0 to Z of Playstation 1 Games - Athena Awakening From The Ordinary Life

Athena Awakening From The Ordinary Life is a 3D third person adventure games with rhythm and puzzles elements, the game was developed by Japan Vistec also known as just Vistec, the game was published by SNK, the game is in fact a spin off of SNK’s King of Fighters series.

The games was released exclusively in Japan on the 11^th March 1999 for the Playstation as a 3 disc game, the game would later get a release for the PSP and Playstation 3 on the 30^th of August 2007 and in 2012 for the Playstation Vita on the 28^th of August, all three releases were via the PSN network.

The games main character is Athena Asamiya a regular in the King of Fighters series from SNK, before that though she appeared in the 1986 arcade platformer simply called Athena. She was also a character in the 1986 action arcade game Psycho Soldier.

In addition to the future and past games that Athena has appeared in, the character also appeared in a short lived live action series staring Kei Ishibashi as Athena. The drama series aired for just 13 episodes, the series suffered from budget constrains as a result the Sci-Fi heavy nature of the game was reduced for the tv show.

The game is primarily a 3D adventure games with the player controlling Athena, directing her to talk to pople and resolve conflicts at hand, the main story of the game is presented to the player largely through long FMV sequences.

During parts of the game the player will need to use Athena’s psycho powers to perform various tasks such as teleporting, mind reading and solving puzzles, which sometimes involves using audio visuals clues that the player must then repeat for example specific memorizing a specific button combination. Doing this right will allow the player to use Athena’s powers, doing it wrong though will have consequences with Athena suffering psychic damage which will drain some of her health.

The game also features a basic turn based battle system again the game calls upon the audio visual clues with the player having to perform similar tasks but to a much stricter time limit, correctly completing this will result in Athena being able to use her powers in battle failing will result in the enemies landing a strike.

The year is 2018 and scientific breakthroughs are progressing at an alarming rate, under the Tantauls system the likes of dinosaurs, clones and mecha are no longer the figments of fantasy and peoples imaginations, they can now be constructed in real life.

 

Tantauls regulates society down to the finest detail, creating vast automated and technologically advanced cities on land and sea, however this government organization hides a dark conspiracy, this conspiracy surrounds a young school girl and her brain waves.

Athena Asamiya is this young schoolgirl who believes her life to just as normal as any young schoolgirl, but her life changes forever once her psycho powers develop and begin to manifest, it is now up to Athena to understand her new found powers and uncover the secrets of Tantauls,

This being a Japanese only release critic reviews are hard to come by with just one for Athena Awakening From The Ordinary Life, this comes from German publication Video Games who rated this game at a 50/100. The review critical of the game being in Japanese (the face they must have had to import it didn’t give it away).

They were also critical of the lack of voice work in the game with conversations between character just being text boxes, they did have some praise for the game though calling it kind of fun with the unusual gameplay and many well done rendered movies (fmv’s). however the games length was the main stumbling block with the review onto the second disc within 40 minutes, concluding the review called the game a real freak of a title and a hard to find one as well.

Heading over to GameFAQs we find one user review waiting for us from Mysticcat who rated the game at a rather disappointing 1.5/5, Mysticcat concluded with neither buy or rent this title, moving on we now have the GameFAQs user ratings.

The game has a total of sixteen user rating, with the game averaging out at a rating of 3.41/5, Mysticcat’s review score is not included in the review score average with no 1.5/5 rating in the overall score breakdown, which sees generally a pretty good overall reception from users, with the majority of reviews scores between a 3/5 and a 4.5/5.

Only two users have scored this game below a 3/5 the first gave the game an average 2.5/5, the final user rated the game at a lowly 1/5. Moving on to the games difficulty again we have a good number of users rating this category with fourteen in total with a large majority rating the game as having just the right difficulty level.

The remaining users who don’t make up the 78.57% who think the game has just the right difficulty level rate this game as either being on the easy side or just simple, with just one user rating the latter, overall the game rates as easy to just right even with the huge leaning towards it having just the right difficulty.

Finally on to the games lifespan with the game not being overly long, the twelve users that rated this category are split between 8 hours and 12 hours with the game with 8 hours just edging it overall, averaging out the games lifespan comes in at around the nine and a half hour mark.

This is the part of 0 to Z where is visit four online retailers and see what the availability of the title is, and what price you would be looking at if you wanted to pick this title up, the sites that I will be using for this are Amazon.com, eStarland.com, retrogames.co.uk and Gamedude.com I know the last one is very location specific, but from a podcast I listen to, I’ve heard they have a huge stock of older games, Ebay has now been dropped unless the game is unavailable at other retailers.

So lets get down to business with Gamedude who unsurprisingly don’t stock this Japanese only release, same goes for Retrogames.co.uk as well as eStarland.com. So we next move over to Amazon.com in search of a copy of this game where we in face find a plentiful supply of the game available.

Like the previous game we covered Atelier Elie, the used copies are generally in pretty good shape with a good and very good condition used copy of this game available for almost identical prices at around the $13 mark give or take a few cents, both these copies come with free shipping from Japan as well.

Used prices generally reach a peak of around $20 with the usual few overpriced or inflated shipping costs copies floating around, new copy prices do take a fairly sizeable jump up from the $20 price range, nowhere near as bad as Atelier Elie’s but you will be looking at around $60 for a new copy, again plenty come with free shipping as well. Prices for a new copy do steadily rise from here with prices currently peaking at around the $89 mark

Written by

P J Gibbon