Yawara

~ YAWARA! ~

SOFIX / Hudson Soft

Super CD-ROM

1992

This is a pitifully bland digital comic in which you play a goofy journalist guy who, along with his sidekick (a chubby cameraman), goes out hunting for scoops and scandals. He takes a particular interest in the eponymous judo girl. It's a lame premise, and the story is uneventful. Long stretches are spent on chatter-sessions, with the numerous newsroom meetings leaving me dozing every time.

Scenes intended to liven up the proceedings typically fall flat. Even the judo matches suck.

It doesn't help that the characters aren't very likable. The protagonist has these wide owl eyes that make him look like a freak, and he receives regular beatdowns. Now, the guy in the far superior 3x3 Eyes also got tossed around like a ragdoll, but at least that guy was in major-league fucked-up situations with scary, fucked-up characters. This bum suffers his defeats at the hands of other nerds, who revel in hurling him off buses and into garbage cans.

But he's certainly not alone among Yawara!'s "stars" when it comes to making an unfavorable impression. Even Yawara herself isn't particularly cute or interesting.

Not that every aspect of the comic is bad. The graphics aren't very colorful, but the colors that are there are nice and bright, making the game easy on the eyes. The music also isn't completely awful. But these somewhat-decent aesthetic elements aren't enough to make up for the boring story and repulsive characters.

The game is very accessible, however. There are no Game Overs, no quizzes, and no first-person mazes. You typically don't even have a choice as to what your character will do; you just keep clicking the given commands and proceed through the scripted events. This accessibility would seem to make the game ideal for those who are new to digital comics, but I'm afraid that Yawara! is so uninteresting that it'll turn newcomers off from the genre for good.