|
At first sight, “Yu Yu Hakusho” doesn’t look all that bad. The sprites look decent, the playing field looks all too familiar to anyone who’s ever played a strategy RPG. But once you’ve gotten past that shiny outer layer you get to the soft and overripe fruit this game is. The tone is set immediately after starting. A bug-eyed character named Genkai berates you for saying anything, calling you stupid for everything you’d even think of doing. It may work in the anime, but in the game it’s more annoying than anything. What’s even worse is that your tasks are beyond easy, and there’s no way to do them incorrectly. If the game would expand a bit after that, it wouldn’t be quite as mediocre. The shallowness continues throughout.
Strike 1: Not enough variety. You have ten heroes to choose from, and no character creation in sight. A staple of SRPG’s is creating an army, and this game fails at that. Strike 2: EA BIG style leveling. Each character has points they can put into attributes after a level-up. With the low number of attributes, and the fact point management is almost exclusively 1 point of attribute per level, the depth of characters is almost nonexistent. Strike 3: Strategy is overruled by a simple and fundamental meat shield with sniper setup. Put your toughest characters up front to take the abuse, and toss a couple of long-range fighters in the back. If you want, you could even put a healer along with the long-range folks to help keep the meat shield healthy…but yet again, there’s really no reason to do so. Combined with the lack of depth is the immensely stupid AI. Nearby enemies may or may not attack you, depending on whether or not they decide to walk around in circles. Most times, you’re forced to the offensive because they don’t seem to care that you’re out to take them down. Now, don’t get me wrong. “Yu Yu Hakusho: Tournament Tactics” is not bad by any means. It’s mediocre at heart, and I realize that I’m not the target market for this. If you’re looking for a good strategy game, and you’re a fan of the genre…feel free to skip over this. If you have a child that likes the license and may have an interest in the genre but not the skills to manage it well, though, it could work.
|
