Lovely game, a true metroidvania. It's really fascinating to see a game this old having all the elements you would expect to see in modern games.

The map system works great, exploring is not burdensome at all. As the game is so small, it doesn't really take too long to get anywhere and simply looking around will guide you to the critical path.

Still, this is a game from 1991 and that's most obvious in the game's punishment for death. It is not too severe - you don't lose any items or upgrades but you always respawn at the beginning (the middle of the map) with very little health. Grinding for HP takes a ridiculously long time, but there are quite a few game sections where small slip ups can kill you very quickly.. as well as some boss encounters that will likely take more than one attempt.

The bosses are generally quite simple to figure out, but controls are not the most responsive in this game and when I made mistakes they often felt sort of unfair.

Still, these are minor nitpicks - the game overall is breezy and fun, oozing charm from every pore and feeling incredibly modern in a lot of ways. Highly recommended!

I've been meaning to play this one for years. I had it on Wii U, but never really got far. The remake was leaked so I decided to finally go through it. I think this game is really interesting and worth your time if you really like the NES. It's doing a lot of stuff that are ahead of its time for a NES Metroidvania. The music and spritework are easily the best part. The world feels really fleshed out and weird because of it. I love the characters, they are so cute! At first I was a bit weary how important each character was to the experience, but as it went on, the game justified all of them pretty well. Bop Louie is the one you wanna play as the most, but the others are useful for specific challenges, sometimes even requiring you to switch characters constantly which was really cool to see. The map is really well done, even when you start at the beginning a lot, there are some great shortcuts that take you across the map that feel rewarding to unlock. It really has that metroidvania feeling of being frustrated with a wall I can't overcome and feeling overjoyed when I get the power up that disposes of it. If you really like the genre then I think it's really worth your time. The caviots are numerous though.

This game has some poor implementation of certain power ups. The fish characters bombs are so slow, and there is a section that requires you to bomb a floor over and over again really slowly to find a light switch. Stuff like that feels really rough and even as an NES game, I feel like there were ways they could've broke the tedium of it. As previously mentioned, the game has the Metroid 1 problem of sending you all the way back at the beginning with very little health every time you die. This usually isn't a bad thing, but there are a couple of sequences where you are a mistake away from instant death. Having to go all the way back and try again is a real pain in the butt. Some of those bosses are also really rough, and kind of convoluted to get a read on. I usually don't like save stating, but I ended up doing it the more and more I played it. This is something I'd also recommend newcomers do, it makes the experience way less tedious when you can instantly restart a challenge. I think the four characters are utilized well, but Shades doesn't get a lot of use, and I wish there was more going on with him gameplay wise.

This game is a real joy to play and even with its issues, I played it all in nearly one sitting. Just understand that it's a bit jack in places and don't be afraid to make your own checkpoints. This game also seems to have a good learning curve, and it's surprisingly open ended, so you can get a lot out of the game. I'm actually really looking forward to the remake of this. The screenshot of it looks really good, and it has the potential to expand on it and fix the issues I had with the original.

Bop Louie, a humble hero. Where his Japanese counterpart takes the glory of the "Hebe"reke series, Bop relinquishes the title to the sheer joy that comes from the trusted group of four. Even within the saga itself, an experience in a genre which demands traversal, while Bop Louie may command the speediest playstyle, most relevant abilities are signature to the others. Bop Louie will never morph into the whirling machine of powers and chaos that so many other protagonists in this space delve into. He looks temptation in the eye and responds "No, I say to you. My friends are my strength, and without them I am no better than the very monsters I seek to overcome".

Shades, despite drawing on motifs associated with confident characters of the time period, lacks this sheer willpower. A fragile ego, Bop Louie sugarcoats his abilities as "you can jump very high" despite Shades' athletics being focused on travelling farther, a necessary concession to give to a friend incapable of acting without appearing the most talented in the room. Even with such insecurities, a second side to Shades shines through when using his secret attack, a cartoonish slapstick move in which he draws strength by exposing his true face to the world. This struggle to be taken seriously, even when most wouldn't mind either way, is eternally relatable, and perhaps alludes to some of Sunsoft's own catalog. For what illuminates this conflict better than Trip World's grandiose opening of two puffballs fighting over a flower, only to follow this up with a middling Kirby effigy? And yet, Shades persists in both the Japanese and European versions of the saga, a global superstar loved by all except himself.

