Sega Ages 2500: Vol.5 - Golden Axe

The Good
This game was a joke and a travesty. Only Golden Axe for the PC Engine was worse than this. Enhanced? NO. Its a totally different game with terrible graphics.

The Bad
The graphics are NOT ENHANCED from the original Golden Axe. It simply replaces vivid, colorful, well-drawn rendered sprites with atrocious polygon based sprites.. This thing is a totally different game that is a knock off of the original that featurs none of the exquisite original art of the Arcade. The original game was designed by Makoto Uchida and its great. This joke was made without his creative authorization and its garbage.

The Bottom Line
Its a joke. Every copy of the game should be burned.

The Good
I really like the magic animation and artwork. Also the cutscenes are pretty decent and some character models also look decent.

The Bad
The worst thing of the game, it's awful and clunky gameplay. The characters move very slowly and most moves are not precise, leaving you vulnerable for extra hits. Also, enemies will ALWAYS have advantage when it comes to hit priority; if you are going to crush against an enemy, they will always succeed. The hitbox detection is so poor that you can get hit while in mid air despite the enemy hitting near the ground. This makes the game unnecessarily frustrating, and while somewhat playable and even enjoyable, the game will frustrate you more than making you enjoy it.

The Bottom Line
While not as bad as the PC Engine CD version, it's still pretty awful, specially considering the PS2 capabilities and the fact that they had much more advanced technology than back in the late 80's, yet the original version manages to be 1 million times better. As the saying goes: "If it's not broken, don't fix it" and they tried to fix an already great game, but failed miserably. Still worth trying if you really like the Golden Axe series, but don't expect much out of this.