C&VG


Yaksa
By Wolf Team
PC Engine (JP Version)

 
Published in Computer & Video Games #95

Yaksa

"Space Harrier" is the first thought that crosses your mind when you press the Start button on Yaksa. Running over a stripy landscape, blasting monsters that zoom at you from the horizon - all familiar stuff. Or so I thought...

The star of this show is the eponymous Yaksa, a Japanese Hippy swordsman with the wildest pair of bell-bottoms in the province. He can run and leap into, and even out of the screen as he takes on the encroaching hordes of Napalm Ninjas, disembodied Samurai heads, skeletons and sabres, fireballs and winged demons.

The sword is a pretty inadequate weapon because it's only effective when monsters are very close. Fortunately, littering the landscape are stone idols which yield magical weapons and abilities, such as multi-way fireballs and super leaps when Yaksa runs into them. The effectiveness of each weapon depends on Yaksa's power level, shown as a bar which shrinks as he runs into hostile fire.

Yaksa

At the end of each stage there's a boss monster, for which Yaksa needs all the extra firepower he can muster. At the end of level one, he has to fight a fire-spitting dragon for a good couple of minutes - and that's if he's got four-way fireballs! If he's only carrying his sword, forget it. Level two's main monster is a comparatively easy tentacled blob, but after leaping along level three's mid-air causeway, you have to take on a pair of giant crabs which are even tougher than the dragon!

The monsters, both large and small, are nicely drawn, but the way they're animated is not so good. Most don't have more than a couple of frames of animation, and only the Yaksa sprite moves around the screen with any semblance of smoothness. To keep the speed of the game up, everything else jerks around the screen so badly that it is difficult to work out where the hell anything is meant to be in time for you to shoot it.

Ruining the visual impression (not to mention the gameplay) even further is the very ropey 3D display system, which gives apparently stationary objects like the idols a life of their own. Jumping from platform to platform in level three is a nightmare, because you're often unsure where the next platform is supposed to be!

Yaksa has a few redeeming features, such as the level password system and the short-lived soundtracks. But with the odds so heavily stacked against it, not even these can save Yaksa from the kind of mediocrity we don't usually associate with PC Engine games.

PC Engine

Awful, confusing 3D graphics kill the gameplay of what could have been an interesting improvement on the Space Harrier theme.