Gil, another constant to each retelling of this experience, has remained not out of love but out of indifference. An aquatic denizen with an unflattering image, they fit in both Hebereke's esoteric cutesiness and Ufouria's cartoony coolness, but are at home in neither. Tossed around unceremoniously through rip currents, their boons of fast travel to the team will never be recognized. But Gil never loses sight of themself, even in their most lonely hour. For when there is a task to be done, shouldering the burden for the rest of the team is enough.

Freeon Leon. A name powerful enough to persist well beyond the scope of the world of Ufouria. A trailblazer who challenges frigid wastes and stormy seas without a hint of fear. Much has been said of her declaration to the world, "im freeon leon". But can you even comprehend what it means to stake ones claim in such a mighty existence? To feel every ton of weight that Freeon Leon handles during her legendary journey? Well, there is only one way to possibly perceive the breadth that legacy.

And that is to submerge yourself in true ufouria.

One of the weirdest localizations of all time. Like I know why they made Totally Rad, I understand that. What was the value of turning a penguin into a Funko Pop? Unknown. Freon Leon is an all-time good character name though.

Anyway the game's fine, but mainly held together by charm. The english script has an unbelievably terse quality that makes me smile everytime, and the characters are all lovely to look at. But it's like, it's fine right? It's just pretty much fine. Like it's no Castlevania 2 alright? One of the weird things about the pacing is that there's no health upgrades until the back third of the game at which point you get a bunch at once and have no hope of efficiently filling them. Mostly, the game's not too tough, but there's some tricky bits and you have to go back to one specific point when you die. And also it's a password system but listen. It's 2024 I didn't have to deal with that. I honestly feel like I'll like the new one better! Not planning to find out any time soon though. I have a lot of games to play and it's like 30 bucks.

This is my second playthrough. This time I played the Japanese version titled 'Hebereke'. The only major differences with this version is that two of the character sprites are entirely different including the main character and O'Chan. The names are different, the script is also much better, and theres some stuff uncensored about it. I find the story quite charming and unique for a Famicom game. The rest of the game remains the exact same. Now that I know where everything is I had a blast. This game has an openness that's really refreshing for a Metroidvania. It's simple and really well designed. I love all the unique uses characters can have. The soundtrack was at the right speed this time (when I played the PAL version at 60hz it sped up the soundtrack) and I think it's one of my favorites on NES. I really like how you can optimize picking up health flasks and when to use them, and I died a lot less because of that.

My problems are similar to my first playthrough. The dark area still has this obnoxious section where you spend a million years bombing to floor to hit a light switch. There's also this lava area that feels harder than anything else in the game, I'd recommend save stating here specifically, as it's the only area in the game where you have a risk of instantly dying. I hate that boss you have to fight as Jennifer underwater. I don't really know how else to defeat that other than damage boosting.

This is probably one of my favorite NES titles and I can see myself going back to it as a comfort game. I'm still really excited for that remake, hope it lives up to it!

It’s always fascinating to search for and discover the hidden gems buried beneath the surface. One might cynically chide someone for making this effort and attest it to gaining some sort of nebulous hipster cred. I believe most people who take off their proverbial floatation devices that the general public provides and sink deeper into the water do so to achieve a more well-rounded perspective of a medium’s history or a specific genre they enjoy. The unearthed gleaming jewel in this context is Ufouria: The Saga, or Hebereke as it’s known in its native Japan. Back in early 2018 when Nintendo decided to close the Wii Shop Channel’s doors, I scrambled frantically to seize the waning opportunity to purchase all of the rarities that the vast catalog bestowed. The appeal of downloading Ufouria on my Wii wasn’t only due to the fact that this port was the only (legally) available release in North America, but because the “Metroidvania” tag caught my attention. Everyone knows the Adam and Eve of the Metroidvania genre are Super Metroid and Symphony of the Night, so discovering a “foreign” game fitting the tag that predates both games by at least a whole generation immediately spurred my sense of curiosity. I was still skeptical of Ufouria’s general quality given that the first Metroid game had convinced me that the design philosophy of the Metroidvania genre could not flourish on the primitive hardware of the NES. Ufouria is indeed guilty of having plenty of rough snags in its gameplay and presentation, but the overall execution of what we’d come to associate with the Metroidvania genre is surprisingly solid.

