Some of you may remember last March I talked about Yu Yu Hakusho - Spirit Detective, and that I wasn't overly impressed by the game and that I hoped Tournament Tactics would be better. Turns out it was a significant improvement on the last game. When I turned it on and started playing, my thoughts were: 'Hey, this is more like it, the graphics are about as good as the GBA ever got, and the gameplay is far closer to what I've come to expect from most of what Nintendo have released on their handheld consoles for the last decade.' Well, I didn't actually think that word for word, but you know...This game apparently follows the story of Yusuke Urameshi during the 'Dark Tournament' period of the saga, where Yusuke and his friends enter the tournament to destroy Toguro and his team. All the characters from the first game are there, including Kuwubara, Hiei and Kurama, plus a supporting cast of other playable characters. The plot for the game centres around recruiting these other characters in various different locations in the island, and journeying to the Dark Arena to face off against Toguro. Dialogue is basically limited to speech-bubble cut-scenes in between levels, and while Atari's script is certainly not on par with their Square contemporaries, the personalities of the characters are brought out more by their interaction with each other. Kurama, for example, is nice and polite to everybody, while Hiei goes out of his way to annoy Kuwubara, who appears to have a thirst to prove himself. Ironically the least interesting character is Yusuke, who's brattish spite but with his heart in the right place is about all you get from him throughout the entire game. Nonetheless, if only for this reason the game is far superior to it's predecessor.
The actual gameplay won't be a surprise to anybody who's ever played a game with 'tactics' as a suffix. You take a maximum of five characters out in to the game. The action happens on a 'game board' style series of levels, and the characters can move a certain amount of squares that the level is divided into, depending on their move rate. They have a selection of actions, including attacks, which develop as the game progresses, using items and performing actions such as taunting the opponent and recovering your spirit energy (more on this later.) Some of the levels have specific missions, however most of them involve killing demons, which take the shape of humanoid animals and get progressively harder as the game goes on. So far, so Final Fantasy meets Dungeons and Dragons.
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| A Lion roars at the Masked Fighter, while the team prepare to stike... |
Right. Spirit Energy starts off as what most RPG players would recognise as magic, mana, MP, whatever. You have a certain amount of Spirit Energy you can use in one particular stage, or level, and once it's gone you either have to manage without it or use a special action to recharge it. Where it differs from the usual incarnation of magic is that the greater majority of standard attacks also use Spirit Energy; you can't decide not to use it or you'll never make any attacks. That's certainly the case in the first few levels, anyway.
Initiative is in essence the order of turns; certain actions take more initiative than others. Moving, for example, costs initiative, all attacks do, some more than others, and the special actions certainly use initiative as well. So you might do a fairly low-powered attack which uses 10 initiative and be able to move again almost straight away, or Yusuke's Spirit Mega Gun - the best attack in the game - costs 50 initiative and the other characters might get another two or three turns before he can act again.
Combine these two things and the tactical nature of the game with the implicit strengths and weaknesses of the characters, and you've actually got quite a complex and well-thought-out system which can actually be quite interesting to analyse. Very broadly, most of the characters have most of the following:
- A fairly basic, low powered attack that doesn't use any Spirit Energy and not much initiative,
- A basic attack that is quite powerful and does use Spirit Energy,
- A ranged attack,
- A linear attack, that is to say an attack that hits the 2-4 spaces in front of the character,
- An attack that for lack of a better word I'll call a blast, that affects a number of squares around the character in different shapes depending on the character,
- A reasonably powerful attack that uses no Spirit Energy but uses a lot of initiative.
Learning how to use the different characters effectively is an interesting challenge and in the latter stages of the game becomes crucial. Chu, for example, does not move very quickly, his ranged attack is poor and he doesn't have a linear or blast move, but once he's levelled up and gets in close, he can be extremely powerful. He also doesn't carry a lot of Spirit Energy, which when Chu has all his attacks lends a new level of tactics - if speed is of the essence, it may be better to use his Crusher Kick, which uses a lot of Spirit Energy, than his Headbutt, which is his most powerful attack but uses a lot of initiative. Yusuke and Kuwubara do not have attacks that don't use Spirit Energy, so in the longer battles they will be useless for at least one turn while they recover it. Hiei is awesome - he can't take a lot of damage (relative to some of the tougher characters, anyway,) but can hit the demons very hard and very fast with his dark attacks, and has a reasonable selection of attacks to keep using once his Spirit Energy runs out.
A great system, but one that unfortunately only really has the chance to shine in the more difficult levels towards the end of the game. Up until about two thirds of the way in, most of the battles can be won by splattering the nearest demon with your most powerful attack and hoping for the best; some battles are harder than others but you'll rarely get stuck to the point where you need to take the time to think about what you're doing. There are a few levels, though, that are absolute beauties. One specific stage quite late in the game is where the characters have to kill all the demons on the stage plus three floodgates, which spawn out another two demons every so often. The floodgate towards the back of the stage spawns Wolves - by far the hardest of the demons to deal with - and if you try to fight your way through the two gates that spawn Cats and the other demons on the level, you'll find it flooded with Wolves that you haven't got a hope of beating before they beat you. Your best chance is to take that gate out first, and very quickly - but the only character who can take out Floodgates with one attack is Yusuke, and even then, the attack needs to be overdriven (the overdrive system being remarkably similar to Limit Breaks and such.) So Yusuke needs to do enough on his way up there to fill his OD meter, still have enough Spirit Energy left in the tank to perform the attack, and the other characters need to be nearby as well in order for them to support Yusuke so he doesn't get left out on his own. Therefore the other characters need to use their ranged and quick attacks, perhaps not dealing with the demons as systematically as would be usual, but nonetheless necessary.
The sound is as good as it needs to be; the background music is cheesy and not-too-overblown, and all the bells and whistles happen in the right places. Instantly forgettable, but let's be honest, how many games have you bought because someone's said to you, 'Wow, did you hear the BGM from that game?' Not many.
While I'd hardly say this is the best game I've ever played, it's an entertaining enough package to keep you going for a while. Both the storyline and the level-up system is quite linear, so there's almost no replay value (unless you re-he-hearly enjoy setting yourself challenges like, I don't know, max out all the characters, or play through the entire game using Yusuke as little as possible, in which case fine but there are other games out there, you know?) but if you can keep at it, it's fun while it lasts. How it measures up to the anime or the manga I don't know, probably not all that well, because game adaptations of this sort of thing rarely go as well as the publishers would probably like. But if you're not a fan of it, it is if nothing else a solid game that will give you probably about a weekend's worth of entertainment if you really push hard.
So what's next? I'm playing Medal of Honour - Frontline on my Xbox at the moment so maybe...
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