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.