Saint Seiya NES Game Review

Saint Seiya (video game, NES/Famicom)

General Info
Saint Seiya's a classic anime about the battles between the Greek gods continuing in the modern world. Or, specifically, the battles between their servants, who in Athena's case are the Saints, including Seiya, Hyoga, Shiryu, Shun, and Ikki, who each wears a suit of armor based on a constellation. Please don’t get on my back about Saint Seiya being a good anime. I think so too. I just don’t think the game about it is.

Review
This game is a summarized version of the first season of the show. It begins with Seiya dueling with Cassios to get the Pegasus Cloth and reportedly culminates with him and the other Bronze Saints battling the evil Gold Saints under the control of Ares. Wouldn't know, since this game is so hard to play, let alone win.

Most of the time Seiya walks along in a 2-D sidescroller area and can go to other places from a menu, or walk there if he has the inclination. When he runs into a character from the show like Marin or Ikki, he stops throwing simple punches and goes to a sort of RPG text-command duel. Basically you use Seiya's points of "cosmo" to fill in four little meters, and the more you fill them up, the stronger his attack is. You get a little cosmo back by talking to other characters, but considering how much it takes to beat a guy, it never seems like enough.

There's a leveling system, although how it works I don't know, since I hadn't advanced, let alone healed, by the time it came for me to stop dealing with relative wimps like Cassios and worry about beating actual other Saints. With no one around except Shiryu, who kept killing me with one attack, to fight with, that was about as far as I could get.

The graphics are crude at best, even considering the year in which this game came out. The audio is also bad, with the pinnacle being the Saint Seiya theme song replicated by Nintendo beeps and boops. I understand the desire to hook audiences from the very start with a cool song or whatever, but something’s really wrong if that’s the highlight of the whole package, which it is for this game.

Saint Seiya for the Famicom is a bad game, plain and simple. I tried to get an FAQ, but the only one I could find was practically no help. However, there's rumors of a good-looking PC version on the horizon.

END REVIEW