with, as I wasn't sure how to render the leaves. I seriously sketched out about five different ideas (even my roommate suggested a few) of varying levels of stylization.

The title parchment is the result of a royal botch-up SERENDIPITY. At first, it was drawn as an unfurled scroll, but I didn't get the spacing of the letters right, so I ended up cutting off the last two letters. The paper also didn't look quite as distressed as I wanted it to (I really should have done a rough in pencil instead of just going straight to ink), so I just printed* out the name onto a sheet of calligraphy paper, added the "Language of Worlds" subtitle by hand, tore the edges, and broke out my lighter.

The reason for it being uploaded in JPG format instead of my usual favorite PNG is because I'm also submitting this to an "earth day"-themed contest.

*_{The font for the center parchment is called Onciale PhF01 1.02 and came from my favorite site to get fonts: [link]}