11/30 A “Golden Axe: The Duel” tournament held at Game Center Mikado in February 2024
Golden Axe: The Duel is frequently mistreated and scorned by Sega fans, quite unfairly in my opinion. Not only is it a decent fighting game, it’s also a misunderstood title.
The game is often pigeonholed as a VS Fighting spin-off betraying a long and prestigious lineage of belt scrollers (the Japanese term for those Final Fight-style beat’em ups ) to ape the fad of the moment (Street Fighter II clones).
It is no doubt due to the numerous sequels (Golden Axe II, Golden Axe III) and spin-offs (Ax Battler, Golden Axe Warrior) exclusive to the consoles of Sega’s consumer division that Sega’s fans easily forget the arcade version of Golden Axe (1989) only saw two “legitimate” sequels from its Sega AM#1 parents, Golden Axe: The Revenge of Death Adder (1992) and Golden Axe: The Duel (1994).
The second image problem that hurt the game’s reputation was the enormous hype generated by The Revenge of Death Adder on System 32, a rather rare arcade terminal in the grand picture of things, and the absence of its port to consoles due to the game being stuck between two generations (far too ambitious for the Mega Drive but a hair too 2D Super Scaler-ish for the Saturn). Golden Axe: The Duel on Saturn thus seemed to unfairly “take the place” of another game’s consumer version that fans and magazine rumors had taken for granted.
The last perception problem that hurt the game in the West was its release timing on Saturn, in relation to the supersonic evolution of fighting games between 1991 (Street Fighter II landing in the arcades) and 1999 (the Dreamcast port of Soul Calibur).
The arcade version of Golden Axe: The Duel was released in Japan in early 1995. At that time, bear in mind that Shin Samurai Spirits (i.e. Samurai Shodown II) had just been released. It seems obvious to me that The Duel was envisioned and developed as a contemporary competitor to the first two Samurai Spirits on the NEO•GEO.
The Saturn version of Golden Axe: The Duel arrived in Japan in July 1995, at the height of the VF2 craze, but also right in front of two 2D fighting games that had stylistically outclassed much of the competition, Street Fighter ZERO and KOF’95. Worse still, the game didn’t release in the U.S. until the summer of 1996 (opposite Tekken 2, Tobal №1 and the soon to release port of Soul Edge on the PlayStation).
Replaced in the context of late 1994, however, Golden Axe: The Duel does Golden Axe: The Job. You’ll recognize, for example, the typical obsession in those days with sprite scaling (i.e. zooming in/out) of characters according to their distance, extremely swift movement so as not to disorient players by then accustomed to the TURBO★★★★ setting, a Super moves gauge that skillfully recycled the potion system of its elders, and overall a more involved interaction with the background that again bridged the gap between Golden Axe’s gnome interactions and SamSpi’s many charming stage interactions. All the above is enhanced by a vibrant color palette and visual effects that take up half the screen, just to show off that the hardware running the game has nothing to envy to the NEO•GEO or the System 32.
That is because, without even debating the true commercial potential of a belt scroller like The Revenge of Death Adder against a VS fighting game in 1994~1996, Golden Axe: The Duel should first and foremost be seen as a standard-bearer for the ST-V format.
The Sega Titan-Video (or ST-V) motherboard was, as its name openly suggests, a satellite product of the Saturn ecosystem (Saturn → Titan, you get the idea). It was undoubtedly one of the biggest successes of the project as a whole (“by default”, as the petty among you might add). Largely taking its cue from SNK’s revolutionary NEO•GEO Multi Video System, the ST-V was a JAMMA-compatible motherboard that mirrored the Saturn motherboard almost exactly, with a bit more RAM and ROM cartridges instead of discs to store its games.
As with SNK’s MVS, Sega’s aim was to offer an entry-level product for arcade operators unable to afford a multitude of Model 2 titles, with software sold on ROM cartridges that could replace others without having to change entire PCBs or cabinets (i.e. at a lower cost, not only for acquisition but also for maintenance and game storage). All this while allowing the Saturn to receive the same games via matter-of-fact ports.
The ST-V / Saturn symbiosis was successful enough that it was replicated by many publishers, such as Capcom, Namco and Konami developing their own PCBs based on PlayStation technology, Sega doubling down with the Dreamcast-based Naomi, the Nintendo x Namco x Sega alliance to feed the Triforce/Gamecube ecosystem, and so on.
I won’t catalog the thirty or so games that the ST-V and Saturn shared in this post because ① I don’t have the time for that and ② in truth, I’m telling you about the ST-V today because I wish to tackle another ST-V game later in the week. But since Sega’s main competitor for this entry-level market was SNK, it was important for the ST-V to offer fighting games, and since the two trendy fighting games in 1994 were Samurai Spirits and Virtua Fighter, Sega released Golden Axe: The Duel and Virtua Fighter Remix – the latter doing double duty as a fix for the poor Saturn port of VF1 (on the Saturn), and a low cost Virtua Fighter game for operators unable to afford VF2 in 1995 (on the ST-V).
Golden Axe: The Duel was one of the very first games developed for the ST-V; the first loketests date back to 1994. In retrospect, it is pretty obvious that it doesn’t take full advantage of the final hardware, and the way it maps the three extra buttons (the game uses the same six buttons layout from the usual Capcom formula) on a JAMMA pin is a bit awkward; it requires its own extra cable, like Capcom’s CPS.
The soundtrack is frankly not very inspired, but the Saturn port made it possible to change the original tracks with less lukewarm re-orchestrations (in Redbook format). Below, here is Kain’s theme on ST-V…
… And below, the same theme on the Saturn. With the extra spice of (frankly reasonable) loading screens, it’s a bit like comparing an MVS version with its NEO•GEO CD port.
Just to be clear, I certainly wouldn’t want to pass Golden Axe: The Duel off as an certified masterpiece, the greatest fighting game of its generation inexplicably shunned by the plebs (if not for the explanation: that’s what the plebs are meant to do). Let’s save that battle for Real Bout 2.
Golden Axe: The Duel is merely a nice fighting game, very by-the-book, but with the know-how and control-quality typical of Sega’s arcade joints; a level of polish frequently missing from other challengers to Capcom and SNK’s 2D fighting reign. I am just annoyed that the game wasn’t and still isn’t properly judged on that fair criterion.
Anyway, here is a tournament played on the ST-V version as part of the latest Street Fighter Carnival, the biannual championship for regular pro players at the legendary Mikado arcade in Takadanobaba, in February 2024. For convenience, I’ll timecode the video right around the start of the tournament (23m11s).
