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Review: Ultraman [SNES] |
While relatively unknown outside of the Far East, in his native Japan and it’s surrounding nations, Ultraman is a seemingly invincible franchise that’s enjoyed success that’s seen it transcend the status usually afforded to television characters and become a bit of a phenomena.
Do a search for him on Ebay, and while you’ll encounter the odd effigy of DC Comics Anti-Superman namesake and the odd Strongman related product, the overwhelming response is related to Tsuburaya Productions silver and red hero, and by god is the range of products available diverse: cutlery, tissue dispensers, action figures, chopsticks, t-shirts, earmuffs, trainers…all available with the big guy’s image emblazoned. Naturally such a franchise has inspired numerous videogames in it’s time, the majority of them involving the character’s Super Deformed or ‘Chibi’ incarnation, with lots of them appearing on the NES, and many on those crazy card things they released for the Super NES in Japan.
Despite being a launch title for the machine in Japan, this fighting game, simply titled Ultraman as far as I can tell, appears to be quite obscure, it’s murder trying to find anything about it on the Internet anyway. The reasoning for this is both simple and confusing at the same time. You see, also released early doors in the life of the SNES’ American release was ‘Ultraman: Towards The Future’ which is also sometimes simply referred to as Ultraman. This game was based on the Australian co-produced series of the TV show that was released worldwide in an attempt to break the character outwith his native grounds. Towards The Future was based around the same engine as the Japanese title, had the same screen layout, given that Ultraman Great, that series’ Ultraman, had a very similar costume to the original version of the character, in many instances the game even uses the same sprite. As far as I can tell, Towards The Future was never released in Japan, so a lot of people are simply going to see the title and assume it’s the same game. I’ve even seen reviews of Towards The Future that use screenshots from the Japanese title they appear so similar to the un-geekytrained eye.
So, what exactly is Ultraman? In short, he’s Japan’s answer to Superman. A cross between the Last Son of Krypton and the Power Rangers. An alien law enforcer chasing an escaped convict, a monster named Bemular, who has fled to Earth, Ultraman accidentally crashes into a pilot, and in an act of remorse, binds his life force with the pilot, allowing him to live, but also giving him the responsibility of transforming into Ultraman when the Earth is in peril from an alien threat. Unfortunately, he can only last for a limited time in his giant size, but he has a convenient timer on his chest that will begin to flash when he only has a minute left.
The series was the brainchild of Eiji Tsuburaya, the Special Effects man responsible for bringing Godzilla to life, and proved a massive success, while Ultraman itself simply ran 40 episodes, it’s given birth to numerous spin-off series, with a new Ultra-hero being introduced on an almost yearly basis, with the exception of a hiatus in the 1980s, as well as another brief break following the disastrous co-American production Ultraman Powered. Some series have been dubbed and shown in the US, and for an idea of what the show is like, a giant alien monster lands in Japan, causes some trouble, the pilot turns into Ultraman, scraps with the monster for a few minutes until his timer begins to flash, before he finishes off his enemy in a ridiculously efficient fashion.
The game is a product of Bandai, a company more famous for action figures than videogames, which should perhaps set alarm bells ringing early doors, but that pales in comparison in terms of pre-play fear establishment to the game’s release date. As I mentioned earlier, the game was a SNES launch title in Japan, meaning that contrary to what some idiots on the Internet claim when talking about the Towards the Future version, the game was not a Streetfighter 2 rip-off, it’s chronologically impossible. While you might say “surely that’s a good thing, it’s original?” to anyone who would even consider such a thought, I’d like to ask if you remember fighting games Streetfighter 2? It was a sad, barren wasteland of games where most games only offered you a choice of 1, maybe 2 characters, and around 90% of them wore white karate suits.
I guess in that respect, Ultraman was fairly unique, as it’s also the first licensed Fighter I’m aware of, not to mention a somewhat bizarre choice for a videogame for what was then an almost exclusively children’s market. The game is based on a TV series from around 35 years prior, why didn’t the Japanese get the Towards The Future game? It was the current series at the time, though perhaps this was released in conjunction with some form of re-release of the first series, I don’t know. It’s a bit like the PS3 launching in the UK with a game based on the original Dr. Who
So what of the game? Well naturally you play as Ultraman, and it’s your duty to battle through 10 classic foes, in somewhat chronological order from Bemular to his final foe Zetton. Where the game actually succeeds where many licensed fighters have failed, is it’s roster. While some of the lesser monsters inclusion could be seen as questionable, and I would have liked to see the Imitation Ultraman, in general, all the major bases in terms of villains are covered. We’ve got Bemular, Red King, Gomora, a Baltan, Mefiras and Zetton, all the major fan favourites. Also in there are Telesdon, Jamyra, Geronimo (that’s Geronimon, a cross between Godzilla and a Native American) and my personal nemesis, Bullton.
