Partridge Senpai's 2021 Beaten Games:Previously:
2016 2017 2018 2019 2020 2021 2022* indicates a repeat
1. Super Hero Operations (PS1)
This is the 3rd game in my journey through the Gundam & Tokusatsu crossover JRPGs that Banpresto published in the 90’s. This is the first one they not only published, but also developed in-house as well (as they were starting to do with Super Robot Wars around this time). Releasing in 1999, it’d been a good few years since the absolutely awful previous entry in this kinda-series was released, and given that this was Banpresto themselves, I had a fair bit of hope that this one would at least be pretty good. It took me around 36 hours to beat the game in Japanese on real hardware.
Though it’s a licensed game, the story of SHO follows an original main character as the main point of view character (in a very Super Robot Wars-y fashion). There is a male and a female character to pick from, but I chose the male character Ingram. You start in the very G Gundam & Gundam Wing-y future, sent on a mission to chase down the Devil Gundam, but upon falling to earth to chase and fight it, it flings you back in time 40 years to the very Ultraman and Metal Heros-y past. While this game does adapt just about all it can of Ultraman, in a change from previous games in the series, the *only* Gundam adapted is G Gundam and Gundam Wing, so no U.C. Gundam stuff at all. Most strange of all is how we are also deprived of any Kamen Rider and instead we have a lot of Metal Heroes (and adjacent franchises like Kikaider and Kaiketsu Zubat) characters in the story instead. This came out right on the deathknell of Metal Heroes as a larger franchise (and on the eve of Kamen Rider’s rebirth), which makes this an especially interesting and odd bit of crossover fiction from a historical and cultural standpoint.
As far as quality of the writing goes, it’s a really mixed bag on a lot of levels. The general structure of the game is one-by-one doing general reconstructions (within its own framework) of popular episodes from the properties its adapting, not unlike a SRW game or something. The issue most prominantly with that is that in a JRPG, we don’t have the luxury of skipping to the most intense bits of battle or plot or whatever that an SRPG can get away with, so this invites more problems than it solves. The first half or so of the game is really slow with a lot of clunky design mixed in with pretty same-y Ultraman missions. The game is sorta based around plot cul-de-sacs as a matter of point, as a result, but in some cases it’s way worse than others. The Gundam stuff in particular is located almost entirely in the few and far between future segments, making it very jarring and hurried when we finally return to those stories.
Some aspects of the story are done really well, like the Kikaider and Metalder parts in particular, but so much of it is sorta all over the place and confusingly related that it’s hard to get terribly invested in. The plot really starts taking shape around the 60% or so mark, which is when a few more interesting and important characters get introduced as well. The end result of all of this is that, compared to another game in this kinda-series like Hero Senki, this game has a lot more trouble standing on its own, and I’d say someone not already quite invested and interested in the represented series is going to have a much lesser and more boring time with it than someone who isn’t.
Mechanically, it’s a pretty unremarkable JRPG. A party of four and eventually you can swap characters in and out in between battles as the size of your party increases (and it gets pretty hilariously large, frankly), and the battles are simple turn-based affairs. There are some neat little mechanics to battle here and there, like HP slowly recovering in between fights, MP being recovered by doing normal attacks, and an overcharge meter that gets filled slowly by normal attacking with full MP that will give you a free and more powerful spell when you finally cast one. But the game is more mechanical missteps than it is successes. In total honesty, the game moreso comes off as an adventure game masquarading as a JRPG with just how much text there is and just how little actual gameplay you do compared to more typical JRPG games from ’99.
The story is entertaining enough for someone who likes the series represented in this game, but the actual playing of the game is clunky and cumbersome enough that it makes playing the game solely on its narrative merits more difficult than I’d like it to be. For starters, everything about menus and inventory is so busted and poorly done that it’s hard to believe a company as big as Banpresto developed this. The game has a TON of items, but you can’t see what they do in battle. You can only check that in your inventory between fights, and you’ll just have to remember what they do. You can’t see the actual effects that most equipment items do, just what stat they affect, meaning you’ll be swapping in and out items to try and get a sense of just what they even do to try and see what equipment is most worth using.
