	Yu Yu Hakusho - Dark Tournament
	Developer: Digital Fiction Publisher: Atari Release Date: Out Now Players: 1 - 2	Words By:
Over the years the beat ‘em up videogame has changed a lot. From the days of IK+, the forgettable Street Fighter, to the truly unforgettable Street Fighter II. Everything then went 3D, and we had Virtua Fighter, Tekken, and later Soul Calibur. Gamecell’s current favourite is Tekken 5, with its superb combat mechanics, fantastic balance, and well.. it looked outrageously good to boot. There is now a new fighting game on PlayStation2. It’s Yu Yu Hakusho – Dark Tournament. Apparently it’s based upon a popular anime shown on Cartoon Network. I would have looked into this for some research, but unfortunately I have a job, so I can’t be seen sitting at home in the daytime watching cartoons (I would of probably flicked over to Tom and Jerry anyway). Over twenty-five characters are in the game, which are from the TV show. There are eight arenas to fight in, which I presume are sets from the TV programme. However none of this actually matters because game itself plays so badly you won’t care what the background looks like. You’ll be too busy trying to figure out how to jump, which you’ll soon enough realise it requires two buttons to be pressed at once. Sigh.. Was it that Capcom and Namco don’t know how to make controls work, or did they think they’d try these new methods for a laugh? Each character has many moves and combos, but unfortunately unlike any other fighting/combat game out there; you cannot break a combo whilst in the middle of it. So if you realise what you’re doing is bad, and are going to get countered, you can’t suddenly break the animation, and start something else. Come on guys, you can do this beautifully in game like Tekken, and even non-specific fighting games like Devil May Cry 3. You need this sort of thing in fighting games. There is a lack of responsiveness, and the result of this is a lack of any real control over your character, and I don’t need to tell you how bad that is for a fighting game. Each character has a certain set of devastating combos, which if performed correctly, can do fatal damage (or knock them out of the ring) within seconds of starting a match. The usual game modes are included; Arcade, VS, Practice etc. You also have a story mode where you play through a series of characters, with cut scenes presumably taken directly from the anime TV programme. It follows the story of Yusuke Urameshi, a fourteen-year-old boy who makes the ultimate sacrifice trying to save a boy who is standing in the middle of a road with a car bearing down on him. He visits Spirit World, where he meets Koenma, the ruler of the strange place. The ruler says he will give Yusuke the gift of life again if he performs certain tasks for him, so off he goes and the story mode begins. In addition to this, there is a Token Challenge mode. You collect tokens in the other game modes by winning battles and progressing. You can then use them in a specific mode where you play against AI. Graphically the game takes on a cell-shaded look to give it a similar appearance to the anime programme, and it does remain faithful in some areas. The characters are reasonably well detailed, until they move and seemingly have many missing animations - perhaps this is why you can’t break combos? The arenas you play in, which only have a very small play area before you get a ring-out, have limited detail and are just rather bland. There is just nothing much going on in the backgrounds, and the texturing is so flat. Just because its cell shaded, shouldn’t mean games should look flat, take a look at Jet Set Radio, or more recently The Legend of Zelda: The Wind Waker, to see what detail can be put into cell shaded graphics. To be perfectly honest, I really can’t see why anyone but a big fan of the anime would go out and buy this game. There are many fighting games on PlayStation2, and the majority of them are head and shoulders above what Digital Fiction have failed to achieve with Yu Yu. It’s a shame really as it could have been fun, but it just doesn’t deliver the goods and fighting game essentials that people expect in 2005. My advice would be to go and find Street Fighter II Collection or Tekken 5 in the bargain bin, and buy Yu Yu on DVD for your anime fix.

Best Bits
- Lots of characters from the TV show.
- Plenty of unlockable stuff.
- Story mode is great, if you’re into the anime.

Worst Bits
- Very basic combat system.
- Unresponsive controls.
- No depth to the characters moves.


by: DC