I may have stated it before, but it's been awhile, so I will make a confession - I count time spent looking at guides and walkthroughs as time spent playing the game. No nefarious purpose to this, and it doesn't usually amount to much, five minutes here or there, mostly, but if I'm playing a game and need to look something up, it doesn't make much sense to close the game just to be a total stickler about my goal.
Which of course segues neatly into the part where I reveal that I've bent my own self-imposed rules for the sake of convenience. A certain portion of my time, roughly 2 hours, was spent watching Golden Axe speed runs.
It wasn't entirely an excuse to goof off and not play Golden Axe - I learned quite a bit about the game in the process - but I'd be lying if I said it wasn't primarily motivated by a desire to pad my playtime. Nonetheless, I'm going to count it, because it relates directly to the game, it's not something I would have done if I hadn't been playing Golden Axe, 18 hours is still way too much time for me to be playing this game, and also it's really convenient for me to do so.
What I learned from the speed runs is that I am nowhere near the top tier of skill in this game. One person beat the whole game in 9 minutes and didn't get hit once. A tool-assisted run managed it in 7 minutes - the credits took longer than beating the game. It was mind-blowing. Watching them improved my play in the long run, even if my performance tanked in the short term as I attempted to replicate the powerful, but difficult moves I saw in the videos.
Sadly, I never actually reached my goal of 11 or fewer deaths. I got close. Twelve, as of my latest playthrough. I did reach a point where I could consistently reach the final boss when playing the unmodded version of the game, which isn't nothing, but that fight is total bullshit, and I could never master the frame-perfect jump-stab that the speedrunners used to keep Death Bringer permanently stun-locked.
This is usually where I'd announce my disappointment at getting so close and resolve to play a couple more times just to see if I can squeeze out that last bit of efficiency, but this time, I'm good. It is difficult to express how little I care about mastering Golden Axe. I started this game with a rant about arcade games, and while I'm not going to repeat it, out of a desire to avoid excessive negativity, nothing I saw here changed my mind. Designing a game to maximize the money a player will spend to keep playing leads to artistically barren games, and it is kind of shocking to me that console games of that era retained the "limited continues" model of the arcade games that preceded them. I guess it just goes to show that when an idea gets embedded in a culture it can endure long after its usefulness has passed.
So, to sum up - I am not qualified to say whether this is a good game or not. What I like about games is so at odds with what Golden Axe is trying to do that it's like me trying to critique a movie in a language I do not understand. I simply have no context to appreciate what the game does well and what it does poorly. Watching the speed runs was amazing, and I will always be grateful to Golden Axe for that, but it was a mistake for me to buy this game, even at a price of zero dollars. It absolutely was not for me.
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