Forums > Submission Feedback > JoeTheDestroyer's Golden Axe Warrior review

An aside on the topic of games that give poor clues: if you want to go down a rabbit's hole with some of these games, find unofficial translations. Many of the clues in Simon's Quest (just to pick a more famous example) are still vague in Japanese, but many are mis-translated beyond use in English. It's illustrative of the slip-shot, whatever nature of translations during the 8- and 16-bit eras.

I also think Japanese action RPGs in particular were heavily influenced by the Tower of Druaga, which is notoriously and intentionally cryptic to create something of a social aspect to the game as people talked about secrets (and the game sucked up yen)

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I remember swapping Zelda tips with a classmate in elementary school, which was quite the feat since I only had a few classmates overall in the one-room, multi-grade elementary school I attended at the time. A lot of them couldn't even read yet. And I remember writing to Nintendo Power's counselors to ask about tips I gleaned from the game's manual, trying to figure out what they meant, only for counselor's to tell me, "That was actually a mistranslation." For example, the manual talks about using the whistle for Pol's Voice, when really you should just fire a single arrow at them (which I already knew before writing). And there was talk of hidden doors in caves, but no such hidden doors actually exist. Anyway, the early days of gaming were a wild and crazy time, and sometimes I do miss the sense of mystery.

"Too often we enjoy the comfort of opinion without the discomfort of thought." - John F. Kennedy on reality

"What if everything you see is more than what you see--the person next to you is a warrior and the space that appears empty is a secret door to another world? What if something appears that shouldn't? You either dismiss it, or you accept that there is much more to the world than you think. Perhaps it really is a doorway, and if you choose to go inside, you'll find many unexpected things." - Shigeru Miyamoto on secret doors to another world2