What the game doesn’t do very well is actually playing. Before I go into detail about what is so loathsome about the game, perhaps I should run through how the game plays. Your fight is a single round long, and in that round you must take down your opponent with Ultraman’s Punch, Kick, Throw and Karate Chop, oh and we can’t forget his special moves. Ultraman has 4 at his disposal, a beam like series of arrows, a laser-circular saw he throws like a shuriken, a series of laser hoops and his Finishing move, the immensely powerful Specium Ray. What is unique is the how the game implements these moves. They are all activated by the one button, you select which move to use by pressing L or R to scroll through a menu located at the bottom of the screen inbetween Ultraman and his foe’s Health Bars. However, this isn’t where the intricacies of the system end, you see each of the four moves are assigned a number, and they can only be activated when you store enough Special Energy. Seeing as the moves are ranked in ’Power’, from the Arrow-Beam to the Specium Ray, it means that you must store enough specium energy to activate the Arrow beam, then store some more before you can perform the Saw-Shuriken and so on.
In theory this could perhaps be seen as a very early incarnation of the Super Meter, or at least a very similar system to that employed in Sega’s Eternal Champions. In theory, this stops the player from spamming his specials…it has it’s shortcomings. You see, the game has attempted to be faithful to the show, where Ultraman always finished his foe with the Specium Ray. This means that you must finish your opponent with that move, your most powerful special. It gets better though, the only time you can finish your opponent is when their bar is completely depleted and reads ’Finish’. This, once again, can actually be seen to precede another large fighting game, in that it isn’t too far removed from MK’s ’Finish Him’ trademark. This means you must first of all beat your opponent down to an empty health bar, but also have enough energy built up for a Specium Ray. This sounds frustrating on paper, but that’s only the beginning. Next we have the fact that as the fight goes on, your opponent’s energy constantly refills, which can lead to thoroughly infuriating incidents where you fire your Ray while they are in Finish…but by the time it hits they regain enough energy to take them back into ‘miniscule health’, meaning you just wasted your Special. Sickeningly, this isn’t where the problems with this system end. It takes an eternity for the Energy Gauge to actually fill up, meaning that on some enemies you can actually beat your foe down to Finish before the gauge is actually up to enough Energy to perform the Second Special attack, and on the harder enemies, you find yourself reluctant to use special moves for fear you get a break and beat them down to Finish, only to find you can’t actually Finish your opponent, and by the time it’s full again, their health has regenerated. Then we reach a really bizarre aspect of the game, the levels. There are no corners to the level, meaning you can never be trapped. In an unusual twist, it is set up so only Ultraman needs to remain in frame, meaning you, or your enemy, can run out of view of the other. This gets stupid, in that if your opponent fires a projectile while off-screen it still appears in your screen and can do you damage, but if you do likewise the move will count for nothing. Very disappointing when you fire your Specium Ray and the enemy steps back off-screen and your forced to endure your gauge filling up again.
This gets further irritating when you take into account some of the games other flaws. Most relevant is how shocking the game’s controls are. In addition to the Special Button and the L & R buttons, you’ve got a Punch, a Kick and a Jump. You read that right, jump. Now, even in a good 2D fighter, a jump button would be cumbersome, but you also have to take into account that the response of these controls is disgraceful. You’re looking at a good few seconds inbetween pressing the button and the response, that is, of course, when the game actually decides to respond to your input, by which time your enemy has usually stomped the bejesus out of you. What hampers this even more is that the animation for Ultraman’s Punch and Kick seem to take an eternity to get to the stage where they actually do damage. Even on the odd chance you do pull a move off, there’s no saying the game’s highly questionable hit detection will actually pick up on it. However, the biggest control shock comes from the fact that game appears to have no blocking manoeuvre. I don’t really think I can do how much damage this does to the game justice, especially when you take into account many enemies actually have shields which deflect your specials back at you.
However, the daddy of them all, the thing that takes this game from ‘Not Fun’ to ‘Completely Soul Destroying’ is the game’s AI. Now, a lot of people bitched about Towards The Future’s difficulty, but that game has absolutely nothing on this. For the first couple of fights, things are crappy, but when you have so little moves and such bad controls, it’s fair enough. Then we reach Jamyra and the game’s awful hit detection starts to become apparent, then we reach Bullton. This is where the hatred begins. Now, while most Ultraman villains are Godzilla like bipedal dinosaurian things with crap stuck on their heads. Bullton, in the game, looks like a bunch of waste-paper-bins stuck together. What’s horrendous about Bullton is that this is a bunch of waste-paper bins comes programmed with some of the cheapest AI outwith SNK bosses, and the first time you’ll encounter the game’s teleporting foes. Unlike some games, where teleporting is like a Special Move, here enemies just teleport willy-nilly, while jumping, in the middle of their special moves, milliseconds before your move should connect. Naturally this isn’t fun. Nor is an attack it performs by sticking a TV Aerial out of one of the bins and shoots a weapon that freezes Ultraman while doing damage…first of all it’s worth pointing out that you cannot duck below ANY projectile or attack, which makes me wonder what the point of it is in the first place, however you can roll by pressing down-forward, which, in theory, evades the attack. Only it doesn’t always work, and I don’t just mean due to the hit detection meaning you don’t always perform it, I mean sometimes Bullton’s attack will hit you, others it won’t. Bullton’s real blow to the balls comes towards the end of the fight, when you reduce him to ‘Finish’ then fire your Specium Ray…and he surrounds himself with a shield that reflects it back and kills you. This is at least 11x as annoying as it sounds on paper.
