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Review - Ultraman: Towards the Future [SNES] |
In 1991, Tsuburaya Productions, in conjunction with some Australian TV Studio, decided to try and craft an Ultraman series that would break the character, and the franchise, worldwide. Ultraman: Towards The Future was that series, and it really wasn’t very pretty.
The show, filmed in English, would be the first Ultraman in around a decade, and the plot would be close to a rehash of the original series, only with some ecological elements thrown in to make it more Captain Planet. Aussie astronauts Stanley Haggard and Jack Shindo land on Mars, only to be attacked by a giant squid-like creature known as the Gudis. However Ultraman, a silver and red giant appears and starts to fight the Gudis, however, a rockslide traps Jack, who, at gunpoint, orders Stan to return to their rocket and go home, sadly the Gudis destroys the rocket, killing Stan, and defeats Ultraman, before making off towards Earth. Taking pity on Shindo, stranded on Mars, Ultraman combines with him, allowing him to transform into the super-powered giant and fly back to Earth, where he joins UMA, a sort of anti-monster branch of the military. It’s a good thing he does too, because it isn’t long before the Gudis, who it turns out is some form of virus, starts mutating the local wildlife into giant monsters.
The series was, to be blunt, a bit of a bombscare. The writing was awful, and the acting almost unanimously diabolical. Like a cross between Home and Away and Power Rangers. These days it can’t be bought in a conventional TV Series Box Set, and is instead broken down into 2 90 minute long Videos/DVDs titled ‘The Alien Invasion’ and ‘Battle For The Earth’, the former taking the first 6 episodes, the Gudis story arc and editing them together and the latter taking 6 random episodes and trying to do the same. The first one which, to my knowledge, is the only Ultraman product besides this game, released in the UK, works better than the second. A lot better.
Naturally, given that they were trying to break the character into a much larger market, Tsuburaya went all out in terms of marketing. There was an interesting (for the time) toyline from Dreamworks, which was quite unusual given they could have just repackaged the Japanese toys, a comic book that attempted to explain Ultraman’s origin more, and amongst other things a Super NES game, a sort of variant version of the SNES’ Japanese launch title based on the original series.
Often cited and laughed at by internetters as “the worst Streetfighter 2 rip-off ever”, Ultraman: Towards The Future still predates Capcom’s classic, so some of it’s shortcomings can be looked at in a more lenient light, given that it didn’t have anything good to rip-off, or at least they could be if they weren’t hold overs from the Japanese title.
As with that game, Towards The Future is a 1-on-1 fighter where the second 1 stands for ‘The SNES’. There is no 2-player option in the game. Obviously this is a big blow from the outset, as I would have imagined a Vs. mode would have been a no-brainer for a game based around 2 characters thumping each other until one dies, but then I thought the same thing Multiplayer wise when it came to racing games, and that didn’t stop companies (proper, good ones like Sega and Namco) releasing single-player racing games on into the 32-Bit era. There’s no options either, so basically you slot the cart in and take off as Ultraman, on your quest to save Australia and the world.
The basic mechanics of the game are the same as the Japanese title too, you have Punch, Kick, Jump and Special assigned to the face buttons, and L & R used to scroll through your 4 Special Attacks. Sadly these aren’t anywhere near as interesting as those in regular Ultraman, but then Ultraman Great, as he became known, didn’t really have an arsenal of distinct moves on tv, he just seemed to shoot random laser things when called for. Once again Special Moves can only be performed when you build up enough energy, and once again you require a full-energy shot to kill your opponent after beating their health down to empty (signified by it reading ‘FINISH’) Naturally this carries over pretty much all of the issues from the earlier game. A jump button is still awkward, although the controls seem a whole lot more responsive in this game, making it slightly less painful, and the Special Move/Finish system still grates the nerves more than you can ever imagine, although at least you don’t have to stand up to any irritating foes who teleport out of the way a millisecond before your finisher connects this time around.
