Athena

     Well, things started out a bit shaky in terms of game quality. I mean, Athena's titular first appearance (or at least an appearance that influenced the Athena of today) is on that list of games that every gaming humor site has to make fun of, like Daikatana or Deadly Towers. It's like an unspoken law or something. (-edit: just this morning, Something Awful posted an Athena article. See my point?) So, I won't go into excruciating detail about it. Suffice it to say it wasn't the best Greco-Roman NES platformer adventure I played.

     Basically, for the unitiated, the plot follows the goddess Athena on a quest to relieve her boredom. So she puts on a little red bikini (a subject explored with much love and care by the awesome Tong Poo) and wanders around beating up indistinct critters, as seen in every other NES game ever made. Really, with a vast wealth of fantasy beasts from Greek mythos at your disposal, you'd think they could come up with better enemy grunt types than horse-headed knights.

     As she explores the Land of [whatever], certain enemies drop things like helmets and shields and whatnot, which have different colors and properties that aren't readily discernible from the properties of her own head. I guess the bikini thing is some sort of parallel to Arthur's boxers from Ghosts n' Goblins- an out-of period piece of garb possessed of innate sexiness. Kudos to the Greek god of spandex.

Crystalis

       Athena and Kensou supposedly both show up in bit parts during the course of the game, probably as townspeople. In any case, I can't remember them and am just going by my sources. (And a helpful email attachment. See right.)

Psycho Soldier

     After apparently getting tired of all that excitement, Athena was resurrected in modern day Japan to fight alien mutants in the streets with incredible psychic powers. She also picked up an energetic young partner by the name of Kensou who could also fling big balls of energy around with plucky abandon.

     Largely unremarkable in terms of gameplay, Psycho Soldier was a landmark game in certain respects. For starters, it had a fully digitized opening song. Yes, song, as in with vocals. Granted, in this post-Playstation era of CD quality sampling and what have you, a little J-pop ditty (translated in the most insipid manner possible into English) doesn't sound as impressive on its own, but in 1986... yeah. Probably not too impressed by that either. The song also lead to her future image as a pop idol. Who blows crap up with her mind.

     The game also introduces several motifs that come up again in her later appearances, such as Psycho Balls, those little beads, and gratuitous phoenix/dragon imagery. See sidebar at right.

     As I mentioned before, aside from the whole schoolgirl fighting aliens while causing somewhat mass destruction angle, the game itself isn't particularly outstanding. The thing that really irks me about the whole game is the auto scroll. Isolated auto-scrolling segments in a game are bad enough but the entirety of the game pushes you along at a steady clip. Take a moment and reflect on that, you kids these days, with your non-linear plots and FMV, CD-ROM software and memory cards.... there was once a time when games grabbed you by the shoulders and marched you for levels on end with no food, water, or entertainment value. And that's the way we liked it!

FIRE! FIRE! PSYCHO SOLDJAH!

Athena's infamous first appearance plagues her through the rest of her games, from the inexplicable sword in Psycho Soldier to-wait, scratch that. The entire fricking Psycho Soldier GAME could fall under 'inexplicable.' The red bikini motif continues through much of the KOF series, appearing randomly during her Shining Crystal Bit DM and her alternate striker of 2000, Goddess Athena with flame sword. (above: hidden ending to KOF '97 featuring not only Athena-garb uh, Athena and Psycho Soldier Kensou, but the NES-style Ikari Warriors.

In the King of Fighters series, Athena is notorious for the fact her costume and voice actress changed with each consecutive game. But certain elements from the prior Athena/ Psycho Soldier games remained the same. Her costume is generally red, and the purple beads are the same beads that act kind of like rotating Options in Psycho. (Actually, they work pretty much as seen in that aforementioned Shining Crystal thing.)

She's generally associated with the spirit of the Phoenix, which she can transform into in Psycho Soldier and uses as the prefix to certain attacks. (Yes, she's yelling PHOENIX Arrow. Not the other P-word.)

Strangely, KOF seems to have left out the part where she gets ganged by a swarm of maggots, and levels a small office building with her mind. Pity.

I forgot to mention before KOF, they called him Kensu. The 'Asina' spelling, well, that's unique to Crystalis.