Yu Yu Hakusho: Spirit Detective (GBA)
Even before The Game Hoard solidified as a concept, I was incredibly reluctant to part with any video games in my collection. However, when I was younger, there were a few games I did sell, and one of those games happened to be the Game Boy Advance title Yu Yu Hakusho: Spirit Detective (or Yu Yu Hakusho Ghost Files: Spirit Detective depending on if you can see that awkwardly squeezed in potential subtitle on the box) . As time wore on the contents of the game faded from memory and I became curious why this game was one of the few I was ever willing to part with, but when I decided to give it another whirl, it was all too clear why I had no qualms in getting rid of it. It was almost like my younger self was protecting me from this game, as I uncovered what may be one of my least favorite games of all time.
The first hint that something was amiss about this game was the moment I turned the game on. The opening logos, scratchy music, and poorly inserted art from the anime this game is based on at first made me suspicious that I had somehow stumbled upon a bootleg version of the game. Much of the menus and scenes in the game seem to be constructed as if this full-priced Game Boy Advance title was actually one of those free flash games you’d find on the web to serve as a tie-in to some popular T.V. show. I will say the moments when stills from the show appear are somewhat nice despite that and they’re probably the only really good visual touch to the game as everything else seems to straining against the limitations of the Game Boy Advance rather than working with them. Most characters are featureless human shapes and even some the creatures you fight like the constantly recolored panthers look sloppy. The music is the real sin though, as most of the songs are amateurish loops that repeat quickly and won’t be stopped even by pausing.
The areas you explore are at least better visually, in that you can make things out clearly. The areas are, however, incredibly generic and prone to repeating themselves, a fact made worse because they are also incredibly large for some reason despite having very little to do in them. This plays into the issues with the gameplay, as Yu Yu Hakusho: Spirit Detective mostly consists of walking and punching. This is not a reduction for the sake of making a point nor is it being done for the sake of humor. Multiple early missions actually require you to only walk around the large town to complete the level’s objective, either forbidding fighting, making it impossible due to the character you play as in that mission, or making fighting pointless since most fights can and should just be walked away from.
The incentive for picking a fight in this game is an experience system that gradually increases your character’s stats, but the fighting itself is so incredibly boring that leveling up is not worth the effort and if you do need to level up for some reason, it’s still not going to put up a good fight. Your basic attack consists of a three hit combo across most of the playable characters, and while you do get some attacks that pull on spirit power as you level up and progress in the game, they’re really only there if you want to get a bit saucy with your attacks. Most every enemy, from the standard punks at the start to bosses throughout the course of the game, can be defeated with your basic punch combo because it stuns enemies enough that all you have to do is hammer the A button until they’re dead. Some enemies might get in a swipe or two between your punches, but the experience points they drop can add up to refill your health with a level up or they might just drop hearts that offset the damage you took. Even boss arenas will usually have constantly regenerating health orbs so you never need to worry if the boss is hitting you too much during your standard attack. Just punch them until you need to briefly retreat and heal up, then repeat the process. Your spirit powers mostly boil down to stronger versions of your basic attacks, a projectile, or something gimmicky like Hiei’s teleport that is only really good for a few moments of level traversal. The spirit powers mostly don’t do well in combat because, unlike your basic combo, they can be interrupted by enemy strikes and often have a short wind-up, and enemies will almost always try and be in your face unless they have projectiles as well.
Across the 26 levels of the game, most of the experience boils down to walking to assigned locations, sometimes flipping a switch, and getting into the most bog standard battles ever conceived. They do sometimes throw in some pretty simple minigames like the arcade portion or have you navigate an area that is a little bit maze-like, but mostly it’s just a series of stages for the incredibly simple combat. Enemies rarely can handle your basic combo and bosses are too easy thanks to the health pick-ups, but rarely they do realize they should put in an enemy that requires a bit of thought… or movement, since most enemies you can just stand in place and punch. These exceptions include some enemies that are out of your reach, so you have to move around a little and then fire the spirit gun to take them down. Another boss throws explosive shurikens that you need to avoid so they bounce back and hit him. And lastly, the creatively named Demon 1 has the amazing ability not to be stunned by your basic punches, meaning you have to walk around a little to fight him. There are some failures in variety like the second member of the triad who is literally just about using your ultimate spirit powers a few times to kill, but at least it wasn’t another punchfest. Another feature that makes fights less interesting is that the game lets you swap out characters after a certain point in the story, giving you four potential health bars but the same combo across all four so that the already brain dead combat has given you another method of staying alive. Perhaps the only time you are in peril thanks to this is when the game throws a bunch of enemies at you at once, although you can usually line them up to punch repeatedly if you’re in the right spot. Only the small hooded Jawa-like enemies can break through this by getting you stuck in a loop of draining attacks, but just like any battle, you can just avoid them if you don’t feel like dealing with that.
