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Golden Axe on the Master System is a scaled-back port of Sega's arcade classic. Although it's single player and you can only play as Ax-Battler, you can select any magic at the beginning of the game. It doesn't have the extra levels of the Genesis version, but it's a little harder than that port.
In the western release of this game, they renamed Ax-Battler to Tarik. The reason this game is able to pull of such huge sprites with little slowdown is because there ARE no sprites. All the graphics are rendered on the background layer which is less limited.
The SMS port of Golden Axe is pretty good. It exclusively uses the background to accomplish large sprites, although the animations are really choppy as a result. Still, it captures Golden Axe's gameplay reasonably well, although unfortunately you can only play as Ax-Battler. This is one of the harder versions of the game thanks to the strong bosses.
