Joy In A Silver Zipper
A digital diorama can be an act of love, too
Below is an essay I wrote for a zine, republished here for those who hadn’t seen the first release. If you enjoy this, check out the full zine with other essays by my lovely friends at https://www.rumblepackzine.com/zines/this-game-was-made-for-me
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Have you ever seen a video game geek out about something? Ever play a game with such an earnest love for its source material that every detail is passionately, excitedly right? That’s 1998’s Ultraman: Fighting Evolution for the Playstation 1.
Ultraman is a Japanese franchise older than commercial video games about a 40 meter tall alien fighting equally sized monsters. This original series was started by the guy who headed special effects for Godzilla, Eiji Tsuburaya, who took a break from making ridiculously successful movies to make a few ridiculously successful TV shows. These shows, and by extension these characters, went on to become a foundational pillar of modern Japanese pop culture. Even if you’ve never seen a single episode of any of the 41 seasons that make up the franchise, you’ve almost certainly seen some incarnation of the titular Ultraman in passing. Maybe you’ve heard the song about being unable to beat Air- Man, which uses the words “Ultraman Seven” (the title of the second or third season of the show depending on how you count) as a chorus. Maybe you’ve seen an anime where the characters go to a summer festival and buy masks, and one of the masks on the wall has big yellow eyes on a silver face. Perhaps you’ve played Katamari Damacy and rolled up a huge red and silver hero named “Jumboman” doing a wrestling move to a giant monster. All these things and more are because of Ultraman.
You know, this guy:
The thing that made Ultraman’s action scenes good wasn’t just the masterful and deeply charming special effects work of its creators; what made those fight scenes work so damn well was the choreography. Ultraman, facing up against every flavor of gigantic alien monstrosity, almost always fought unarmed. What resulted was a no holds barred melee combat consisting of only those attacks which were the most flashy and fun to watch. Put another way, Ultraman is a pro wrestler if a pro wrestler was the size of a building and could suplex Godzilla. Ultraman is also excellent as a show for many other reasons, but suffice it to say that he and his peers were hotter than hot in late ‘60s Japan.
The ‘60s came and went, as decades so often do, but people’s love of flashy melee combat persisted and found new mediums to express itself. 1993’s Virtua Fighter was a fighting game that felt like it was stolen from the future. Fighting games up to this point had flirted with the third dimension in passing, but only with two-dimensional characters. Virtua Fighter eschewed the pixel for the polygon, sculpting its cast out of three-dimensional triangles instead of two-dimensional squares. Not very many triangles, mind you; the hardware the game ran on simply wasn’t powerful enough to render more than a handful, and it certainly couldn’t draw pictures (known as textures) on top of them. Instead, each polygon consisted only of a single, flat color. Despite all these limitations, Virtua Fighter managed to convey extremely convincing interaction between two human shaped figures battling across three dimensions. There are animations in this game that still impress me today. If it was only beautiful it would still be an important milestone in the medium, but it’s also extremely smart.
It features a set of inputs so simply mapped to function that by merely telling you what they are you’re able to play it: Punch, Kick, and Guard. You can alter your attack timings, push different directions while you press these, press them at the same time, but at the end of the day 90% of what you’re doing is one of those three things. Most fighting games up to this point involved twice as many buttons, so why simplify? Virtua Fighter’s designers realized that by moving the game into three dimensions it would not only entice players who were new to its famously complex genre, it would also make each action in that genre more complicated. Each action now moves the limbs of your fighter in different ways, making them easier or harder to be hit by other kinds of attacks. Some of these attacks are better at bumping your opponent towards the edge of the ring, where you can eliminate your opponent in a very sumo-like Ring Out. By reducing the inputs to the absolute bare minimum, it made itself more approachable even as it became more complicated. It may not surprise you to learn that Virtua Fighter, like Ultraman, was a combination of flashy technical achievements and rock solid foundations which also made it hotter than hot. Everybody had to be Virtua Fighter and they had to be it now. It was the Street Fighter 2 of 3D fighting games and it didn’t even need to make a Street Fighter 1 first to do it.
