Golden Axe III was never really a game I was interested in playing for the longest time. I think a big part of it was because I disliked Golden Axe II and this game has a very polarizing reception. You can find many people who like this game and even argue it was one of the best of the beat em ups on the Mega Drive. Nowadays however it’s very clear people don’t appreciate it like it once was, while there are still enjoyers of it, I always felt like the negative reception has been more vocal. This game also back then stayed in Japan though it was probably meant to get a US release considering art for the cover was already made for the game but it was only released on the Sega Channel. It’s been almost 3 decades since this came out and it’s time to give my opinion.
This is a 1 or 2 player beat em up where you’ll go through 7 stages with a choice of four characters this time. No one from the past games is playable here though Gilius does show up in the beginning to remove the curse of the one you chose and he’s also at the end of the game. The first character you can choose is Chronos Lait who is half human half panther. Due to this, he uses his strengths of being part panther to use with some great speeds and has many good attacks with his claws. He was the character I chose for my playthrough. Kain Grinder is this game’s typical buff dude with a sword though for some reason he was my least favorite to use. I did only play the others for stage 1 to see how I’d feel about them, he was the one I just couldn’t get good attacks on enemies with. Sarah Barn is this game’s token sexy girl. She uses a shorter ranged weapon but makes up with it by using different moves to support her smaller weapon giving her more technique then Kain. Finally we have Broude Kragger who is the slow but powerful character kind of like Max from Bare Knuckle II. I almost went with him but I felt his slow speed wasn’t too good for this game but he’s probably fun to use if you’re doing 2 player mode.
One thing you’ll notice messing with the controls is that you have a lot more moves to use. While you obviously only have one button for attack, they’ve given it a lot more uses compared to the previous entries. I mean just look at this move list and be amazed at just how much you can do. It’s easily one of the biggest improvements this game makes compared to the previous game. You can feel like a badass just with the many options you have at your disposal, even stuff like grabs have more depth even if it’s still nothing major for the genre. There’s even a block function though you have to do back and attack to activate it which felt too unnatural for me to use comfortably. Magic sadly hasn’t been changed at all and in fact was made worse compared to II as that game didn’t force you to always use the highest level of magic which this game does. Characters in this game don’t even have their own max levels for potions you can hold at once, they’re all the same amount which is a weird thing to keep the same for each character. One other cool thing that I sadly couldn’t do is there are co-op attacks and even co-op magic attacks giving you more reason to play with a friend.
Levels haven’t really been expanded much in this title and still feel like stuff you’d find in the past few games in the series but that’s not really a bad thing. One cool thing however is the ability to take multiple paths to lead to different areas of the stage you’re in allowing for a lot more replayability. That said however it’s still the longest game in the series so you got yourself some time to spend on this before your journey ends. This game also makes you play through it with no passwords or saves and you have limited continues though for a beat em up this is understandable as the other games did it too. One odd thing I felt was it seems the game really tones down instant death as pits are a lot rarer which means you or the enemies won’t be falling too much in this game. Maybe they’re more common in different routes but I’ll explain later why I only did one playthrough. So with new move variety and lots of replayability, this sounds like it’ll be amazing right? Well about that…
Let’s talk about the enemy variety. It’s horrible. There is so little here and it just gets old after a while. Could the team just not put anymore enemies when making this game? It’s a shame because it hurts the combat for reasons I’ll explain in a bit. There’s also barely any rideable mounts with one being this weird snail thing that uses its tongue and fire breathing dragons. The enemies do at times try to change up their strategy which is cool but it doesn’t make up for having to fight the same dudes over and over again. Then you got the enemies with shields and this right here is one of the worst parts about the game. I get it, you can block so they should be able to as well but it basically ruins the idea of wanting to use a lot of your moves because once you find the moves they suck at shielding against, you’re going to spam them. In fact let’s get this clear rn, this game has a huge problem with basically relying on a couple of moves just to survive the later stages as you can get beaten to a pulp if you don’t play optimally. You do at least get health refills from the reoccuring elf thieves and you can even gain lives by saving 5 humans and best of all you can up your max health by collecting hearts. Still though at the end of the day, it’s going to feel draining and it hurts the combat when shields are mixed in.
