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)

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.