Golden Axe, while a heavy inspiration for many future beat ’em up games, is not my cup of tea. Let me rephrase that; Golden Axe was, is, and always will be a bland, boring and all around garbage video game. It’s pure hodgepodge. That does not, however, mean it didn’t gobble up pockets of quarters in the arcade, and sell gangbusters of plastic cartridges when it was released on home consoles. With that level of success there’s sure to be some copycats out there. That’s where Legend comes in. This under-the-radar Super Nintendo game copies the Golden Axe formula, and quite faithfully I might add. With how bland and boring the source material is I didn’t have much hope for it, and after a playthrough I discovered it doesn’t have any aces up its sleeves. Today I’m here to talk about Legend, and why you should avoid this second rate piece of software.
Legend tells a medieval story about an evil ruler named Beldore who has brought his kingdom chaos and destruction for a thousand years. Knights have set out to defeat him and restore peace, but none have succeeded in this conquest. You are the next in line of soldiers sent to defeat Beldore. Look, story isn’t important for this type of game so I’m going to cut to the chase. The gameplay in Legend is horrible. Plain and simple. It’s a very typical beat em up game wherein you move from left to right defeating enemies in an area allowing you to move up and down as well as horizontally. At the end of each stage you face off against a boss. That’s the gist of it. Now what makes it so bad? Well I thought you’d never ask…
Let’s start off with the fact that there’s little to no variety in the gameplay department. Your basic sword slash is what you’ll be using most of the time and repeated attacks result in a three hit combo. You can jump and attack in the air, as well as use a ranged attack that saps some of your health. When you’re feeling feisty you can use a screen filling magic attack to decimate all foes. The only thing new here is a block button, but I found little need for it to be honest. This is a pretty standard set of moves, but with no throw, and enemies with almost all the same attack patterns and no stage variety makes Legend painful to play. Even the stages re-use a lot of assets from each other which makes everything sort of blend together in the worst way possible. They had a medieval fantasy setting to work with, but took no advantage of it creatively.
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| It’s much more clunky than it looks. |
With all of the repetition the game isn’t particularly difficult. Sure, enemies seem to get a lot of lucky hits on you but even in groups they are rarely particularly intimidating. This is due in part to the massive amounts of health that they drop. Almost everyone leaves behind food upon being defeated, and therefore it can be pretty tough to run low when you’re practically drowning in meats. You also get a ton of magic to use which I found useful in clearing the screen of generic enemies on a pretty frequent basis. I will admit that I liked the in-between stage mini game wherein you use your accumulated keys to open treasure chests, but unfortunately this led to the issue of me having too many lives and thus sapped out some of the difficulty. When you can basically press attack to win Legend becomes a real slog.
The real issue, however, is the game’s pacing. Your character moves like a slug through molasses. There’s absolutely no excuse for the slow rate of movement, but the real kicker is that there’s no dash or run. This means you’re stuck basically crawling from one section of the screen to the next. I assumed this was a glitch because the countdown at the top of the screen was also super slow, but no, this is how they intended Legend to be. How this ever made it past any sort of quality control is frankly beyond me because the game is an absolute slog. Even compared to the inspiration, Golden Axe, Legend moves in slow motion. It’s simply inexcusable considering the fact that we know the hardware was capable of so much more.
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| This is one of the more interesting locales. |
Speaking of hardware capabilities Legend is not a very pretty game even by Super Nintendo standards. It’s just so… blah. Characters, enemies, and environments are all entirely too generic for my liking. Your character (and that of player 2) are very boring heroes as well. They had just one job; make a cool looking knight and they failed miserably. The enemies fare far worse with generic soldiers, goblins, bats, etc. The swamp zombie monsters are sort of original but it’s a case of too little too late. The soundtrack is also quite unimpressive. It seems like there are only three songs in the entire game and they repeat too often. I did enjoy the theme of the first stage but after hearing it in four other levels I lost interest. The sound effects and enemy cries are decent, but overall the audio is pretty darn forgettable.
Medieval settings seem like a perfect fit for the genre, but more often than not the end product is botched in inexplicable ways. I don’t know what it was about the setting that messed developers up, but to this day the only decent medieval brawler is Knights of the Round which is also on the Super Nintendo. Like Golden Axe, Legend is just too bland and boring. It feels even less inspired than the source material it tried to copy. This, paired with the slow as molasses gameplay, makes for a very painful and forgettable video game. It’s pretty bad when even stuff like Rival Turf looks like a masterpiece next to this garbage. I pity anyone who wound up with this one under the Christmas tree.
