Ufouria: The Saga

Originally the start of the eclectic Hebereke series,¹ Ufouria had an unassuming localization for the European market that left it with few western fans until emulator-fueled retrospectives came along. After I dug past the first hour, I was shocked to find a sophisticated metroidvania structured hiding behind the ho-hum platformer up front. Ufouria gates its mechanics around different characters that must be “recruited” by knocking some sense to them in a quick boss battle (you and your friends have crash landed in a strange world, and said friends all have amnesia). Starting character Bop-Louie has little other than a jump, a divekick of sorts, and a charge attack, and your first two recovered friends don’t add much (other than Shades’ floaty jump), but once Bop-Louie gets a wall-suction maneuver, the game completely opens up. Climbing random walls or descending into pits not only reveals the usual one-off items and upgrades but often full new areas as well, including the final area of the game, which could theoretically be stumbled into on accident long beforehand. By the time you get Gil, the free-swimming final character, you should already have an item that gives you the location of almost every important item on the map, and it’s your job to roam around cleaning up unfinished business until you have three specific items that will take you into the final boss’s chambers. The small world already doesn’t take much effort to move around in, but shortcuts will become apparent as you play with each character’s movement abilities, and adding Gil to the party lets you access underground aqueducts that let you jump all over the map.

This makes up quite a bit for the moment-to-moment gameplay, consisting of easily dispatchable enemies crowding up minor platforming challenges. With the world so open after a point, it’s difficult to construct revisitable challenges that the player can backtrack to, and the “open” aspect of the world in the second half mainly consists of finding ways to get into standalone areas segmented off to the edges of the map. However, this isn’t always the case. An early minecart level structured as a zig-zagging structure moving up a shaft has all sorts of goodies strewn throughout that benefit from a structure easily broken by wall-climbing and floating. Second character Freeon Leon can take a side jaunt to get his charge attack, which freezes enemies and lets you use them as platforms Metroid-style; this ends up being vital to a couple end-game tasks. More interestingly, character switching can be done on the fly and preserves previous character state, allowing players to switch between floating and wall-climbing mid-air to sequence break certain items here and there. With more focus on actually performing the platforming challenges or having the player wade through enemies, the limitations of the mechanics would become more apparent, but the free-form structure ends up taking precedent and inviting the player to do as they please.

This dead end right next to the start of the game ends up containing the back entrance to the end of the game, as well as access to multiple areas across the west side of the map. Would love to know where the lips/tongue enemies came from. [src]

While the world itself is a bit plain, much of the charm comes from the designs of the player characters and the many enemies in the world. Freeon Leon’s slouch crawl around on his back with his big dumb eyes made me giggle, and Gil’s anglerfish/frog-hybrid physique lets his dorsal fin light up with excitement when you select him in the menu. Against bare backgrounds, enemies like clowns or shitting birds² roam around, and the occasional boss fights throw in equally anachronistic and unfitting designs like UFOs and suits of armor. That last one is pretty funny: while most of the bosses revolve around throwing sweet little blob things at them while they attack, this cat knight runs around back and forth while spears fall from the sky, and its only weakness is your charge move. Once you finally destroy the armor, the cat has nothing to do, and it just sits there and sobs while you deal the finishing blows. The other bosses, especially after you’ve exhausted player characters to fight, do as solid of a job of straining the mechanics as you could for a platformer this simple, including underwater fights, projectiles, and a lot of verticality.