Nerdicus NES Review #48 : Athena

Title : Athena

Publisher : SNK

Genre : Action Adventure Platformer

Players : 1 Player

Release Date : 1987

Estimated Value (as of today's date) : $5-$8

Athena - the Goddess of Wisdom, Warfare, Divine Intelligence, Architecture, and Crafts....not to mention crappy NES games. In comes Athena, by SNK. A horrid attempt at a platformer, and the final product made it seem like SNK had no idea what they were doing at the time. Surprise, surprise.

You take on the role of a half-naked anime-theme princess named, Athena who is bored of her life as a snot nosed brat and decides to open a door that she shouldn't. What good comes of opening a door marked DO NOT OPEN. Well, Athena gets sucked into a world called FANTASY WORLD (how original.....) which is controlled by the malicious Emperor Dante (hey, that's my Dog's name! HOW BOUT THAT!?). So what is a pompous princess to do? 

Kill everyone of course.

Off we go into Fantasy World. As soon as we hit the start button, we are greeted by a creepy little wink from the main character. Nice, five seconds in and I'm already disturbed. Your goal as the Princess Athena, is to travel through 8 different worlds, defeating all the enemies as you go until you ultimately face Dante in a duel to the death.

Well, have fun doing that with a hit detection system that barely even recognizes if you score a hit. This is one of those games that your weapon doesn't know whether or not it's hitting the monster even if you're right on top of it.  But if you do manage to score a hit, you can watch the monsters explode into little balls of light.

How cute.

Each time you defeat a critter, there's a chance that they'll drop some goodies. Either a new weapon upgrade, or a new piece of armor, or maybe even some bags of gold coins! Well, of course if you're in a new world, you're going to kill everyone you meet and steal their money. What else are you supposed to do.

Which makes me think, in these games that don't really tell you the story up front, how are you supposed to know what the protagonists intentions are? Reminds me of the theory that Mario was actually murdering all the citizens of the Mushroom Kingdom deliberately and the Princess was trying to be protected by Bowser.

Naaaaaaaaaaaaaahhhhh.

If you somehow manage to put up with the wonky controls, horrendous hit detection, and awkward graphical glitches, you'll encounter some massive boss fights. The bosses are absolute push overs unfortunately, and it's so easy to discover the pattern for each one, it's hard to even consider them bosses. 

Ah well...there are a lot better platformers on the NES than this one. I'll say that this game at least deserves one attempt at a play through. But after that, you can go back to using it as a coaster.

Final Score (out of 5) :

Until next time. Keep on gaming!