Mamono Hunter Yohko

"Dedicated to anime babes and lots of fanservice."

I’m not really what you would call a big fan of the “Devil Hunter Yohko” anime series. Not because I don’t like it, but because I’ve never had much of an opportunity to watch it. I saw one tape of it, and what I saw of it was fairly decent.
And due to the previous two reviews for this game, I was not excepting much out of it at all.

Gameplay:7 Yohko is basically a Hack & Slash platformer that plays much like the Valis series.
You move through each of the games 5 levels by fighting your way through the level and beating the area boss. I made it to level 4 and I would say that all of the bosses are fairly challenging. I never got any further than level 4 because the boss there was ultra cheap.

The controls are a little bit stiff at times and there were a few areas where I had problems turning when I needed to make a jump. But once I got used to the way it worked I had little difficulty with it.

You don’t have much in the variety of moves for attacking. You have Yohko’s sword for just slashing enemies and then you have Yohko’s barrier which I found to be very innovative. Whenever you hold down the sword button Yohko will have a barrier around her. The barrier can defend against some enemy projectiles as well as be used as a projectile. Whenever you use the barrier to attack enemies it will return back to you like a boomerang, and as long you hold it on the sword button it will stay around you.
My only real problem with this is that the barrier can shoot in every direction except straight up or down. This caused me a lot of problems because I kept trying to do it.

When you beat a level you will see a nice picture of Yohko. Not a nude picture, but it’s still a nice picture.

Story:2 This is not much of a story that I can see going on here. It’s basically just something evil has appeared and it’s up to Yohko to stop it. And that is not necessarily a big deal to me. A game doesn’t need to have an epic story to be playable. I’ve played plenty of great games that have awful stories to them. Lufia 3 is a fine example of that.

That was what really bugged me about the two previous reviews for this game. Both of them seemed to except the game to follow the story line of the anime and that seemed to very strongly affect their ratings for the game. That and fact that they were mad that there wasn't any nudity in it.

Graphics:5 I will agree that the graphics are as bad as everyone says they are. Although I do think they are a bit better than NES graphics. There is not really much at all appealing about them,But that isn’t to say i don’t like how the levels look. Because I thought level 3 was a nice looking level and the under water boss fight at the end of the level was pretty cool. But everything else is rather unspectacular and doesn’t really do anything for me.

Sound:7 This is the area where I think people are a bit too harsh on it. While I will admit the sound effects leave much desired, ( The sound of wind blowing in level 1 sounds more like static to me than wind.) The music is really not that bad. I’ll admit the level 1 tune does suck pretty hard, but after that all the tunes that I heard I liked. I liked the boss music and the 2nd level music the most. It was a very peaceful sounding tune.

Difficulty:9 Pretty tough. The game gives you 5 lives a game and 7 continues and I still wasn’t able to get past level 4. The main problem was with falling in pits most of the time and fighting the level bosses.

Replay Value:3 This is the type of game that you can beat once and never care if you play it again.

Buy or Rent: If you really want to play this game you’re either going to have buy it or emulate it. Though you may not want to buy it because it’s a fairly rare game and seems to go for quite a bit. So unless you’re into collecting every MegaDrive game there is (Like the friend that let me play this game.) Then you should probably just emulate it and try it out.

Reviewer's Score: 6/10, Originally Posted: 06/16/02, Updated 11/11/03