Golden Axe - 9/20 hours

This is going to be rough. I'm fairly confident that I'm going to finish this game, but I'm going to have to pass through darkness to get there.

I resolved to stop saying negative things about the game, so let me say what I like about it. The backgrounds are colorful and distinct, the characters have nice designs, and the music is pretty good. I also like the little dragons that you can steal from the enemy and ride into battle, though I think the player gets knocked off too easily. It makes me sad when my creature runs away, and I start to miss it almost instantly.

Now I'm going to say something that sounds like a criticism, but is so clearly a demonstrable fact that I don't think it even counts as "negative." There is not enough to this game to support playing it for 20 hours. If I were playing it without the infinite lives cheat, I wouldn't have beaten it yet, granted, but even so a full playthrough is 40 minutes, maximum. And since there is no plot and the gameplay is about as simple as a brawler can be, I don't anticipate having any great insights in the coming hours.

My plan going forward is to keep playing the cheat version over and over again until I manage to complete the game in 12 lives or fewer. Once I reach that benchmark, I'll know that I can, theoretically, beat the game with the cheat mod disabled. It's not so farfetched a goal - my most recent completion was in a mere 14 lives. With the knowledge that victory is possible, I will disable the cheat and try and beat the game "honestly."

I've sometimes talked about going back and disassembling my various game bundles. You know, instead of counting Portal and Portal 2 as a single game, just knuckling down and playing Portal 10+ times in a row. Golden Axe has disabused me of that fantasy. As much as I need to discipline myself when talking about the game, it's not boring. For the whole 40 minutes of its run time, you're actively making decisions and maneuvering your character in life-and-death situations. Playing its 8 short levels 30 times in a row is probably not much different than playing a massive 100 level, 20 hour campaign. At least, not in the particulars of the moment-to-moment action.

Yet the utter weariness I feel at completing the entire game and then immediately going back to the main menu to start all over convinces me that even a great game would become unbearable by the third or fourth repetition.  Even Consortium, which built itself entirely around the pitch that you'd need multiple playthroughs to see everything, could not quite pull it off.

At least, for now, I have the quest for ultimate mastery to distract me. Hopefully I progress at exactly the right pace to achieve my ultimate goal exactly 11 hours from now.