At this point you might be thinking that I just chose the most boring approach to combat because it was the most effective. That would be ignoring the issues I outlined with trying to use special skills in regular fights, but I would like to pose a hypothetical situation to help you better understand this game’s design. Imagine a game where you come across a bridge over a small gap. You can run across the bridge to quickly bypass it, or if you are looking for something marginally more interesting, you can jump over the small gap even though it will take a bit more time to execute. Which option would you choose? In this one instance, I might even jump over that gap just for kicks, but imagine now that after that bridge and gap are hundreds more like it stretching as far out as you can see with no variation in sight. Would you continue to do the slower jumps that are only marginally more interesting, or would you just run across the bridges to get it over with more quickly in the hopes you might see something slightly different down the path eventually? That is how Yu Yu Hakusho: Spirit Detective’s combat feels. You either go the easy and boring route to get it done more quickly, or you try to spice it up with a still limited range of options and slow down an experience that still won’t be fun.
Perhaps one thing that could blind a few people to the major flaws with Yu Yu Hakusho: Spirit Detective is that it actually adheres pretty closely to the show when you aren’t actually playing it. You get to play as most of the characters from the show you would expect, playing as the titular spirit detective Yusuke and his allies Kuwabara, Hiei, and Kurama as they take down demons and dark spirits by harnessing their spirit energy, but more unexpected appearances are put in by Botan and Kayko who also get the spotlight in their own levels. Levels follow the basic structure of the anime, covering most of what happened during what is called The Spirit Detective Saga. Because of this, you do get the rare deviation from the standard gameplay because the anime itself had a deviation, but the show itself conveys the story much better and is a lot more interesting for it. The scenes in the game are usually just two alternating text boxes juxtaposed over a backdrop of the current area, but the game sometimes forgets it hasn’t introduced certain info and hopes that you’ve watched the show enough to remember it from there. A lot of tone is absent as well due to the static character portraits used to represent the speakers, and the dialog is heavily simplified so the scene can be shuffled through so the game can get back to its drawn out battles. If you weren’t familiar with the show, the game won’t sell you on it, and if you are, you’ll likely get through the plot because you had that outside knowledge.
Much like the minigames, the game does try to introduce a few elements elsewhere that fall equally flat. There are segments where lasers turn off and on at timed intervals and you are supposed to time your movement between them to avoid getting hurt… but they do so little damage you can just walk through them and know you’ll be able to heal soon after. There’s a segment where you are meant to avoid being detected by surveillance cameras, but if you get caught, some guards appear to fight you who are weaker than most of the enemies seen elsewhere in the game. When you beat the game (after a legitimately challenging final boss is sabotaged by the game literally introducing cloned versions of easier bosses as the final unnecessary battle), you unlock a tournament mode where you play as a new character (who plays exactly the same as Yusuke) and fight most of the bosses again in the same kind of permissive boss arena as most of them were fought in before. Basically, even when it attempts to diversify, this game still falls flat on its face.
THE VERDICT: Yu Yu Hakusho: Spirit Detective isn’t quite the disaster that games like Bubsy 3D are where it’s barely functional or something like Rogue Warrior is where the game is designed exclusively around a poor idea, but it still has just as many design problems that it certainly nears their level of failure. Despite trending pretty closely to the events of the show, the entire gameplay side of things is too dependent on an uninvolved combat system and its gameplay mostly hinges either on that or the slow navigation of large empty environments. For how faithful the story elements are, the gameplay more closely adapts the mechanical tedium of something like hammering nails, but at least if you were doing that then you’d be doing something constructive.
And so, I give Yu Yu Hakusho: Spirit Detective for Game Boy Advance…
An ATROCIOUS rating. Yu Yu Hakusho fans deserve better than this travesty. Despite how much of the structural things it gets right in regards to following the show’s storyline, it completely fails to capture the feel of the show, the things that would make people actually interested in playing as Yusuke and his friends instead of just watching them. Everything in this game revolves around a single brainless combo that can take down most every opponent, with the more interesting skills punished due to how aggressive enemies can be when they aren’t stuck on the other end of your A button presses. Battles are boringly easy and the only other things to do in this game are dull minigames, constant walking to where a compass points you ,or bumbling around in search of a switch or door. The only thing that will really keep anyone going in this game is the cheap thrill of recognizing things from the anime, and although it’s not a long game, the tedium of all its activities will make it feel like it takes forever to complete.
Yu Yu Hakusho: Spirit Detective completely fails to capture the feel of the anime, perhaps more accurately capturing the feel of commercials instead: something you have to suffer through to get to what you came to see. The only problem there is the story that the game does borrow from the show is poorly conveyed, meaning you’re sitting through the boring padding just to see a faint glimmer of the show you like.