Prince of Tennis (Images: Konami Japan's official Prince of Tennis website)
By Ashsura
System: Plasystation 2
Developer: Konami

Introduction

I played a lot of Prince of Tennis games, some of them (GBA) were enjoyable, but lacked something, and some were downright…different. Smash Hit however…like the name says, is a smashing…hit.

Review

The most important thing about this game is that it’s a tennis game. It looks like a regular tennis game, and plays like a regular tennis game. However, people who watched and read the manga/anime know that Prince of Tennis isn’t normal tennis.

It’s really simple to learn, using the analogs (left one mostly) to move, and the O and X buttons to hit the ball. The R1 and either O or X will allow your player to use their special skills. The thing about this game is that they have a WIDE amount of players from the anime (don’t know about the manga) with their own special skills that allow you to kick the pants out of either the CPU or your friends. For instance, Inui, the Data guy, can see the point where the ball will land, giving him an advantage. Not only that, but each player has their VA from the anime, which makes it a little bit more enjoyable.

In this game, there are three different playable modes, the first, is “Free” mode. This allows you to choose a game in singles, doubles, the players you want, the playing field, and how many games you want to go through. This mode is great to play against your friends or become better at it.

The next one is “Doubles Championship” (a rough guess on the mode's name) in which you pick a player and a partner, train them up until their trust is high, and when the time comes, play against other double partners. This mode is fun, with a bunch of “mini-games” to train for you and your doubles partner to be better double players. The downfall of this part of the game is that if you choose someone like Tezuka (who has one of the best status in the game) and someone else who’s good, it’s hard to lose a game at all.

The third mode is “Story Mode” Where you play matches that have taken place in the anime series. This is a little bit of a problem if you don’t understand Japanese, like the match where you play as Fuji and can’t let the other guy get one point .

Conclusion

This game is really addictive to play for me, at times, it can be very high paced and action packed with a large number of gravity defying tennis balls. The problems I have with Prince of Tennis is that there’s no Sakuno in it >< (well, dunno yet), besides that new players can find it difficult to hit special moves like Kaido’s “Boomerang Snake” and other specials like Ryoma’s “Drive A” which is mainly used for hitting the other player (unless your smart enough to get out of the way from a speeding ball, then it’ll most likely go out). Other then that, this game is pretty fun, with a a good selection of different players, moves, music and nice looking graphics, this game really is a…smash…

Ashsura