Astyanax

The Short


Pros
- Fun action-platformer that reminds me a bit of Castlevania
- Big, good looking sprites and excellent background art
- Music is also quite standout
- Charging attack power is a cool idea that eliminates button mashing
- Game strikes a good balance of difficulty from beginning to end
- I dig the Greek-ish theme
- Has BUILT IN CHEATS!

Cons
 - Having a big sprite can lead to cheap hits
- Many bosses and mini-bosses can just be cornered and stuck in place
- Can be difficult to completely gauge hit boxes/distance your weapon reaches
- Some cheap pit deaths (World 4-1 I'm looking at you)
- Dying at any point in the stage starts you over. No mid-level checkpoints here!
- That cover art looks freaking terrible

Astyanax: The Quest to Legally Change Your Name

The Long

Astyanax is an action platformer. It's also the name of the main character, whose parents clearly hated him because they named him freaking "Astyanax." As he says in the opening cutscene: "It's Greek. I think." Way to go, dude. You have the weirdest name ever and you didn't even wiki it.

Turns out Astyanax is the son of Hector of Greek mythology, one of the key players in the battle of Troy (from the Illiad). So he's got that going for him, even though his name would be a pain in the butt to fill out on scantrons. 

Anyway, Astyanax as a game was one I never really played until very recently. I'd heard a bit about it before, and my local retro game store always seems to have like fifteen copies for some reason (always a good sign...). After a while I finally caved and picked it up, and after some initial frustrations...I actually kind of dig it. 

Purple skeletons? That's some Castlevania level crap right there. 

The story of Astyanax is pretty silly. Astyanax (the character, not the game) is just some regular anime high school freshman, chillin with his homies who I'm assuming also have weird names. That is, until a fairy named "Cutie" shows up and whisks him away to a magical world to save some hot princess babe from a guy who looks like a viking and his assistant, Skeletor. At least, I think this is the plot; the text scroll is so tediously slow during every cutscene it makes it hard to sit through. But hey, at least all the cutscenes look cool if they are insanely slow going.

The point being that Astyanax (again, the character not the game) turns into a Greek Warrior Badass™ and is given a magic axe that turns into other weapons to murder stuff with. And thus our adventure begins...

More like Ass-tyanax. Thank you, I'll be here all night. 

Astyanax (the game, not the character) is a fairly standard action platformer with only one...or maybe two real unique bits. Astayax (the character not that...you know what? You get it. Besides, I totally already did this joke before) first has a bunch of...really big sprites. As you can see from the screenshots, they are a bit chunkier than normal action platformers. Personally, I like it because it gives the game a unique style, but it also means enemies are bigger and you have less room to play around in. Can be a bit tricky.

The other gimmick is the "PW" bar at the bottom. Similar to Secret of Mana, after Astyanax swings his strength must recharge if he wants to do a full power attack. The longer you wait, the more damage it does, which means button mashing quickly becomes ineffective. It's a cool trick that works very well, especially since the hit detection in THIS game actually works (that's right, another Secret of Mana jab).

The game is colorful and distinct. I like how Astayanx "pops" out of the background.

In terms of gameplay, Astyanax actually reminds me a lot of Castlevania, if not quite as clunky as the original game. This is an action platformer were you are best rewarded by taking your time and being careful (as the PW meter helps push home) and accessing jumps and enemies before you. While it isn't nearly as hard as Castlevania, it still invokes that same feeling that you can "get better" at the game through patience, repeats, and memorization. The game can be pretty difficult at first if you just plow through it (again, like Castlevania), but to those who approach it carefully there's a lot of fun to be had here.

This is probably due to the relative leniency in the game's difficulty. To be honest, I made it all the way to the Stage 3 boss without ever knowing how to use my magic (labeled with an SP bar on the bottom) because I had no idea how to do it. Turns out it's Up+B (again, Castlevania). Way to fail at games, Nathan. 

Nathan vs Learning How To Play The Damn Game

Regardless, this game is considerably less cheap than many other "hard" NES games. The infamous "jump back" when you are hit that seems to permeate these types of games isn't nearly as awful (I didn't find it flinging me off pits too often), bosses have easy patterns that even a novice gamer will figure out through trial-and-error, and you are constantly rewarded with a satisfying explosion whenever you dice an enemy to bits. 

There are a few minor annoyances, the main one being the constantly spawning blob-amoebae things that seem to be in every stage. Seriously, they're like the Medusa heads only smaller and more of them. Luckily they are easy to kill but still...every stage seems to have tons of flying things.

Another minor gripe is the fact that the distance your sword reaches is hard to fully determine. To be honest, you actually swing a few pixels past his slashing arc, meaning you can be further away than you think you need to be in most cases. That's probably actually a good thing (the longer range the better), but the dissonance between the graphic and the attack threw me off for a bit. 

You took the words right out of my mouth, Cutie. 

You have three available magics: a time-stop move, a fireball spread, and a room-clearing lightning. What's obnoxious is how you switch between them. You'd think it would be the Select button since, you know, you are selecting magic, but no...Select doesn't do anything at all. After experimentation I finally figured it out: You have to pause the game (which doesn't bring up a menu or anything; it just pauses it) and then press Up or Down on the D-Pad to change your magic. Alright?

You also have three weapon types you can get, which increase in power as you upgrade them, but in truth you should stay on tier 2 (the spiky sword). For some reason mana costs change based on the weapon you have, and the spiky sword (while doing middle of the road damage) makes all your magic super cheap. Time freezing enemies forever? You bet!

I'm gettin' some Capcom vibes from this tune.

As stated, I really dig the look of Astyanax. It has a bright, colorful pallet with excellent pixel art and big sprites, and I also like the Greek mythology theme it has going on. The music is also very good throughout, as are the sound effects. Overall, it's a solid package, and while only a few songs are memorable (like the one above), it still leaves a good enough impression as a whole.

Is that the demon from Demon's Crest? Also, that background is CRAZY!

I actually didn't have very high expectations going into Astyanax, but after playing through it a few times I really started digging it. It does have a few other things I didn't mention, like the fact that if you die anywhere on a stage it dumps you at the very, very beginning (even if you are at a boss...no checkpoints here!) and drops your weapon down a level. But it also has built-in cheats you can enter in the title screen, so no Game Genie is required if you are a lazy cheater!

But, to be honest, you probably won't need them. Despite a few difficult stages, Astyanax strikes a fair difficulty from start to end. And with unlimited continues and a fairly forgiving life bar, through practice this is a totally beatable NES game. It's easier than stupid Karnov at least. 

If you have any affinity for the action-platformers of the 8-bit era, Astyanax is absolutely worth picking up. I'm honestly surprised this game isn't as well known as its contemporaries, considering it is a completely solid game from start to finish. 

Four out of five stars. 

I was gonna end with a Golden Axe joke, but I got nothing. Insert your own humor here.