“Alex Kidd on acid” should’ve been the tagline for Ufouria: The Saga. The similarities between the game and Sega’s pre-Sonic hit on the Master System fall on their bright aesthetic and more methodical approach to a 2D platformer’s pacing. Those comparisons end when Ufouria takes the twee, childish whimsy of Alex Kidd and dips it head first in a lysergic liquid and totally trips balls. A group from the land of Ufouria gets lost and separated in a strange land, and one of the four friends must retrieve the rest of them and set a course back home. Although the premise is simple, I neglected to mention that the savior is a snowman searching for a dragon, a ghost, and an anglerfish. Also, it’s worth mentioning that some of the platforms that the snowman must hop onto to hold his ground are colored faces that look up with a deranged, closed smiles. Some platforms lend a hand in letting the player climb upward by providing a drooping strand of saliva viscous enough to hold, and the creatures that offer flight assistance look like the abominable lovechild of a chicken fetus and a Teletubby. Enemies range from blobs, clowns, detached lips with long tongues, frog statues, crows that drop anvils, etc. The consistent factor with this eclectic range of enemy types is that upon defeating them, something that resembles a molested-looking pillow pops out from their remnants which the player can use as a projectile weapon. By my interpretation, it might be the soul of the enemy, but it’s hurting my brain attempting to make sense of it. If not for the complications of using licensed music, an 8-bit rendition of Jefferson Airplane’s “White Rabbit” should play on a loop throughout the game. The hallucinatory, Japanese weirdness of Ufouria is a charming factor that makes it aesthetically interesting.

Ufouria’s cast of strange characters is the crux of the game’s Metroidvania design. Following the path of least resistance the beanie-wearing Bop-Louie can traverse will lead to a battle with one of his friends, whose hostility towards him stems from amnesia. Once Bop-Louie literally knocks some sense into them, they join the party for the duration of the game. Once unlocked, each partner can use their distinctive talents to uncover the hidden areas that Bop-Louie cannot access. Freeon-Leon’s scaly, orange body is the only one adhesive enough to naturally walk on the ice without slipping, and he can swim on any water’s surface if a pool lies between gaps of land. The cool Mr. Shades uses his weightless, incorporeal form to glide across gaps, and the bulbous Gil’s gravitational grip on the water allows him to submerge himself in any body of it like he was walking. Bop-Louie isn’t made irrelevant by his friends either as he is eventually granted the ability to scale up any surface like climbing a ladder. All of them also have specific extra abilities for either traversal or combat. For example, Bop-Louie can retract his head like a spring to hit enemies at a distance, and Gil’s egg-shaped bombs that he coughs up are essential to breaking the brick walls that inhibit the end-game collectibles. None of the characters stop being useful, as they are all distinctive enough to provide a special service (even if Gil’s swimming ability is more proficient than Freeon-Leon’s). I wish I didn’t have to keep pausing the game to select one but considering how primeval the notion of playing as multiple characters was in the NES days, I’ll accept the slightly inconvenient process. At least it’s less tedious than the character swapping in Castlevania III, whose glacial shift felt so long that it should’ve been accompanied by elevator music. The big question of why the designs of Bop-Louie and Freeon Leon have been changed in the international versions from a penguin and a guy in a catsuit is unclear. Perhaps a human being wouldn’t have been as weird, and kids would find an adorable penguin with a detachable head to be unsettling as opposed to the more…biodegradable, transient snowman?

