Giral (PC)

 This RPG Maker game (or, it at least uses tilesets from RPG, I don't know if it was actually made in the engine) drew me in with two promises on its DLSite page: combat in the style of the first two Ys games, where the dedicated attack buton is eschewed, and you strategically walk into enemies to defeat them, and a protagonist whose sprite and artwork changed when you changed their equipment.

 

Unfortunately, it doesn't really deliver on the first, and while it does deliver on the second, there isn't really a lot of equipment to see in the game (though, to be fair, it is a game that was clearly made on a tight budget, and the character art there is is really great). The problem is that it's not really an Ys-like action RPG at all, instead being a kind of endurance testing game.

 

Enemies attack you once when you touch them, then they die. And each kind of enemy will always deal the same amount of damage to you. So you've got to look at what enemies you can see ahead of you, and judge whether you've got enough HP to make it through them or not. It's really just a question of counting rather than strategy or skill. If you don't have enough HP, go back home and spend the money you got from killing enemies to increase your max HP (one hundred points for every thousand gold).

 

And that's it, really! The entire game is about an hour and a half long, and the final fifteen minutes will be made up of you grinding for enough money to get your max HP to 30100, since the final boss deals 30000 damage, and you need at least 100 left over to win the fight. There's not much more to say about it. The character artwork is nice, I got the game in a sale for next-to-nothing, and I guess it's a potentially interesting idea, that just needs some work to make it into more of an actual game. I hope the dev sticks with it, at least.

Ultraman Powered (3DO)

 Sometimes, you encounter a game that's centred around a concept so obvious, you can't believe you've never encountered it elsewhere. Ultraman Powered (based on the Japan-US co-produced TV show that's also known as Ultraman: The Ultimate Hero) is a game that has two such concepts! And it's hidden away on a console nobody cares about!

 

The two concepts are kind of related, though, being both related to the fact that this is a fighting game that makes use of digitised sprites. Firstly, it's the first game I've seen that mixes them with live action FMV cutscenes, but the real shocker is that this is the only game I can think of that's based on a tokusatsu TV show or movie that uses digitised sprites! It's such a natural combination! Not to mention the glory days of the Mortal Kombat series coincided with the heyday of Power Rangers, VR Troopers, and all the other American "localised" versions of toku series.

 

So, is it any good? Eh, not particularly. To be more fair, it is fun to play, and there are positive aspects to it, like how the digitised look really does fit perfectly with the theme, but there's some real problems, too. In single player mode, you play as Ultraman, and you fight against various kaiju one after another, like you'd expect. You've got a couple of special moves that aren't particularly impressive or useful, and the controls are laid out very strangely: you've got light and heavy punches and kicks. The punches are assigned to the A and B buttons, while the kicks are assigned to C and the right shoulder button. This isn't an arcade port or anything, it's a 3DO exclusive! Why didn't they design the controls more logically based on the controller that they knew players would be using?

 

There's actually two modes for single players: visual and battle. The only differences between them are that visual mode has fairly long FMV cutscenes before each fight, while battle mode has "VTOL Shooting" sections before each fight. The sections play out like a very simplified version of Cobra Command/Thunder Storm FX. They're viewed through the windshield of a VTOL craft flying towards the next kaiju you're going to fight, and you move a crosshair around the screen to shoot at little targets that appear on them, slightly reducing their starting health during the fighting section. It's nothing spectacular, but it's fun little gimmick, and I can't imagine anyone ever picking visual mode over it more than once.

 

Ultraman Powered isn't a very good game, but it's not painful to play or anything, either. You'll probably get some mild amusement out of it for maybe thirty to sixty minutes? It is at least better than the 1991 Ultraman fighting game that appeared on the Mega Drive and SNES (and somehow also got a SNES-only sequel), though.