The Classic Arcade and Console Era (1972-1989) - Psycho Soldier
A cooperative multilane shooter from SNK featuring a pop idol psychic warrior who’s far more famous than the game she starred in.
RELEASE DATE: 1987
DEVELOPER / PUBLISHER: SNK Corporation
BEST VERSIONS: Arcade
PLAYABILITY TODAY: Highly playable
Psycho Soldier is technically a sequel to SNK’s 1986 action-adventure game Athena and also features a purplish-blue haired female character who’s named Athena. We’ll cover that game in a later entry, but this time, our focus is on the purplish-pink haired distant descendant of the original game’s protagonist - Athena Asamiya, a teenage school girl and idol singer who also happens to wield kinetic and pyrotechnic psychic powers, making her the titular “psycho soldier.” Along with her infatuated guitarist, the martial artist Sie Kensu, Athena has to battle her way through the ruins of Japan and repel an alien invasion.
One of the first things many gamers will notice about Psycho Soldier is that the game has a vocal track where a female singer (which the game later reveals as Athena herself) belts out an anime-style theme about the heroine over a synthesized music track. In the US version, the tune is a bit hard to hear and sounds like it was sung in a closet by a very embarrassed vocalist, but the Japanese version has a lot more force and production quality. In fact, the song was good enough that a more professional version was recorded on cassette and given out with copies of the Famicom version of Athena in Japan, and the song’s been re-recorded several times, including both a Japanese and overseas version in Super Smash Bros. Ultimate which are both absolutely worth a listen.
All of that is the icing on the cake to an unusual four-lane horizontally scrolling run and gun action game where Athena and Kensu fire two different varieties of psychic blasts as they rush through a series of levels that begin in the ruins of a city aboveground before taking you through subterranean sewers, ancient underground ruins, past volcanic caverns and down the gullet of a humongous chthonic beast. As the game progresses, it’s often necessary to switch lanes to keep from being crushed by rubble, walls or other hazards, and the game has a tendency of restricting the lanes to two or three layers in different spots in the game to make things more challenging.
Fortunately, Psycho Soldier offers a variety of power-ups that include a flaming sword (straight out of Athena) to enhance the characters’ powers and a rotating shield of forceball orbs that can protect the characters and also fire its own attacks. Unfortunately, the game also has skull items that can decrease your magical power, so it’s vital to pay attention to what you’re picking up. For reasons unexplained in the game, Athena and Kensu both enter the game in flying saucers which make them temporarily invincible, and both can even find green eggs that temporarily transform into mythological creatures – Athena becomes a phoenix while Kensu changes into a Chinese dragon.
Though the game is very different from Athena and the setting, power-ups and enemies suggest more of a science fiction backdrop than the mythological fantasy world of the earlier game, there are elements that both games have in common, from clearing rubble to picking up flaming swords to encountering what appears to be a temple of Athena underground. Psycho Soldier’s gameplay is like a combination of Capcom’s SonSon and Konami’s Contra, the latter of which becomes quite clear as you reach the final levels and see enemies that are similarly inspired by the xenomorph artwork of H.R. Geiger.
The best way to play Psycho Soldier today is to pick up the SNK 40th Anniversary Collection, which includes 24 classic SNK arcade and console games from 1979-1990 and which also offers the chance to play both the Japanese and English versions of some of them as well as both the arcade and console versions of others.
Much like SNK’s other mid-to-late 1980s games, Psycho Soldier had some home ports, but unlike more popular games like Ikari Warriors and Guerilla War, the Psycho Soldier adaptations outside of Japan were only released in Europe for hardware like the ZX Spectrum and Commodore 64. None of these ports is great, and it’s no surprise that Psycho Soldier quickly faded into such obscurity that only hardcore SNK fans would have even been aware of the game’s existence.
Fortunately, SNK didn’t give up on the characters, and both a purple-haired Athena Asamiya and the slightly rechristened Sie Kensou appearing along with their master as the Psycho Soldier team in The King of Fighters series.
Beyond all of her stints in The King of Fighters and its related games as well as appearing in some other SNK and ADK titles, Athena Asamiya was also featured in a 1999 PlayStation survival horror game called Athena: Awakening from the Ordinary Life. Beyond the fact that it’s only available in Japanese (though there is a fan translation for those interested in the story), it’s not a game that’s too easy to recommend due to its clunky and outdated controls. It was popular enough in Japan, however, to be adapted into a TV miniseries.
As Our Series Continues…
It’s time to move on to console and arcade gaming in the 1970s and 80s, and we’re going to cover it all with an exploration into hundreds more games you’ve probably never played but definitely ought to check out. Come for amazingly great early 1980s games like Warlords, Super Locomotive, Shark! Shark!, Acrobatic Dog-Fight, Mysterious Stones: Dr. John’s Adventure and Intrepid and stick around for mid-to-late 1980s greats like Peter Pack-Rat, Penguin-kun Wars, Momoko 120%, UFO Robot Dangar, Wonder Momo, Raimais, Last Alert, The Legend of Valkyrie and the arcade version of Twin Eagle: Revenge Joe’s Brother, complete with a rockin’ soundtrack with wonderfully inscrutable lyrics.
If you’ve never heard of any of those games, you’re in for a treat as we explore them one by one. And If those games are all old hat to you, don’t worry; they’re just the tip of the iceberg for what we’ll be discussing!
If you missed my series on the hundreds of 1980s PC games you probably never played, you can find the entire archive at https://greatestgames.substack.com.
Anything I don’t share here will be in my upcoming book, tentatively titled The Greatest Games You (Probably) Never Played Vol. 2. Subscribe to this newsletter so you won’t miss it!