Of course this means shopping is a nightmare too. You can’t even sell items at a normal store. A store can only buy things that they already sell, so getting rid of early-game equipment can be a really annoying hassle, and more unique items, well you’re stuck with them forever. This is all even more annoying with how there’s no inventory sorting of any kind. It’s just one giant list. You can filter the list by what class (i.e. what series) can use those items, but otherwise it’s just equipment and consumables in one giant pile and you just gotta sort through it every time. There are also secret collectible trading cards that almost universally serve no function other than simple completion too, so that’s one more thing to clog up your mega list of an inventory. As an icing on the cake, you can’t even see your current HP or MP when using restoring items in your inventory. You’ve gotta look on the main screen, remember who needs healing and how much, and then go into your items menu to actually heal people. It’s absurd just how poorly put together this inventory system is for a major release by a major publisher in 1999, because I’d call this level of clunkiness embarassing even for 1994, let alone doing it in nearly 2000.
And the general clunkiness and rough design unfortunately doesn’t stop there. The game is put together with pre-rendered 3D assets, a lot like a game like Super Mario RPG is. This means that there are a lot of nearly identical looking areas because of how often they just reuse maps, and they reuse them a LOT. This combined with generally rough signposting means a more than fair amount of getting lost, especially in the four or five endless expanses of similar repeating maps the game has over its duration (which is even better because map edges aren’t clear either, so it’s diffciult to know if you’re exiting on a diagonal or not, so making mental maps is that much harder).
Combat is mercifully never difficult, almost literally. A lot of the bad design in other places would be far more worth complaining about if the game were actually difficult in any way, but it really isn’t. I encountered only a single actually difficult fight in the game, and other than that, as long as you’re just fighting things and gaining levels (the most important way to get stats), you’ll be fine. Combat takes too long and the buttons for your commands are such low resolution JPGs that they’re almost impossible to read, but at least it’s a trivial exercise. The balancing between characters is also awful, with Metal Heroes being the stand-out best among anyone and Ultramen being hilariously awful (you need to burn a turn to turn into Ultraman, and given that most battles are over in two turns, this means they rarely are actually useful, and they’re also very weak even when they’re Ultraman). While I’ve spilled a lot of ink here about how the mechanics are rough, it all really just comes down to being annoying. Like I said before, the game is really more of a glorified visual novel with a JRPG paint job given how simple the mechanics are and how much text there is. Heck, I think there are more event boss battles (ones you can’t win or are just glorified cutscenes) than actual boss battles. The main point of this whole section is basically just to exhaustively explain why anyone looking for a good JRPG should stay away from this game, as really it’s only the story that you’d wanna come for.
I’d love to say the aesthetics are worth coming for as well, but that’s another pretty mixed bag. The pre-rendered 3D model SD art style is gonna be hit or miss depending on who you are. I think it doesn’t look very nice, as did most of my friends I showed it to, but that’s all down to taste at the end of the day. One of the best things worth noting about the presentation visually, however, is how they go out of their way to recreate bits from the show in different ways. In one of my favorite ways, they inter cut live action shots from the shows for events like the Metal Heroes guys transforming, which adds a lot of silly tokusatsu-y energy to it all. Similarly, battles may take way too long, but a lot of the Metal Heroes special moves in particular really go out of their way to recreate the tons of cuts between jumps they'd do in the show by having it do the same thing with their animated 3D models mid-fight. It definitely takes too long, and most enemies are too easy to actually warrant using special moves on at all, but it's a touch I found very fun.
A bigger and more measurable problem is in regards to the game’s music. There really isn’t much of it, and while what’s here are pretty good original track and arrangements of licensed tracks (which are sometimes also incredibly funny), there just isn’t enough of it. This game is one of the very few I’ve found to have the “Lufia 2 Problem”, as I call it (as that was the first game I played that has this as well). There are so few songs and they do an exceptionally bad job of using music to underscore what should be more affecting and dramatic moments of the story, meaning a lot of moments (especially nearing the climax of the narrative) hit way weaker than they otherwise should. It’s not a death sentence for the writing by any means, but for a game that has so little to go on beyond its story, it’s really unfortunate that the music makes that story hit so much less hard than it should.
Verdict: Hesitantly Recommended. I’ve complained a lot about this game both here and in many places over the course of playing it, but ultimately, it’s just OK. I more or less had the read I do now like two hours into the game that this would be a solid 6/10 experience, and I ended up being more or less correct on that assumption by the end. Having finished it, I enjoyed the parts I enjoyed more than enough that I don’t regret playing it, but I think only people who are already invested in the series this represents will end up feeling that way too. Unless you’re a huge SRW and/or tokusatsu fan, I’d stay away from this one. It just can’t stand on its own merits well enough, and it only really succeeds at being astoundingly mediocre or sub-par at most everything else it tries to do. It’s not a bad game, but it’s also one you’re probably better off hearing about than actually playing yourself.
I identify everyone via avatar, so if you change your avatar, I genuinely might completely forget who you are. -- Me