In the first Metroid on the NES, the game’s sense of directing the player through an environment with a nonlinear world design felt a little too amorphous to uphold what would become the Metroidvania design philosophy. I thought that Ufouria would be subject to the same lack of form, as I attributed Metroid’s sparseness to the unadorned hardware of the NES. Fortunately, Ufouria proved to me that developers didn’t need a successive console generation for the Metroidvania genre to blossom to its ingenious potential. Ufouria effectively arranges its progression into something readily recognizable as a Metroidvania title. An arrow will point out the path the player is intended to travel on when the game begins, which would compromise on the subtleties that make the genre so enticing. After a certain point, the game leaves the player to their own devices, so the first few moments of hand-holding can be forgiven for an early title. The game makes it abundantly clear which of the four characters is applicable to an obstacle or situation, and a map is even offered as a navigational aid. The map may be primitively rendered with gray blocks representing the layout but considering the Metroid genesis point of the genre didn’t offer one, it’s a monumental leap in progress.

Ufouria’s inaccessible jaggedness stems from a few choices that are as bizarre as its presentation. Evidently, one of Ufouria’s biggest influences was the first Legend of Zelda, and these apparent influences did not translate well. Checkpoints are essential to the world design of the Metroidvania game, as finding these places of respite are great rewards for exploration to relieve the player. Ufouria offers a password system, which I find especially inappropriate and dysfunctional for this kind of game despite its ubiquity in the NES era. However, this isn’t even the prime grievance relating to the game’s method of saving the player’s progress. When the player dies, they are transported back to square one where the adventure started, with everything done up to then still saved at least. It works in The Legend of Zelda because the land of Hyrule was small and densely mapped. In a game like Ufouria, however, where the world is vast and requires the select talents of four different characters, walking back to the place where the penalty was enacted is such a slog. The player’s maximum health can be enhanced with items found on the field similar to Zelda’s heart containers, but collecting one does not fully replenish those containers. The player will most likely find themselves around the starting, depleted level of health, and the nuggets of health that spawn out of enemies only increase it by the quantity of a crumb. It isn’t a problem as the enemies are facile products of the environment rather than animalistic savages. That is, until the final boss of the game, which finds the player having to grind immensely to fill those containers in preparation.

Ufouria’s combat is just as unyielding. The player can always throw the perturbed soul cushions, but a simpler way is to channel Mario and flatten enemies like pancakes with their feet. What the game doesn’t tell the player is that they must hold down on the D-Pad to engage the stomping position, lest they take damage. It seems simple, yet how the player intended to figure this out and not see it as a penalty is beyond me. It oversteps the practice of trial and error a bit. Even though this is the more straightforward method of disposing of the land’s wacky inhabitants, pillow-throwing is the only way to dispose of bosses. Jumping on the heads of the naked, wide-eyed, big-lipped purple bosses to then chuck the hefty bag at them takes place for all the bosses, even though each one of them is intended for each of the four playable characters. Even the final boss is a slightly deviated variant of this. The process becomes too formulaic to hold any real engagement.

Ufouria: The Saga surprised me in more ways than one. The Japanese producers at Sunsoft probably thought that the bizarre presentation and progression of the early Metroidvania that hadn’t been solidified quite yet would be too disorienting for us North Americans, so they deferred it from our soil until the game was a peculiar relic of gaming’s past. While this decision most likely prohibited the title from achieving considerable success, I’m somewhat glad that the game serves as a point of reference in the evolution of one of my favorite video game genres. Despite it being released before Super Metroid and Symphony of the Night, I wouldn’t classify Ufouria as a “proto-Metroidvania” game. While the fabric of Ufouria still shares the rudimentary properties that stain the NES era, it’s incredibly impressive that everything in its foundation still sustains the modern definition of a Metroidvania. With its offbeat quirks and charming outlandishness, this NES oddity shouldn’t be forgotten.

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Attribution: https://erockreviews.blogspot.com