The bosses don’t help matters as they can really be annoying unless you abuse their bad AI quirks. It’s either going to be you dying trying to be flashy or just spamming the same two moves as you may get hit a couple of times which is never fun. It especially gets bad when said bosses start just becoming enemies in the actual levels and sometimes it just annoys me to the point I said “Oh come on! Enough with this!” Which made me pause the game and realize I wasn’t having fun anymore and got kind of quiet. This is when I knew the game was showing its flaws for me and this was the point I knew I wasn’t going to do more playthroughs.
I’m going to say it, this game is way too long for its own good. I’d argue this might be a me problem because the first game was pretty short but I rather take that then this which feels like it never ends. If they were going to make a game longer, they really needed to do more than just add branching paths, just something that isn’t fighting the same five enemy types. Maybe if the levels were a bit shorter or even had set pieces which the first stage did but I can’t think of other examples. I honestly would have played the game more times if it weren’t for how repetitive it can get and that’s such a shame because having a lot of replayability is cool. There is one more thing I need to discuss however which is the ending.
Okay so this game has two different endings and the way you get it is confusing. Apparently this game was infamous for not really being known how you truly get it. It does seem to be known nowadays (EDIT: Hey Arle here! What I'm about to say is actually wrong at least according to the site gaminghell so apologies for the misinformation with this section.) so I’ll just say the one I saw that seems to be right. One thing I didn’t mention about the bosses was you can actually fight the other playable characters that have been cursed as Gilius was only able to save one of you. Saving one of these characters will basically allow a continue. Now you may think “But Arle! You have 4 continues from the start!” Yes that’s true but let’s say you only save two but use three continues, you get the bad ending due to using more than you saved. Meaning all of that could be for nothing if you use too many continues. While I can’t confirm it, but some routes don’t lead to those characters though going down every time for me led to all of them so I’m not sure if I got lucky. Now if it was just for the good ending, I wouldn’t really care but you need to do this to fight the 2nd phase of the final boss so you’ll never feel fulfilled and why is it even so cryptic to begin with? At least you don’t have to worry about the difficulty selection gatekeeping the final boss like II did but this still isn’t much better in some ways.
Graphically, the game is kind of boring to me personally. This game came out in 1993 and there were many better looking games in 1993 or even before like Thunder Force IV, Gunstar Heroes, and Phantasy Star IV. I won’t say it all looks bad but I do wish the game used more than 8 megs. Even the magic isn’t all that impressive looking which is a shame, I was hoping it would look the best here. If you play in co-op this game also occasionally has slow down though I couldn’t test it out. The sprites are good and while some could have better uses of color, it’s a better use of the graphics in my opinion. The music is decent but there are some good tracks like The Vast Field and Ancient Mound (Wish I could’ve heard that one during my playthrough). Sadly the voices are still not good but that doesn’t surprise me.
I gotta say, I’m sorry to the fans who like this game that I gave it a hard time. I really do like things about Golden Axe III and would love to see another crack at it to improve it’s flaws in my eyes but sadly the series never got another entry like this with the next game in the series being an Arcade fighting game. I really want to like Golden Axe III as I’d argue it could be the 2nd best game in the series with some of the things I complimented it for but its flaws hurt it so much for me. I feel so bad having to give it this score because I almost thought of giving it a 6/10 and even a 7/10 earlier in my playthrough. Maybe it would be more fun for me if I played with someone else? I think you should try giving it a full playthrough if possible but I don’t blame you if you stop. I’ll give the game this, I liked it more then II because at least this had its good moments. I should probably end the review now before I get more sad about how this game ended up for me.
