Taiketsu! Ultra Hero (GBA)

 Can you believe it's been over two years since I wrote about a tokusatsu tie-in game here? And even that's if you're liberal enough to count Power Rangers as tokusatsu. Don't worry, though: there's going to be more than one post on this subject this year, I'm pretty sure. This one is an Ultraman fighting game! There's been many of them, some notoriously awful, some sneakily having little cult followings. This one is closer to the first group, but I wouldn't go as far as to say that it's awful.

 

It's got a pretty big roster of characters, with a bunch of Ultramen selectable in "VS Mode", which is actually what you'd normally think of as arcade mode, and tournament mode, where you only fight against other Ultramen. There's also a Free Battle mode, in which you can select any of the monsters that you fight against in VS mode, including a screen-sized representation from one of the great old ones of the Cthulhu mythos, Ghatanothoa (or rather, "Ghatanothor", as the Ultra series officially spells it), who apparently appears as the final enemy in 1996-97's Ultraman Tiga (which I unfortunately haven't seen). More importantly, yes: you can play as Dino Tank in this game.

 

There's some things that are very strange about this game. Firstly, there's the balance. All of the monsters are massively more powerful than all of the Ultramen, in every mode. They do more damage with their attacks, they receive significantly less damage from attacks, and most of all, they can use their special infinitely. Ultramen have a power meter at the bottom of the screen, representing their Color Timer. It slowly goes down constantly, with special moves taking chunks out of it. There's even some "all or nothing" specials that can immediately win a fight if they hit, or lose it if they miss! So, this imbalance is clearly a deliberate choice to add tension, and stay close to the lore of the TV shows. It makes for a worse game, but a better adaptation. What a conundrum!

 

Another weird thing, that can't be so tidily excused, is the way special moves are performed. Instead of having move inputs like a normal fighting game, instead you hold a shoulder button and press a face button to perform specials. So every character has a maximum of four specials, and it's not really possible to make combos with any of them. While the face buttons are each assigned punch and kick, the shoulder buttons don't do anything when pressed on their own, so I wasn't even able to figure out this weird system on my own! Instead, I saw that there must be specials in the game when I saw CPU opponents performing them, and went looking online. Luckily, there is a guide on gameFAQs (written in 2004, a mere six months after the game's release!). It doesn't work well, it's not fun to do, and it's not very intuitive. 

 

There's good things about the game, too. Like how it looks: all the sprites are really well-drawn and animated. And while it's technically a bad game, there's still a little bit of entertainment to be had from having monster vs monster fights in free mode. And then learning that it's still hilariously poorly balanced, since any monster that has a projectile with full screen range can just spam it with impunity. If you fire up the ROM, I'm sure you'll be amused for like, half an hour or so. That's fine, right? I haven't been able to find a copy for sale, so I don't know what the prices are like for it, but whatever it costs when it does emerge: it's not worth it.

Gaiapolis (NES)

 This is an unlicensed port of the arcade game of the same game. Double unlicensed, even, since they didn't ask Nintendo if they could make a Famicom game, nor did they get permission from Konami to make a port of their arcade game. Still, this is the game to show people when they, in their ignorance, parrot lazy old stereotypes about unlicensed Famicom games being low quality, as when it came out (circa 1994-95, according to people who probably know, like those to maintain the Bootleg Games Wiki), it might well have been the best beat em up on the console.

 

But before I get onto that, I should probably describe the arcade game for those who don't know it, and also address the inevitable differences that are going to happen in porting an arcade game to vastly underpowered hardware. The arcade Gaiapolis is a vertically-scrolling, top-down beat em up with a fantasy theme and even a little bit of RPG nonsense. The RPG stuff comes in the form of not only experience points and level ups, but also in passwords used to carry those over into future games (something Capcom would later also do in their single player-focused fighting game Red Earth/Warzard). You also get little buddies following you round to help fight enemies. A little robot knight or a little armadillo thing, etc.

 

This version is also a top-down vertically scrolling beat em up, and it does a pretty impressive job of replicating the game at this basic level. It includes all three playable characters from the original, has a simultaneous two-player mode and manages to put you up against several enemies at a time, all feats that even some SNES beat em ups famously couldn't manage. The levelling up is also present, though there's no passwords to carry it between games (and since you always fight the same enemies and get the same items, this means you always level up at the exact same rate). The little buddies are also gone, which is understandable, but still a little sad.

 

On its own terms, without compared it to the original, Gaiapolis is a good game. It looks amazing, there are very few Famicom games that can boast of such detailed backgrounds (there's some really impressive animated rivers and stuff that look amazing!), or of throwing around so many big characters around the screen all at once. There's a few points where a discerning eye can see the metaphorical strings (one big example is that your screen-clearing magic attack and the large sprites used for certain bosses are both made of background tiles, so they can only appear on alternating frames), but honestly, that kind of thing only makes it all more charming. And most importantly, it's fun to play, too.

 

Obviously, you can probably play the arcade version in 2026 just as easily as you can this one. Maybe even easier! Which does make this version a little obsolete from a totally objective standpoint, but I think it does still have some value. It's a fun game, even though it's so heavily compromised, truncated, and abridged, and more importantly: it's interesting. It's so far beyond most (maybe all) of the officially released Famicom beat em ups, and it really shows that the people at Sachen really had a handle on how to get the most out of the system, which was a decade old when this game was released. If you are interested in developers drawing miracles from ancient hardware, it's definitely worth your time.