Saint Seiya - Ougon Densetsu Kanketsu Hen (Famicom, 1988, TOSE/Bandai)

An interesting hybrid of an action game and a turn based RPG, and also adapting that part of Saint Seiya which I actualy first saw when I was a kid. How can this possibly turn to crap now ?

What ? Bandai ?

Yeah, figures.

But let's start at the begining: the game is based on a Shonen Jump Manga and Toei anime called "Saint Seiya" or "Knights of the Zodiac". It involved a bunch of guys in mystical armour fighting other guys in mystical armour trying to do generaly nasty things to Athena and the world. The first story arc was by far the simplest and was already structured like a video game, with a series of "levels" accesed after defeating the "bosses" of lower situated "levels" to do battle with stronger "bosses", all to save a damsel at the last one. The series even provides a handfull of different protagonists to chose from for the sake of replay value and variety.

A succesfull attack in motion

So how can this possibly suck ? Well the problem lies in the format. Instead of a sidescroller, which you would expect this to be after starting the first level and entering the action section, you get a hybrid action game/and a hybrid action/turn bassed RPG fight mode. The regular action sections are dirt simple, even if there's times when you simply can't avoid hits. While traveling through this area you may notice the "sevensense" bar at the bottom: this fills up slowly for every regular enemy you kill and by larger chunks for the bosses. However the game doesn't like to see you making things too easy for yourself, so just as you've found a nice grind spot and started accumulating some sense points the game literaly drops a meteor on your head. And I don't mean the regular meteors that show up in every stage, I mean the game literaly takes a meteor and fires it at you in the shortest possible trajectory. The bar can be used to replenish the "cosmo" and "life" bars that get depleated with every hit, once you start the boss battle.

The actions sections are still, however, more or less dirt simple. Go forward, shoot the three enemy sprites availible, try to avoid meteors, fail at it, jump over gaps, get shot by archers and then go up to a temple entrance. The only variety is found in special "dimensions" some of the bosses teleport you to.

The Level Map

At the end of an action section you come across a boss. And here's where the "fun" begins. You have several options, from attacking, talking, observing your status and talking/summoning one of the other characters. Depending on the character you can have more then one attack to use. Using the attack effectively seems to be somewhat based on pressing the apropriate directional buttons at the time you cast it, but it's realy hard to tell for sure. After an attack your enemy might say something and....he does an attack that always hurts you. You want to know why ?

Well it turns out you're supposed to physicaly dodge the attack by pressing the correct directional button just before the attack begins. If you manage to dodge sucessfully but in the wrong direction your character will stay out of reach for a while....and will then return to the centre of the screen when 2/3rds of the attack are over, yet takes the exact same dammage if he hadn't done anything.

The action section. Pretty much all of them.

And worst of all, the dodging is like a quick time event. An incredibly quick quick time event with no button indicating when you're actualy supposed to dodge. You're just supposed to know you can dodge just slightly before the bad guy's text stops scrolling....if you didn't press it before. If you did your character does nothing even if you press it at the correct moment later. This means that dodging attacks effectively is related to predetermining when the enemy will stop talking (and they sometimes simply attack you without speaking) and then doing it slightly beforehand.

Worse, the RPG element seems to mostly take the worst elements from the genre and glueing them ontop of each other like some bizarre modern art piece. Basicly the game devotes itself to slavishly adapt the plot of the original series, to the point where it becomes detrimental for a sidescroling fighting RPG hybrid with a free range of selectable characters. That means that if someone lost in a fight in the series, you have to first go into the fight as them, lose and best case scenario have to fight with a new character that pops up out of nowhere, or worse you have to replay the level as a different character, once having to do so four consecutive times. Other times the game will randomly not make it possible to hurt the enemy (although they still can, and will, hurt you) until you talk to the opponent....twice. There's a gimmick like this for virtualy all of the later half of the game.

Having a good ol' chat with the boss.

However, when you don't know what to do and don't follow the invisible road map, you can find yourself in a rather tight spot. Like the last boss. You succesfully deplete all of his life and cosmo and he still stands there, attacking you. You're actualy meant to lose so another character can get brought back and learn a random move to finish him off. However you probably won't know this at the time and worst, at this point the guy only does 3 points of dammage per round. Out of about 799 Life points you can have if you don't screw up. So this will take awhile. And you'll probably swear quite alot.

In the end, Saint Seiya - Ougon Densetsu Kanketsu Hen is a rather unplayable mess that tries so hard to faithfully adapt the source material that it becomes a large stumbling block.