WAIT! I completely forgot about VS MODE! So it’s basically like the bosses where you fought the other playable characters, you can even play as the bird boss Eve. Yeah there’s really nothing else to say here, bye bye!
This is a 1 or 2 player beat em up where you’ll go through 7 stages with a choice of four characters this time. No one from the past games is playable here though Gilius does show up in the beginning to remove the curse of the one you chose and he’s also at the end of the game. The first character you can choose is Chronos Lait who is half human half panther. Due to this, he uses his strengths of being part panther to use with some great speeds and has many good attacks with his claws. He was the character I chose for my playthrough. Kain Grinder is this game’s typical buff dude with a sword though for some reason he was my least favorite to use. I did only play the others for stage 1 to see how I’d feel about them, he was the one I just couldn’t get good attacks on enemies with. Sarah Barn is this game’s token sexy girl. She uses a shorter ranged weapon but makes up with it by using different moves to support her smaller weapon giving her more technique then Kain. Finally we have Broude Kragger who is the slow but powerful character kind of like Max from Bare Knuckle II. I almost went with him but I felt his slow speed wasn’t too good for this game but he’s probably fun to use if you’re doing 2 player mode.
One thing you’ll notice messing with the controls is that you have a lot more moves to use. While you obviously only have one button for attack, they’ve given it a lot more uses compared to the previous entries. I mean just look at this move list and be amazed at just how much you can do. It’s easily one of the biggest improvements this game makes compared to the previous game. You can feel like a badass just with the many options you have at your disposal, even stuff like grabs have more depth even if it’s still nothing major for the genre. There’s even a block function though you have to do back and attack to activate it which felt too unnatural for me to use comfortably. Magic sadly hasn’t been changed at all and in fact was made worse compared to II as that game didn’t force you to always use the highest level of magic which this game does. Characters in this game don’t even have their own max levels for potions you can hold at once, they’re all the same amount which is a weird thing to keep the same for each character. One other cool thing that I sadly couldn’t do is there are co-op attacks and even co-op magic attacks giving you more reason to play with a friend.
Levels haven’t really been expanded much in this title and still feel like stuff you’d find in the past few games in the series but that’s not really a bad thing. One cool thing however is the ability to take multiple paths to lead to different areas of the stage you’re in allowing for a lot more replayability. That said however it’s still the longest game in the series so you got yourself some time to spend on this before your journey ends. This game also makes you play through it with no passwords or saves and you have limited continues though for a beat em up this is understandable as the other games did it too. One odd thing I felt was it seems the game really tones down instant death as pits are a lot rarer which means you or the enemies won’t be falling too much in this game. Maybe they’re more common in different routes but I’ll explain later why I only did one playthrough. So with new move variety and lots of replayability, this sounds like it’ll be amazing right? Well about that…
Let’s talk about the enemy variety. It’s horrible. There is so little here and it just gets old after a while. Could the team just not put anymore enemies when making this game? It’s a shame because it hurts the combat for reasons I’ll explain in a bit. There’s also barely any rideable mounts with one being this weird snail thing that uses its tongue and fire breathing dragons. The enemies do at times try to change up their strategy which is cool but it doesn’t make up for having to fight the same dudes over and over again. Then you got the enemies with shields and this right here is one of the worst parts about the game. I get it, you can block so they should be able to as well but it basically ruins the idea of wanting to use a lot of your moves because once you find the moves they suck at shielding against, you’re going to spam them. In fact let’s get this clear rn, this game has a huge problem with basically relying on a couple of moves just to survive the later stages as you can get beaten to a pulp if you don’t play optimally. You do at least get health refills from the reoccuring elf thieves and you can even gain lives by saving 5 humans and best of all you can up your max health by collecting hearts. Still though at the end of the day, it’s going to feel draining and it hurts the combat when shields are mixed in.
