Atari's dabbled in the anime videogame market for some time, achieving success with its Dragon Ball Z games. Well they're at it again, this time with Yu Yu Hakusho. The popular TV series has been converted into a fighting game called Dark Tournament that comes full loaded, but some flaws with the game engine and bland visuals really keep the game from reaching its full potential. Instead, it's simply a bust.

In case you don't know, Yu Yu Hakusho is an anime series about a fourteen-year old boy named Yusuke Urameshi. A trouble maker not known for helping others, Yusuke shows compassion for a boy who's about to get run over by a car and dives in front of the vehicle to save the child, risking and ultimately losing his own life. Dead, Yusuke runs into a 700 year old ruler who brings him back to life, and when he does come back, Yusuke can see supernatural beasts hiding amongst the living. As a spirit detective, he hunts down various dead freaks. In Atari's game, he and his companions take part in the Dark Tournament, a tourney that attracts the most dangerous demons the underworld has ever seen.

That's the gist of what's going on, but honestly, once you look past the game's anime flash (believe me, it isn't hard) what we have is your standard fighting game. The game's Dark Tournament mode is the story portion. You go through various battles peppered with cut scenes in between (some unique to the game, an impressive feature), and while those are fun to watch, the game is dreadful. For starters, it forces you to wade through training because it's part of the story, an asinine decision by the dev team, because I don't want to have to do that with any fighter. I just want to jump in and beat people/things up, and if I want to learn the intricacies of the system and practice my fighter's moves, it should be entirely left up to me. Rather, this force fed series of training sessions mars the opening of the game.

Once you actually start to fight opponents, you're singles and tag team situations much like Marvel Vs. Capcom 2 or Dead of Alive. With the press of a button, you can sub out characters and that's fine, but at least make it a smooth transition. The gameplay is so sluggish that button presses sometimes don't register, and when they do, you're treated to a brief loading session while the next character is prepared to appear on screen. Even worse, once they fly into view, they can be easily attacked before you have a chance to block, so if they're low on energy, you're finished.

As far as the actual fighting engine is concerned, Dark Tournament is simply one of the worst fighting games that I've played this hardware generation. If you do the correct moves you'll unleash lightning-fast combos upon your opponents, but just like tagging out, that's dependent upon whether the controls work. Even when I flawlessly pressed buttons to do moves they didn't register on screen. This happens during Dark Tournament's tutorial, so you're given an idea of what to expect, but during actual combat this just doesn't fly. Enemies pounce on you as best they can (because they too are sluggishly animated), and they always seem to come up with the right moves to take you out quick.

If you can put up with the horrendous combat, the game features several modes of play. You can of course beat up a friend, and the selection of fighters (over 25) is satisfying. Fans will recognize many familiar faces, including Kurama, Hiei, Kuwabara, and Genkai, so it's definitely cool that Atari included a lot of characters, but they also dropped some neat modes into Dark Tournament. There's Arcade (battle in a tournament against 10 fighters), Survival (beat nine fighters in a row), Dark Tournament Plus (an enhanced version of the Dark Tournament that features extra cut scenes and bonus items), and the DT Token Game, a strategy game played using tokens you acquire during the Dark Tournament mode.

Graphically, Yu Yu looks very bland. The cel-shaded characters look all right, but the backgrounds are sparsely filled and lack detail. The environments are destructible, but by destructible I mean, "Wow! I deflected an energy attack, it hit the side of the boat and a wall fell down! That was terrible!" On the aural side of things, the game's soundtrack is forgettable, borderline annoying.

If you're a diehard Yu Yu Hakusho fan and must own everything based on the anime, chances are you may enjoy what Atari's put together, but fighting fans will know right away that the game is seriously lacking. It's slow, sloppy, and not much fun, and where videogames are concerned, that's a recipe for disaster.