Saint Seiya 2

"Pegasus Meteor Suck!"

Saint Seiya is one of the better fight-oriented anime I have seen. Basically it takes place in a world where the Greek gods are real and battle for supremacy and personal power. Or rather, armored warriors with special powers called Saints do it for them. Seiya, the pegasus saint, and his friends, Shiryu, the dragon, Hyoga, the swan, and Shun, the andromeda saint (who, believe it or not, is a guy), all work for Athena, the only benign deity in the mix.

This is the premise the Saint Seiya games are based off of, but they are pathetic mockeries of games that do the series no justice at all. This game covers the end of the first season of the show, where Athena has been poisoned and her Saints have only a few hours to get her into the font of her power to save her life. To do that, they need to beat the Gold Saints who serve Ares, Athena's mortal enemy and who naturally doesn't want her to get better.

My problem with this is that the first Saint Seiya game covered the ENTIRE first season, meaning the heroes storming Sanctuary and battling the Gold Saints in a race against time to save Athena's life like in this one, in addition to everything else. What the heck made Bandai think Saint Seiya fans were hungry for a rehashing of something they already played? Maybe they realized how awful their first effort was, but this one manages to be even more tedious and frustrating.

So, the four Bronze Saints are storming Sanctuary, the Greek island which is supposed to be the seat of power for Athena and her Saints, but Ares has taken it over. Before each level you can pick one of the four Saints and then you have to run through a non-descript level fighting an endless horde of faceless henchmen. Once you do, you enter a command-based battle against a Gold Saint.

Now, each of Athena's Saints has several special moves they frequently roll out to crush their enemies in the anime. Can you use them in the game? Yes. In the RPG turn-based boss battles against a Gold Saint at the end of every level. Even then you can hardly tell what's going on, though, because there's no screen of Seiya's Pegasus Meteor Punch or Shiryu's Dragon Sky Tear, it's just a back view of your Saint throwing a non-descript lightning bolt or something. I suppose it might be possible to use them in the lame platform levels leading up to the boss battles, but I don't have the manual, and even if I did I can't read Japanese very well, so I was pretty much stuck with a lame punch until I faced a boss.

The game has a bit of innovation in that sometimes during a battle with a Gold Saint a supporting character of the Saint you're controlling will appear and offer moral support, but to take advantage of this, you have to know which Bronze Saint fought which Gold Saint in the show. No others will stand a chance. If you don't know which Bronze Saint did the most work against which Gold Saint, there is no point in trying to beat this game.

And you want to know the weirdest thing about this game? Shun, a colossal wuss and crybaby on the show who always needed his brother to save him, is probably the best character in the game. Strong, fast, long reach...

Where the game falls apart is recovering life and cosmo (the strength of your Saint's special moves, basically), which both go down every time you get hurt. I guess this is meant to represent the endurance test it was for the Bronze Saints to take on all the Gold Saints and save Athena in time in the show, but frankly it makes the game too darn hard. Plus the more you get hurt the weaker your attacks get, so if a Gold Saint gets in two or three decent blows, you're pretty much screwed. And that's if you're not too weak already from the unavoidable falling rocks and spastic caffeine-gulping guards before the boss battles.

The levels all look the same, so I wondered a few times if maybe I had somehow started over without realizing it. The first Saint Seiya game was boring, but at least it featured an occasional change of scenery after you finally conquered each stage of the game. Each part of Sanctuary looks the same as every other, and it gets boring fast. The graphics overall are really bad, only being slightly less crude and blocky than in the first game. You can tell who your guy is and who the enemies are, but as much because of the color of your sprite as because you're the only one not jumping around like he's got a rabid weasel in his underwear.

The music is lame, lame, lame. The Saint Seiya theme song rendered in Nintendo beeps plays on the title screen and that is the pinnacle of the game's audio. And something is seriously wrong with a game or show if the best part is the theme song, which it certainly is in this game.

I have no idea what compelled Bandai to put out a sequel that was just a redoing of a title they already put out with a narrowed focus. And to make it hard for a twenty-year-old gamer to beat without having a stroke, let alone a six year old who was a fan of the show when it first came out. Shame on you, Bandai. But with Saint Seiya being released in the US now, maybe we'll see a decent revamp for a next-gen console. Can always dream.

Reviewer's Score: 1/10, Originally Posted: 01/13/04, Updated 07/23/04