This is John Harris’ review of Athena, for the Nintendo Entertainment System, with accompanying, brief lecture on Basic Videogame Design, good for one credit hour at Everything Community College.
If you thought World 6 of Super Mario Bros. was hard… ha! Adventures of Lolo III was mere child’s play. Solomon’s Key is as nothing compared to this. I’m here to tell you guys, I eat the likes of space blaster archetype Zanac for breakfast, but this one is just insane. Athena, by SNK, known best these days as the producer of late 80’s disposable income emblem Neo-Geo and umpteen thousand identical fighting games, is perhaps the most difficult of all winnable NES games. (Games which never end don’t count, and Athena does have an ending. It just seems like it lasts forever.)
The fact that Athena was very sloppily programmed doesn’t help much, either.
The story is that Athena, the Roman goddess of wisdom (and war too but the manual doesn’t mention that) is bored with her betogaed, grape-popping existence up on Mt. Olympus, so she goes off into Fantasy World for some blob-slappin’ action. (By the way, if this is actually a fantasy world, I’d sure as hell would like to meet the person whose weird-ass fantasy it is. I’d also like to ask him what the hell the boss of the fifth level is supposed to be. Guh.) I suppose this game is due points for giving us a female protagonist almost a decade before Lara Croft. The odd thing is, Athena doesn’t have anything even remotely approaching omnipotent, goddessly powers. In fact, she has a hard time deciding how high she wants to jump.
The jumping convention created in Super Mario Bros., and wisely copied by almost every other game in which jumping is an option, is that the height of the hero’s jump is determined by how long the player holds down the jump button. When you press the jump button in Athena, our little four-color goddess gives a little bounce, about two "blocks" high. Then, if you press the jump button after she lands within about a second or two, her next jump will be a huge bound, almost as tall as the screen. Her next jump after that will be similar if made within a similar time frame after landing from that one. If she waits longer than a couple of seconds, or after making two really big jumps in a row, her next jump is just the ordinary bounce sort again. You aren't the only one confused by all this. I was confused as hell, and I had to figure it out through experimentation, as the manual is no help at all and the screen gives no clues.
Athena must have been released soon after Super Mario, because it features the same kinds of block smashing gameplay, although Athena is more flexible in this regard, allowing her to use the stronger weapons to destroy blocks as well as by hitting them with her head (but only if she’s found the appropriate headgear). Unfortunately, it is super easy to be caught in a place where you need a certain item to escape, but have no way to acquire it. This is called “extremely poor game design,” folks. In these cases, you end up waiting for the interminable five minute clock to expire, killing the immortal heroine. In fact, the supposedly fallible, flesh-and-blood inhabitants of Fantasy World, with their repetitive A.I. and firing patterns, often make quick work of their divine foe, thanks to another lesson the designers failed to learn from SMB: when the player is hit, he/she should be made invulnerable for a brief period, so continued contact will not rapidly slaughter the omnipotent weakling. There must be an astounding number of notches on the sword of Horse Guy, Private 3rd Class in the Fantasy World Army, because no matter what equipment Athena may have acquired, one bad bounce and it's over.
Add to this the most convoluted win requirements of any videogame. You can play through all the levels and still not win. That’s right! Just like videogame contemporaries Solomon’s Key and Mighty Bomb Jack, there are special requirements you have to meet to get the true ending. Or any ending. In Athena, if you don’t finish the secret shopping list the game designer keeps under lock-and-key, the final boss is invulnerable! Here, you must find a key in one of the levels, then finish that level, which will then warp you to the secret world, “World of Labyrinth,” which is a murderous trial that would have caused Hercules himself to fling down his Magic Shovel of Stable Cleaning and reattempt his college entry exams. In this level, the player must scour both the top and bottom halves of the level (don’t ask) to find the Magic Harp that will make the final boss beatable. And you have to make sure to find the real harp, because the fake one will just take away everything you’re carrying. And you have to have the mystic carrying case beforehand, I believe. Oh, and if you lose a life, you lose the harp and have to go find another key and play the board all over again. The only good thing about this excruciating, immensely frustrating root canal of a level is that, despite its name, David Bowie is no where to be found.
Just so you know the sacrifices I am prepared to make for the elucidation of you, the Everything reader, concerning misshapen NES cartridges, I will have you know that indeed, I have actually won Athena. The ending, basically, is that the background changes to a castle and field, and the game locks up. Yippie! Thankfully, about the only sort of legacy this festering, loathsome, thesaurus-defying turkey, no, piece of crap, no, piece of turkey crap, has left the gaming world is that the art style is awfully similar to Crystalis, SNK’s later Zelda wannabe, which is thankfully a much better (though still kinda average) game.