"The Legendary Axe" - Turbografx-16/PC Engine

AKA - "魔境伝説" - "Makyou Densetsu"

Makyou - "Ghost/Demon cave"
Densetsu - "Legend"

You can do the legwork on that one.

This is one of the games I've been wanting to try ever since I saw a random Twitter account post a GIF of it. The artwork looked really cool, and the gameplay looks a bit like Astyanax, which I played through last year for the first time on NES and really enjoyed.

Weirdly, this game doesn't even have a Japanese Wikipedia page, which seems to spell trouble for its quality (they have a Wikipedia page for like 90% of these games). For once, though, the English Wikipedia is actually quite informative.

The game was developed by Victor Interactive Software, stationed at the time in Shibuya, and now stationed at nowhere, because they went out of business in 2003. They actually were the ones who had developed a number of the Harvest Moon titles, like Harvest Moon GB 1/2 and Harvest Moon: Save the Homeland. This gives me hope for The Legendary Axe again.

The main composer for the game is our pal Jun Chikuma, who we previously saw on Jaseiken Necromancer. That's awesome, because even though I didn't like the game that much, it had decent music, and I'm interested to hear another attempt at something a little more action-y instead of moody like that game.

Amazingly, IGN gave this game an 8/10 in 2008, and I can only imagine whoever was taking the time to write Turbografx-16 reviews for IGN must actually like to play games, so now I have to see if it's actually fun. Let's play it already!

The hero has the most unreadable expression I've ever seen.

----- Playthrough -----

The Legendary Axe plays like a lot of other hitty-smashy platformers that you've experienced, including Bikkuriman World, for the very same system, which I've reviewed on this very blog. Imagine.

This may also come as a shocker, but in The Legendary Axe you play a guy with an axe as his main weapon. Using that axe you have to fight your way through a series of different environments and types of enemies, as you'd probably expect.

Another day, another goblin to hack down in the dirty forest streets.

The catch to that axe though is that, as might be familiar to players of Astyanax, there is a stamina bar associated with swinging it. At the beginning of the game, you have no bar at all, and all swings do the same amount of damage. However, collect a jewel (or whatever) and you'll gain a fourth of a stamina bar which extends across the top of the screen and automatically fills when you're not swinging your axe.

Swing your axe when your bar is totally full and you'll deliver a devastating blow which freezes the game for a couple seconds to signify how cool and powerful it is, with fancy shockwave effects and noises to amp it up.

[Schwa-schwa-schwa-schwing!]

Most enemies in the game seem to be plays on this mechanic, forcing you to find ways to charge your axe or otherwise move and strike in such a way that you optimize your damage and avoid whiffing. Once you get further in, the game starts getting significantly more brutal as well, focusing heavily on the use of death pits, and later using a giant maze with 20-some interconnected stages that you have to go through in the correct order.

Alright I've seen this fireplace... 10 times? So I think I'm making progress.

My first play of the game, I made it into the second part of stage 3 before I got stuck, having died enough times that my bar had decreased to empty and it took so many hits to kill an enemy that I was having a hard time getting back up to speed. I gave it another three or four tries, set it down, came back and played it two or three the next day, and so on.

After three days I'd probably tried the game about 5 or 6 times and played for a total of around 6 hours, and I had reached the end of the maze section of the game but chosen the wrong path and got sent back and died in the maze somewhere. At that point I decided I had probably spent enough time on the game to write this article (also known as rage-quitting, but not because the game was bad).

----- Review -----

How long did I play?
~6 hours.

How much did I beat?
I almost beat stage 5, of 6 stages.

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Intuitive Design: 

How easy is it to intuitively understand the game?

Given, I had already played Astyanax and it's very nearly the same thing, but the whole axe stamina bar thing seems obvious enough once you get your first power up. The game freezes to draw your attention to the bar growing, and when you swing your axe you can't help but notice it emptying out. The extra effects also make you think it's doing more damage, and some basic curiosity will show you that it is.

Everything else in the game is easily understandable if you know how a platformer works.

Gameplay: 

How rewarding does playing the game feel? Is it too difficult?

The Legendary Axe has a pretty heavy reliance on skill, and at least to me that often translates to having a tight reward loop. Being rewarded for something you don't feel you tried your hardest on is hardly satisfying, but this game will challenge you for sure, and when you pull off a level or defeat an enemy you hadn't figured out before, you'll definitely feel rewarded.

The first run through, there were some things I found pretty difficult, but as with any (good) retro game, all of these things had patterns that would allow me to beat them without taking so much damage. It was just a matter of time and patience to learn how to deal with them.

Believe it or not, you actually can destroy a rock golem with nothing but an axe.

Depth: 

How deep/long is the game?

It depends on your skill. I think a standard run of the game if you play through and finish it in one try, but aren't speedrunning, will probably take you close to an hour. However as you may have guessed by the amount of times I tried it without finishing it, you likely won't finish it on the first try. I don't know if my 6 hours is standard, but suffice it to say you will likely have to play it a few times.

It seems like a reasonable length for a retro game of this genre to me.

Presentation: 

How's the sound? How are the graphics?

One of the first things I noticed upon popping this game in was the arcade-like graphics. This is definitely the best looking game I think we've seen on the PC Engine so far, with fancy flashing animations and detailed, relatively high definition backgrounds with complicated art. I really was impressed when I put it in and even though the flashiness of any game wears off after you play for awhile, it's still impressive for 1988.

As for the sound, our composer Jun Chikuma really covers some ground in the OST for this game. There's a variety of different types of songs, from standard sounding adventure themes, to urgent boss themes, to... whatever this is (which also happens to be my favorite). I would have to say the OST doesn't blow me away, but it accompanies the game well and is good enough for me personally.

Personal Chord: 

Does the game have that undefinable "something" for me?

After I had played from the beginning a couple times, I had a thought-- this game plays a lot like Castlevania, which is one of my favorite platformers of all time. Once I realized that, the "undefinable something" this game had that I was digging became a little more definable, but at any rate, I definitely like it.

It even has its very own jumping fish people!

Should You Play: 

Is there a reason to even bother with this one?

Actually, yeah. I fully intend to go finish it myself on my own time. I don't think that The Legendary Axe is a legendary example of a good platformer, but it's definitely sitting at the high end of the upper class of these sorts of games. It doesn't get more 'retro' than a platformer where you also hit stuff, and that's what we have here, in one of its finest forms.

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