Ultra 0

Ultra0 was a game I really don’t remember how I found or it made its way onto my radar. I assume it was steam calendar but I honestly completely forgot about it until I saw it go on sale recently and on a whim decided to get it. And I will 100% confess that the main reason I did so was because the summary said it had yuri in it. I’m simple ok?

Well beyond that, I honestly thought the game would be more arcade gameplay first and story second. Surprisingly, I found that the opposite held true. This was both cool and also a bit of a downside, namely that the gameplay felt a biiiit lackluster for me. Granted, I’m not an on-rails shooter expert, and certainly not this style either.

But to get where I’m coming from, I thought that the combat was a bit too simple? Easy? But also kind of hard to understand/grasp. The system is fairly straight forward, and there’s an auto lock on/fire system which was nice because you could then just focus on dodging. Dodging however was a bit too simple for me. You could really summarize the threats in three categories, projectiles that had a set destination, projectiles that tracked, and “melee” (best descriptor I could come up with) attacks. Oh and boss attacks which were clearly telegraphed.

Dodging all these attacks could mostly be done in the same way of just circling the screen. Of course there were somethings you had to be careful of like not dodging into other projectiles and the such, but that was pretty much how I played. This was also combined with the quite generous repair (heal) and barriers which were on cooldown. I think if they were drops instead of cooldowns it would’ve been a bit more challenging/balanced. The other problem I had with dodging and maybe this is more of a skill issue is that it was kinda actually hard to see bullets’ depth. I never tried to be very precise with my dodges and opted for wide berths because I couldn’t trust myself to graze them.

The upgrade system was nice but also felt like it could’ve been a bit more impactful. What I did like about it (and maybe it was just coincidence) but there were a couple of sections where it felt like the multipliers applied only to specific upgrades which I thought was a cool way of indicating a character’s mental state (during Reina’s Harmonic “state” only attacks got x2 for me).

Ultimately what I think was the biggest problem with the gameplay is that while the game wasn’t too long where it became a huge issue, the enemy variety and threats got a little stale so it wasn’t as engaging near the end.

But despite all that, I still really enjoyed the game! And what helped a lot with that is of course the characters, art, and music (i think it’s freeware music, but hey, it still goes kinda hard)!

Everything about the game is very… it’s pretty much exactly what you’d guess when you start up the game and play it for a bit. In fact I even joked with myself that it was muv-luv but good (there were actually more similarities as I played the game and it made me laugh a bit harder at my own dumb joke). The art is great though and I love the animations of the characters. There’s a cool part later on when (obligatory spoilers as I always spoil things in my ramble posts) Maho emulates Akira, and I liked how she basically copies her clothes and even her animations too. All the characters when they fire having that little hair poof animation, or even stuff like Reina switching from her Harmonics on/off modes, a lot of those animations I thought were well done. The character sprites were also fun and charming and I liked the art during the story scenes.

While there’s nothing necessarily unique about the story/setting/characters, I liked the way they all meshed together still. Also the relationships between the characters was cute! Even if one of them got a little weird by the end.

One particular story moment I enjoy and I confess, I know, it’s cliche, it’s silly, but I can’t help it! When Akira saves Maho at the end as a callback to when Maho saved her earlier in the game I got hype! It was expected, but the music cut in and how everything played out made that scene very entertaining for me!

However! And it does pain me to say this, I do felt that the actual coherence of the writing near the end went a bit too off the rails for me to understand. Zero separated from Maho in what I guess is one timeline, Maho went “back” in time(?) to do things more correctly, but it’s not really explained what/how Zero did that, and while the Kaiju is explained as a race waiting for their creators (that are extinct) to come, it’s still a little… unclear to me?

Also there’s not really enough closure for Reina and Shiro’s story for me which sucked because they were my favourite. Yamada also kinda just dies off screen I assume and overall there’s a lot of remaining questions.

But for a game that was less than 10 bucks, it’s exactly what it says it is and I appreciate that. Fun short game!