This time around you only have to face up to 9 enemies, which I find thoroughly bizarre given that while Towards The Future was a short-lived series, there were more monsters that could have lent themselves to rounding the roster up to 10. Sure Rugalo, Gigasaurus, the Gerukadon and the other characters that never made the 2 compilations were a bit crap, but then, so were pretty much all of the monsters they did include. Now, before I go on, I’d like to say I’m at a bit of a loss as to what to call some of the monsters in the game, because the name presented in the game and what they are called in the series. The names on the box of the toys are the same as those in the game, so apparently there was some form of failure to communicate on the part of those who made the TV show with those making the merchandise. The monsters included here (game name first/tv name second) are Gudis, the big squid thing, in both it’s forms, Bogun, a two-headed…thing with no limbs, Degola/Degunja a big…Tasmanian Devil thing, Barrangas, a gas-spewing dinosaurian thing, Zebokon, a green forest guardian thing that a character in the show described as being a mutant kangaroo (!), Majaba, a giant insect (one of the show’s more conventional enemies), Kodalar/Kodara, a fat fish-turtle-aquatic-thing and the show’s final enemy, Killazee/Shiralee a red, dragon style monster with lasers for arms. One thing I don’t understand at all is that it actually takes a step back from the Japanese game in that it does away with enemy-specific endings to fights. For example, in the first game, instead of blowing up, Jamyra just collapsed, and instead of Ultraman killing Zeton, the game turned into a primitive FPS to let you shoot him as a member of the Science Patrol, mimicking events in the show. Here your foes blow up, despite the fact Zebokon, Kodalar and Killazee all got defeated not by being shot, there’s no ending to the game either, which is disappointing.
The fact the response has been improved to actually seem to give a semblance of control to the player is arguably Towards The Future’s biggest step up from Ultraman, however a close second has to be the fact this game was built with a far more humane level of difficulty, which is understandable given that, you know, it was aimed at kids. The funny thing is I’ve actually read people complain about Towards The Future’s AI being cheap, and while it’s not the easiest game you’ll ever play, it never even considers scaling the heights of unpleasantness the Japanese game achieved, the main problems the game has comes from the fact the enemies are so bizarrely shaped it can be hard to land hits on them, the main offenders being Killazee and Bogun, the former due to it’s long neck and the latter the fact it’s lower head stops you getting close enough to do damage from the ground.
Now, I think I owe the makers of these games an apology, because in my review of Japanese Ultraman I said some of the sprites were re-used, which, after playing Towards The Future again I’ve discovered this isn’t true. I suppose this is especially commendable given just how much Great resembles the original Ultraman (he had different ‘ears’, a different shaped timer and the silver area on his mid-section has higher but that’s it) it would have been the easy option to re-use sprites, I mean Capcom would have done it, and the game still looks pretty decent for it’s age. While Ultraman’s punch and kick animations are boring, they are well animated, and this game has a different animation for if you press up on the d-pad with punch/kick (these do the same damage as regular punch/kick, they have different animations) and all his foes look nice enough. The backgrounds, which all reflect where Ultraman fought the monster on the show (Degola in the desert, Gudis on Mars) also look pretty nice, and all have little details to personalise them, such as the spaceship stranded on a ledge on mars and so on. It’s not much but a little attention to detail every now and again goes down well with me.
The sound carries on in a similar passable, if hardly spectacular vein, the music recreates the TV’s Heroic theme and crafts some similar tracks to keep the mood of cheesy superheroics going. There are other effects, like generic impact noises, a decidedly un-heroic grunt for Ultraman and decent recreations of his foes roars, though none of them really live long enough in the memory to truly praise or pound.
It’s funny, a year or two ago I probably would have came down a lot harder on Towards The Future, because truth be told, it really isn’t very good at all. However, the game’s Japanese predecessor still stains my mind, so I can’t bring myself to completely hate it. I mean it really isn’t much fun to play a game with so few moves, such a limited lifespan and such a questionable system, based on a questionable TV series from the early 1990s, but at least it isn’t painful and actually just comes across as a poor game rather than a test of endurance like the game it spawned from. Ultraman fans will probably play through it once, although I don’t see even the most ardent fan of Towards The Future (if such a thing exists) having much motivation to return to it. The only thing that really bothers me is the removal of the enemy specific endings, and game ending full-stop, which I really can’t get my head around, as the game improves on it’s Japanese predecessor in a lot of fields I just can’t understand why you would outright remove one of the more distinctive and enjoyable features.
To be honest, given how easy it is to pick up either the cartridge itself or a rom these days, I really don’t imagine anyone with the inclination to play this hasn’t already done so, though if you haven’t I’d recommend this above the Japanese game in a heartbeat, granted that’s only if you’re looking for an Ultraman title, it’d be pretty hard not to find a better SNES fighter outwith that limitation. While I can’t say playing through Towards The Future was one of the more rewarding moments in my life as a gamer, I also wouldn’t say I regret it.
Of course, seeing as a lot of people have never heard of him, Tsuburaya’s attempt to break Ultraman Worldwide failed, which must have really stung a couple of years later when Power Rangers, which didn’t even go to the same lengths as Ultraman to try and pander to Western tastes, became a phenomenon that still goes on and makes millions every year from toys alone. Of course he’s still going strong in Japan, and the videogames keep coming, though the real shocker is that they milked this engine for yet another game, based on Ultraseven, before moving on to pseudo-3D fields on the Saturn and PlayStation.