Once you negotiate past Bullton, you’ll encounter a few more foes, where the controls will cause you grief, but overall it reverts to ‘Bad but playable’. Then we reach Mefilas, or Alien Mefiras as the game calls him. Not only is he about 3 times faster than Ultraman is, but the game also brings in some hilariously improbably faults here. Mefiras is another teleporting foe, and on one occasion he attempted to teleport and come in with a downwards jump kick on me. However, I managed to not only anticipate this but try and counter with the jump kick of my own. I hit him square in the chest, and while Mefilas recoiled after a hit, for some reason I went flying backwards with damage done. What? How does that work? This isn’t where the game’s questionable damage ends. You can run in the game, to what purpose I’m not sure, but what really raised my eyebrow was when I ran into an enemy, an enemy lying down on the ground. It hurt Ultraman. I didn’t know stubbed toes counted as a fighting game injury.
However, the King of all AI horror shows comes from final boss Zetton (Z-Ton here), aside from his hyperactive teleporting, Zetton also instigates what is possibly the first ever known instance of cancelling one special into another. He fires a triple fireball, you dodge the first shot by rolling, and he’s still firing the other two…this is your opening, he fires his second, you go to hit him…and in the middle of the fireball attack he pulls out a throw on you. This isn’t just annoying, it almost made me want to snap the cartridge, imagine trying to fight this with a character who can barely string 2 hits in a fashion that could be mistaken for a combo. It’s like trying to fight Alpha 3 Bison with SF1 Ryu.
So, I’ve established that the game plays horrible, so let’s look at the other aspects of it. For a start, you have a limited number of continues, it starts at 2, but you can gain extra continues by earning so many points. It’s a system that could work in a better game, but when the AI is as brutal as this and the hit detection as flaky, you need all the continues that you get. It’s also worth taking into account that there is nothing but the single player mode to the game, not even options. I don’t think I need to say how fatal it is for a fighting game to lack a 2-Player option, but a single mode of play is a bit pathetic. A mode where you could play as the Monsters probably wouldn’t have made the game any good, but at least we would have got some variety, though to be honest, by the time I got through the game, I really doubt I would have spent any more time on it. When I finally beat the game, which actually climaxes on a remotely cool point where things turn into a shooter, I didn’t feel any great joy, it wasn’t the satisfaction I usually get from beating again…I was expecting Zoffy to emerge from my TV and offer me the chance to become Ultraman, like the Last Starfighter or something. It’s more like some kind of simulator, some kind of painful training exercise.
Here comes the real killer though, you see, the thing that annoys me most about Ultraman is that aesthetically it isn’t bad at all. I mean the graphics aren’t groundbreaking, but the sprites are of a decent size, and while the punch and kick animations are chronically boring, they are well animated, all the enemies look suitably like their TV counterparts, the stages are all nice enough too, with a decent degree of detail, and some nice, show specific locales, all of which relate to the monster you are fighting in some way, such as Gomora at Osaka Castle or Zetton in front of the burning Science Patrol HQ.
The music, while ridiculously cheesy, fit’s the theme of things perfectly, with enough cheesy heroic anthems and menacing themes, as well as a decent recreation of the Ultraman theme. What annoyed me even more is that the around the fights isn’t as boring as in Towards the Future. When you defeat Jamyra, a mutated spaceman driven made by radiation, instead of a heroic theme, we get a somber tune and a silhouette of a graveyard. At the climax of the fights with Mefiras and Zetton, instead of the straightforward ‘explosion’ end, landing your Specium Ray brings about the circumstances that ended the respective fights in the show, meaning the game actually has an ending!
It’s funny, I didn’t expect this review to go on anywhere near as long as it did, truth be told Ultraman doesn’t deserve it, but that’s just how much this silly little game has infuriated me. It’s apparently based on an Arcade game, which I find hard to believe, as nobody, not even the most ardent Ultra-Fan, could possibly want to carry on pumping coins in after 4 fights, and most shocking of all Bandai actually had the cheek to port the game to the Mega drive 2 years later making no alterations apart from changing the controls to accommodate that controller.
When all is said and done, Ultraman has offended me twofold. First of all as a fighting game fan, because it’s a terrible excuse for a genre entry, and second of all as a fan of Ultraman, for sullying the name of the Silver and Red giant with it’s inexcusable crappiness. When looking for good to come out of this game, I can only think of a few meagre examples, first of all the box art is quite nice, and second of all…well it makes me appreciate just how much Streetfighter 2 did for the genre all the more than I already did. Maybe this game should remain in obscurity, Towards The Future was pretty grim but it never came close to the mental torture that was this game. I wouldn’t even recommend this to the most dyed in the wool Ultraman fans…it will do nothing but turn them against the character.
