Welcome to the second episode of 23 Endings: The Early Years, the show where we put old school video game endings in proper context. Today we're looking at both the arcade and Genesis version of Golden Axe, two similar games with two very different endings. Which is better? Find out now when you watch the second episode of 23 Endings: The Early Years!


This is the story of what happens when an evil entity known as Death Adder takes over the fantasy land of Yuria. It's bad enough that he kidnaps the King and Princess, but Death Adder also finds and threatens to destroy the Golden Axe, the magical emblem of Yuria. Now it's up to Gilius Thunderhead, Tyris Flare and the Ax Battler himself to rise to the occasion and save the once-peaceful land of Yuria from evil forces.

This sends the three unlikely heroes to Turtle Village, through Fiend's Path and straight to Death Adder's heavily-fortified castle. It all ends in the most obvious way possible, with the Yuria's three protectors battling it out with a shirtless barbarian wielding a giant axe while the King and Princess hang overhead. The arcade adventure is surprisingly short, lasting all of fifteen or twenty minutes. But what it lacks in length, Golden Axe more than makes up for with this incredible ending.

This is, without a doubt, one of the greatest endings Sega has ever come up with. It's also one of the few meta endings of the 1980s, even going as far as to install parody billboards like HAGA and Hokari Sweat. It also sets up what could have been a genuinely compelling sequel where Death Adder takes his evil to the real world. But alas, Golden Axe II was just more of the same. Talk about disappointment.

Speaking of which, let's talk about Golden Axe on the Genesis. Seeing as the original ending had the bad guys bursting out of an arcade, you would think that Sega might just do the same thing with a TV screen and a living room. But alas, this is what we got instead.

For as much as I like the Genesis port of Golden Axe, this is a pretty terrible ending. It's happy, I suppose, but it's also anticlimactic. The Princess and King thank you for saving them (and their kingdom), and then we're told by the narrator that everything is good and peace has been restored to Yuria. That's nice, but it would have been cool to actually see some of this. We're basically told the same thing by two different people, neither in front of a cool or interesting visual. Golden Axe went from having one of the greatest endings of all time to being the posterdwarf for generic fantasy endings. This was a big step down.