The bosses don’t help matters as they can really be annoying unless you abuse their bad AI quirks. It’s either going to be you dying trying to be flashy or just spamming the same two moves as you may get hit a couple of times which is never fun. It especially gets bad when said bosses start just becoming enemies in the actual levels and sometimes it just annoys me to the point I said “Oh come on! Enough with this!” Which made me pause the game and realize I wasn’t having fun anymore and got kind of quiet. This is when I knew the game was showing its flaws for me and this was the point I knew I wasn’t going to do more playthroughs.
I’m going to say it, this game is way too long for its own good. I’d argue this might be a me problem because the first game was pretty short but I rather take that then this which feels like it never ends. If they were going to make a game longer, they really needed to do more than just add branching paths, just something that isn’t fighting the same five enemy types. Maybe if the levels were a bit shorter or even had set pieces which the first stage did but I can’t think of other examples. I honestly would have played the game more times if it weren’t for how repetitive it can get and that’s such a shame because having a lot of replayability is cool. There is one more thing I need to discuss however which is the ending.
Okay so this game has two different endings and the way you get it is confusing. Apparently this game was infamous for not really being known how you truly get it. It does seem to be known nowadays (EDIT: Hey Arle here! What I'm about to say is actually wrong at least according to the site gaminghell so apologies for the misinformation with this section.) so I’ll just say the one I saw that seems to be right. One thing I didn’t mention about the bosses was you can actually fight the other playable characters that have been cursed as Gilius was only able to save one of you. Saving one of these characters will basically allow a continue. Now you may think “But Arle! You have 4 continues from the start!” Yes that’s true but let’s say you only save two but use three continues, you get the bad ending due to using more than you saved. Meaning all of that could be for nothing if you use too many continues. While I can’t confirm it, but some routes don’t lead to those characters though going down every time for me led to all of them so I’m not sure if I got lucky. Now if it was just for the good ending, I wouldn’t really care but you need to do this to fight the 2nd phase of the final boss so you’ll never feel fulfilled and why is it even so cryptic to begin with? At least you don’t have to worry about the difficulty selection gatekeeping the final boss like II did but this still isn’t much better in some ways.
Graphically, the game is kind of boring to me personally. This game came out in 1993 and there were many better looking games in 1993 or even before like Thunder Force IV, Gunstar Heroes, and Phantasy Star IV. I won’t say it all looks bad but I do wish the game used more than 8 megs. Even the magic isn’t all that impressive looking which is a shame, I was hoping it would look the best here. If you play in co-op this game also occasionally has slow down though I couldn’t test it out. The sprites are good and while some could have better uses of color, it’s a better use of the graphics in my opinion. The music is decent but there are some good tracks like The Vast Field and Ancient Mound (Wish I could’ve heard that one during my playthrough). Sadly the voices are still not good but that doesn’t surprise me.
I gotta say, I’m sorry to the fans who like this game that I gave it a hard time. I really do like things about Golden Axe III and would love to see another crack at it to improve it’s flaws in my eyes but sadly the series never got another entry like this with the next game in the series being an Arcade fighting game. I really want to like Golden Axe III as I’d argue it could be the 2nd best game in the series with some of the things I complimented it for but its flaws hurt it so much for me. I feel so bad having to give it this score because I almost thought of giving it a 6/10 and even a 7/10 earlier in my playthrough. Maybe it would be more fun for me if I played with someone else? I think you should try giving it a full playthrough if possible but I don’t blame you if you stop. I’ll give the game this, I liked it more then II because at least this had its good moments. I should probably end the review now before I get more sad about how this game ended up for me.
WAIT! I completely forgot about VS MODE! So it’s basically like the bosses where you fought the other playable characters, you can even play as the bird boss Eve. Yeah there’s really nothing else to say here, bye bye!
1 Comment
This comment was deleted
I gotta say this at least sounds interesting, not many games dabbled with a single-character set along with utilizing them and a continue system for a good/bad ending route, it's a shame that the end result is woefully complicated and underwhelming. Sounds like Golden Axe in general from the cropping consensus nowadays now that I think about it...
FallenGrace
11 months ago