 ...
There appears to be some debate as to
whether or not Athena is a bad game. It made both Seanbaby's and
PSYKOSUMA's Worst NES Games lists, but I've also seen people vigilantly
defend it. Well, I am certainly not one to act like my opinions are the
final word on anything, but this is one of those cases where I am somewhat
unable to see both sides of the argument. Let's face it: Not every 2-D
sidescrolling platform game was a work of art. The basic idea
behind Athena is that you are playing as the Goddess of Wisdom as she runs
around bopping strange enemies because she is bored. As you can see, the
problems with this game have already begun.
GRAPHICS:
Athena
has a lovely title screen with a nice anime-style picture of Athena's head.
This actually looks very good for an early NES game, but don't leap out of
your seats yet. It's all downhill from there. It's not really an exaggeration to say that the graphics look like something that belong on a parent's refrigerator. First of all, Athena is drawn very
badly. Her head is way too big and her body is straight up and down like a
flagpole. The animation of her walk and jump is stiff and robotic, and when she swings a weapon, it looks like she's trying to hit herself with it, rather than the enemies. And speaking of the
enemies, many of them look just as bad as Athena. Most of them are very nondescript and it's hard
to even tell what some of them are. There are slimes
(also found in SNK's Crystalis), teddy bear/pigheaded things, spiders, and a blue thing that looks like Grimace from those McDonald's commercials. The
bosses look somewhat better, and they are really huge. The background color schemes are very
nasty, and every level has some kind of ugly, repetitive pattern used
throughout the whole thing. I also have to ask - this game is based on
Athena, a Greek mythological figure...so where are all the Greek
monsters? Why are we fighting things that look like teddy bears,
horseheads, and Grimace instead of centaurs, minotaurs, and gorgons? Even
Kid Icarus, which took a lot of liberty with the subject, had some monsters
and references to the myths. Athena's graphics are not only bad, but they
don't really represent what the game is supposed to be about,
either.
 ...
SOUND:
Athena has some of the most irritating
sound I've ever heard. The musical compositions are extremely bad. The music does absolutely nothing to enhance the
game or emote what's going on, and sounds as though it's being played on a phonograph or out-of-tune music box. The sound effects are extremely loud and annoying. There are
several different sound effects that are used when you swing a weapon, and they all sound pretty much like something out of an Atari 2600 game. With all of these
loud noises going on from swinging your weapon and jumping, you may not
notice that you're being attacked, because Athena makes no noise of any
kind when taking hits from the enemies. Many times in this game, the
screen has gone black, and I got the cinema of Athena keeling over, and I
never saw it coming because I didn't know I was being hit by something. An
overuse of annoying effects, and a lack of vital ones, all against
horrendous background music, makes for a game with horrible sound!
CONTROL:
Just about everything that could
possibly go wrong went the whole distance here! Well, moving left and
right and climbing up and down are okay. But jumping is a whole new
ballgame. When you press the button once, Athena takes a normal jump.
Press it again, and she takes a much higher leap. Neither jump is easy to
control, and Athena is not very responsive. There is a definite lag
between the time you press the button and when Athena actually jumps. The
system of double-jumping is also very cumbersome. When you swing the
weapon, it doesn't really seem to do much. With a few exceptions, most
weapons don't "swing", they just change size, meaning you have to be
incredibly close to the enemies to use them, and it's very unclear just
how close you need to be to an enemy in order to damage it without taking
hits, yourself! Hit detection is really poor, and most of the times you
just miss the enemies. And since Athena makes no noise when she's being
hit, you could be getting attacked and not know it! Bad play control is
one of the main reasons this game is so bad.
 ...
STORY/ATMOSPHERE:
I would really like to believe this was a
translation problem. Maybe this game did have some credible story in the
original Japanese version, and something happened on the way to America.
But from what I understand, the premise of this game is that Athena is
bored and is wandering around some kind of fantasy land, bopping enemies
out of boredom. Maybe we should just put our
imaginations to work and say that Athena is out to stop some horrible
monsters from taking over the world. But no matter how hard you try to
imagine any kind of scheme that would tie all this random enemy-bopping
into the semblance of a storyline, Athena's severe lack of atmosphere still
gives it the feel of a game that was just randomly thrown together. As I
mentioned in the graphics section, there are almost no mythological
monsters, despite the fact that this game is based on
"Athena".
CHALLENGE:
Athena is quite a hard game, but
unfortunately, it's all due to poor play control and the lack of a signal
to tell you that Athena is taking hits. Athena is a very mindless run around
and bop enemies game. This game also suffers from bad utilization of a timer. Many of the levels are huge and confusing, and there are
sometimes multiple paths and dead-ends. Running out of time in a level while trying to complete it only serves to worsen a game that's already quite horrid. Athena may be hard, but most people are going to feel more
challenged just by trying to withstand it than actually playing
it.
FUN:
Besides
bopping enemies, which seem to endlessly pour out of the right side of the screen, Athena can bump her head on blocks to find armor and other
weapons. This seems like fun at first, until you realize a lot of weapons
are useless, or not much more effective than Athena's normal kick attack,
and some even cause you to lose HP when you use them! Most bosses can only
be defeated with a projectile weapon, and if you get up to them with
something else, you're screwed! The game is somewhat playable, until you
reach the third level, where the play control becomes even more impossible to manage when you
have to swim!
 ...
There is no way I could ever manage to overlook everything
that's bad about Athena. Athena is to 2D
action sidescrollers what Hydlide was to RPGs. Super Mario Bros. set the standard for what action platformers should be like, in terms of quality. Athena tries hard to be like Mario, with the block popping and enemy bopping, but its control and level design are so poor, that it doesn't come close to meeting that standard.
OVERALL
SCORE: 1/5
BACK TO NES
REVIEWS BACK TO MAIN
PAGE
|
|
