zigfried's Golden Axe: Beast Rider review

Nice review, Zig.

If my moratorium on Xboxes ever ends, and with Golden Axe being my favourite coin op, I would make a beeline for this.

Seems to be a pretty cool throwback to the old-school sort of game. Not constantly powering up your character, but having to master how to control it to get past tougher and tougher challenges. Seems intriguing.

When I rented this, I never suspected what could happen to the enemies could happen to Tyris (just due to many previous games where even a gargantuan spinning blade wouldn't rip your character in half).

This one line : "Tyris doesn't die with dignity — lose all your health and you'll see Tyris get decapitated, cleaved in twain, or ground into a bloody pile of flesh.", I wish I had found it before I played the game. Seeing what happened to Tyris leaves a very nasty taste in my mouth.

I was disgusted by Tyris's mutilation so badly that now I pose a question on any game I'm about to buy, "Can your character get decapitated/split in half/turned into a bloody mess of guts, boobs, and butts?

I liked the game okay before then though.

That's an interesting comment! I never really thought about something like that with games, just movies. I remember seeing "Event Horizon" and I was pretty turned off by the excessive gore (rooms full of blood, just because?), even though it fit what the movie was trying to accomplish. Yet with games, I played something like the Super Nintendo port of Prince of Persia and it had the character sliced in half by guillotines or skewered by spikes and it was just kind of cool, even though it was pretty grisly. I wonder how many gamers actually look at something like what happens in Golden Axe: Beast Rider as a turn-off. Certainly, the games industry is quite happy to include excessive violence, but that doesn't mean every gamer loves it or even plays violent games for that aspect.

That kind of violence against women has been pretty rare in games -- aside from perhaps a Mortal Kombat character or two, it's usually the men who get sliced to bits (and gory male death has typically been considered a good thing by the gaming public). Golden Axe is notable for also having dismembered, nude female bodies. It's pretty grisly.

//Zig

In terms of 'will this turn people off', the gaming world is still pretty skewed to people who play a lot of games and see a lot of this kind of thing. So at this point in time, I don't think it's going to hurt a game like this version of Golden Axe.

I watch lots of horror and so in a sense like gore, but obviously that doesn't mean I want it everywhere. I find its inclusion in a lot of non-horror games is still kind of dumb or gratuitous. In Golden Axe, well, if Tyris Flare chops down 100s of bad guys with her sword in a world of medieval violence, this to me sounds like a context that would suit me, if she is paid in kind. Of course it will have an effect, as Zigfried said we simply aren't as used to seeing this on women in games as we are on men.

The game even goes so far as to hint that it will take a man to truly set things right in this world. I don't know if Sega is thumbing their nose at "hot female heroine" games like Heavenly Sword, or if Sega really just hates women.

Or maybe it's to give you, the player, an opportunity to prove these naysayers wrong? I haven't actually played a single Golden Axe game, including this one, so I could be off there.

Anyway, my favorite thing about this review is how you explain why it works as a straight up adventure game and why the RPG elements aren't really necessary. I think too many gamers get too fixated on genres instead of how good the game actually is.

Good job. Really like the angle you take here.

Thanks for the compliment.

I'll try not to spoil things too much, but the final message of the game is that Tyris totally bungled things and the male -- that would be Ax=Battler -- is the one who's going to fix everything (presumably in the sequel).

Even though that's still a vague statement, I didn't want to even get that explicit in the review for spoiler reasons, but since we're in a thread, that's a different story.

//Zig

So basically you go through what sounds like a difficult and grueling game only to find out it was all for nothing?

I really hate when games do that.