Urusei Yatsura: Stay with You

~ URUSEI YATSURA ~

Hudson Soft

CD-ROM

1990

So here we've got a high school lecher along with a green-haired alien girl who wants his stick. Annoyed by the lad's wandering eye, the extraterrestrial "cutie" occasionally gives him a huge electrical shock in a futile effort to keep him in line. And off they go on an adventure that takes them from familiar school hallways to the frozen far reaches of outer space. Wonderful.

When I play an anime-based digital comic and I'm not familiar with the source material, it's nice if the game at least looks good and moves along at a reasonably quick pace to gain and maintain my attention. Even Nadia was able to achieve the elusive level of so-so-ness by delivering in these respects, but Uruseu Yatsura couldn't match the feat--at least not for a good long while. Its art isn't very good and takes up but a small portion of the screen, and single poor-looking slides often hang around for way too long as characters chat.

The funny parts aren't funny, the spooky parts aren't spooky, and the characters aren't appealing with the possible exception of... a lemming.

Not satisfied with paining players through its slow, boring plot progression and bad looks, UY also "features" a dumb tile-sliding puzzle game, and you can indeed end up with Game Overs (although the ones I experienced were very easy to get around). And then there's the somewhat disturbing shower scene. (Let's just say it ain't exactly Cadet Babbette hiding in there.)

But UY suddenly rises from the doldrums with an entertaining burst at the end of its second "Act" and proceeds at an above-mediocre level for the balance of the adventure. Act 3 has you visit jungles, deserts, war zones... and bunnies at tea. You'll need to save your allies by finding your way across the desert, discovering passwords that grant access to prison cells, playing lever-based puzzle games, and making doorknobs out of gems. And during the brief fourth Act, you'll run into a number of weird characters, including a boxing cyclops whom you must engage in menu-driven fisticuffs. There's even some nice art at the very end.

UY turns things around during its second half by presenting puzzles and tasks that call for fairly high-level interaction rather than the dull, mindless button clicking one must partake in early in the game. It still shouldn't shoot up to the top of anyone's "digital comics to get" list, but it's not one to dismiss out of hand either.