Yeah, I love Golden Axe and have many ideas in mind, mainly for the fighting mechanic.
But I would like to make something different, this franchise already received some recent projects, like the one by ZVitor and the Kimono's template.
To be honest I'm more inclined in making a 2d platformer. I was thinking about Sonic but this franchise already has a lot of amazing fan games done and others in-progress. I'm curious about exploring the pure 2d in OpenBOR instead of the "2.5d" used traditionally by beat 'em ups.