In the next five years, the resulting explosion of Virtua Fighter’s imitators gave us Tekken, Soul Calibur, Dead or Alive, Bloody Roar, and the first entry of many, many 3D fighting games you’ve almost certainly never heard of. Much like the 2D fighting game boom happening around the same time, there were lots of licensed games using The Foundational Text (Street Fighter for 2D or Virtua Fighter for 3D) as a skeleton to drape their own IP over. These were often rushed out the door on a tight budget and meant to cash in on two simultaneous crazes, fighting games and the licensed IP. But when you cheat off of the smart kid in class, you can still get a pretty good grade on your test. These licensed fighters, while always derivative and often competitively busted, were also joyful things. The rock solid foundation laid by the seminal works was so sturdy you could build a shack out of two-by-fours on it and still have a building worth spending time in. And it’s here, in the 3D fighting craze with a popular IP that we find Ultraman Fighting Evolution.
Ultraman Fighting Evolution (UFE from hereon) drapes itself over the bones of Virtua Fighter in ways it doesn’t even try to hide. Right down to the button combination to hit downed foes (simultaneously pressing up and Punch), it’s a game which springboards off of a very specific mechanical identity. It’s what it does on top of that identity that’s the labor of love. UFE is able to capture with incredible, almost uncanny accuracy the physicality of an Ultraman fight. Each character moves with all the precision of expertly done motion capture and is presented in just the right way to strike sparks against the brain. They move exactly like a bunch of stunt actors in rubber suits. And on top of that, they also look like stunt actors in rubber suitsit.
In the five years since Virtua Fighter appeared in arcades, 3D graphics had taken another notable leap; the triangles could have textures on them now. The texture work in UFE was at just a high enough level of fidelity that it had the wonderful opportunity to draw the seams and folds in the rubber costumes of each of its giant monsters. Most Ultraman games prior to this used their graphics to gesture in the direction of the mythos. Eleking didn’t have rubber creases on his legs;, he was simply a large yellow monster. He was made of whatever aliens were made of. But this Eleking? Unquestionably made of rubber and moves around through the puppetry of a suit actor. And what a wonderful decision that was! By adding this visual flourish to the remarkable animations, a match of UFE manages not to feel like Ultraman fighting Dada but like an episode of a 1960s TV show where Ultraman fights Dada. This is further bolstered by the game’s recreation of the show’s original miniature work.
If you want to have a human sized actor portraying a building sized monster, you’d need to surround them with some miniature scale buildings and trees, and Tsuburaya Productions was the best in the business at this. The miniatures never looked completely real (though perhaps on a 1960s television they were more convincing), but they always looked good. Some truly impressive work was done and continues to be done on the Ultraman shows for making teeny tiny sets to stomp around on. The limited graphics capabilities of the original Playstation are well suited then to representing these tiny buildings. After all, they’re so small you don't need to put very much detail on them to fool the eye.
It all comes together like a magic trick. You see them lift the cup, and the ball is gone, and even though you know that the ball is in their hand, you’re still delighted and impressed. What makes all this remarkable visual presentation so wonderful, then, is how it all feels to play. The weighty melee and ridiculous grapples make rounds dynamic, fun, and short. The characters feel distinct in ways that are fun to explore. Every new animation you discover is a treat! There’s even a nearly useless but extremely flashy universal super move that takes several seconds to start up and is trivially easy to dodge in almost all cases. But really, would it be Ultraman if he couldn’t shoot a laser out of his hands?
Now sure, the game has some problems. The AI is hilariously easy to cheese once you realize they have no meaningful response to just backdashing for an entire round once you have a life lead. The angles you have to be standing in relation to your opponent for your throw to do anything are small and difficult to guess in the fray. But as far as I’m concerned, none of those things really matter. None of them take away from the fundamental joy of sitting in front of this game with a friend and making King Joe swing Ultraman Taro around by the ankles.
So if you’re looking for a fighting game for your next casual get together, give Ultraman: Fighting Evolution a try. It was released only in Japan, but you wouldn’t know it from the menus. In fact, nearly all the text in this game, and certainly all the relevant text for actually playing it, is entirely in English. Find a friend, hand them a controller, and spend a few hours in the stretchy tapestry of a licensed PS1 fighter. You will feel like a boxer. You will feel like a wrestler. You will feel like a guy in a wetsuit giving a full nelson to a guy in a rubber dinosaur costume.