Golden Axe Warrior
Entry posted by fun2novel
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When Shigeru Miyamoto created the concept for Zelda he probably had no idea the legacy that will follow after that first legendary game. There were many similar games before but never quite like it. Instead of leaving you puzzled not knowing what to do the game’s design focused on exploration and discovery, instead of frustrating enemies it had a slow strategic anticipation of enemies’ movements, instead of mostly unfair puzzles the playr instead was rewarded with new areas to explore. Many tried to copy the Zelda formula but gave up as the design wasn’t as simple as it first appeared. One game that managed to copy the formula with a few tweaks is Golden Axe Warrior.
The game was released in 1991 for the Master System, it is a side story to Sega’s popular Golden Axe series and looks very much like a Zelda with upgraded graphics. Or at least that’s what it appears to be at first glance. Indeed the game was inspired by Zelda with green grassy areas with just as green colored bushes, yellow sand colored beaches, squashed player character, very Zelda like dungeons and Zelda like dungeon maps, the inventory screen, the warping camera from one side of the screen to the other side of the screen. It is definitely a game for the Sega Master System owners who didn’t have a NES to seek their teeth into. At the time of its release almost every magazine pandered it simply for being an exact copy of the favorite and very popular The Legend of Zelda.
A copy doesn’t necessarily mean it’s a worse version of the original. Plenty of really bad Zelda wannabes were released over the years but very few could replace or even improve on the formula as much as Golden Axe Warrior was able to do while still keeping its own identity as a good Zelda clone with a bit of a different spin on the usual gameplay.
Unlike Legend of Zelda’s almost completely barren world except for a few caves somewhere in the overworld with some old man lodging inside giving you incomprehensible advice or selling you items, Golden Axe Warrior has real towns you can visit and houses you can enter with living NPCs that give you clues where to go and what to do. There are even stores where you can buy items, weapons, rest, and save. Yeah, a save system, without the confusing holding the reset button method in Zelda and confused a lot of players who had to restart the entire game from scratch every time they wanted to play.
The gameplay differs from Zelda in one basic design choice, the game moves much faster. The player and the enemies move at a faster than expected speeds. In Zelda everything usually moved at pretty slow speeds giving the player enough time to account for enemy’s movement and judge the next action to take in order to attack or avoid fighting altogether. But while in Zelda the player had to make quick decisions, in Golden Axe Warrior the player has to think even faster as every enemy group can surround you or shoot at you from afar while quickly moving in very fast patterns. It sounds very difficult but in actuality it’s pretty simply once you get used to the speeds especially if you just came from playing Zelda.
This small design tweak carries a Zelda on steroids like tone that lacks in many Zelda clones and even the Zelda games themselves lack that fast movement. Certainly the Zelda games aren’t built to move at such speeds and they are very meticulously designed, almost to perfection, but Golden Axe Warrior shows that a subtle change can change and redefine how a game feels. Golden Axe Warriors doesn’t hide its self as a Zelda clone, it knows it’s a damn good one and proudly shows off what it’s got.
There aren’t too many weapons and items but most have some kind of importance, you begin with a forward stabbing sword but very soon find an axe with a slower but wider attack radius and allows the player to cut down the trees on the overworld. The axe works similarly to how Link slashes his sword in A Link to the Past, which is very interesting, almost as if Nintendo copied the idea back from this game.
Golden Axe Warrior also has a magic system as well, though a very basic one acting as sort of an alternative to sub weapons but the magic has its own meter that you can replenish any time. There are also healing items you can use to prevent unfair deaths when you’re running out of health and the enemies don’t give you any health replenishing items either.
There are of course plenty of hidden underground passages, once again, just like in Zelda, the stairs down underground even look very similar to Zelda. The dungeons are very similar to Zelda too with the player walking from one room to the next looking for keys to open doors all the way to the final room for a boss encounter or some kind of an important item at the very end.
Just like Zelda is a product of its time so is Golden Axe Warrior and carries with itself the same old design decisions as well. It can get pretty tough to know where to go and what exactly you should be doing leading to some really frustrating situations, just like the original Zelda had. It’s great to try this game if you are curious but perhaps it’s better to stick to A Link to the Past or any of the portable Zelda games, they are way better designed and less frustrating.
Just as a side not, interestingly enough Sega also released Ax Battler – A Legend of Golden Axe for the Game Gear around the same time as Gold Axe Warrior, only this time it was a combination of Zelda 2 clone for the overworld and the action levels, with a splash of Dragon Warrior for the similar looking towns (a lot of older jrpgs look similar anyway). The player character in Golden Axe Warrior looks sort of like the playable character in Dragon Warrior too.
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