#15: Ultraman Towards The Future

So, moving forward at one second per second?

Ultraman was one of the first games I remember my brother and I renting for our SNES. I don't remember it being terribly engrossing. But is that just my mind playing tricks on me?

Kick!

No, my memory was actually pretty spot on. This game is terrible. It's a fighting game where you have no special moves. No combos. No ability to really defend yourself. It feels like your only hope of winning is to have the AI decide to lose since it seems to have ranged attacks and you don't.

HOW?!?

Ok, that's not quite true. You build up special power in the middle of the screen and can consume a good amount of it to fire off a slow, bad, ranged attack. This was my plan for the first fight and I got the enemy out of health. Woo! But then it just flashed FINISH in his health bar and I had no idea how to do that. Eventually I built up a full special meter and then randomly hit R. It changed which projectile my special ability button would fire. Crank it all the way to the top setting and hit a FINISH enemy with it to blow them up. So I found a way to progress which was nice but it meant I couldn't use any special moves in order to conserve killing blow power. (I ended up dying on the first guy while I figured this out but then was able to take out 4 guys in a row.)

DUN DUN DUUUUN!

I went to check if I was missing any moves or anything that would make the game more interesting than 'try to barely clip the monster with the edge of your kick while hoping he chooses not to kill me' and it turns out no. I also discovered that Ultraman was actually HUGE in Japan. There was a live action television show that was hugely popular where a guy in an Ultraman suit would throw pathetic punches and kicks at a guy in a monster suit. The SNES game seems to emulate that pretty well. Maybe they weren't trying to make a quality fighting game. Maybe they were trying to make a true Ultraman game. And maybe the kids in Japan ate it up. As a kid in Canada who'd never seen an Ultraman tv show this was just a bad game. And it remains that way today.

Rating: F