Unholy Night Review!!!!

[retro junkie]

This my review that I posted in my blog and on Amazon. I was wanting to cut it down for the forums, but could not bring myself to cut anything. So I am sorry that it is here in all its fullness.

A new game released for the SNES in 2017!!! This is the first time I made a pre-order on a video game. I always wait for the bargain bin special. But I figured that something like this would only go up in price due to collectors. First impressions? I have been looking forward to this game. Now that I have it...............hmmmmm, I don't know. In order to do a fair review, I was thinking that, Am I going to need to pit it against Street Fighter Alpha Zero 2? Both are 32meg in size. Or maybe it should be Fatal Fury Special, also a 32meg. There are a few other fighters on the SNES that are the same size but I don't think we need to go there, this will be enough to "get the idea."

First, I love the box art and the fact that my cart is Super Famicom in shape, I didn't expect that at all. Don't worry, it contains the places in the cart to allow it to be used on the SNES. I like the smoked black see through plastic cart. The cart feels solid, equal to any official SNES cart in quality. Nice to have a booklet where character moves are listed, makes a good reference. The whole package speaks quality and professionalism.

This game did not use any special chip, so that, in and of itself, lowers the bar. This game is not going to be a "Street Fighter Alpha Zero 2" on the SNES. So that places it in the category with Fatal Fury Special in expectations. So how should I judge this? Graphics, animation, gameplay, re-playability, and music? Sounds like a winner to me.
Push in, flip the power button and I am greeted with a musical loop of about, is it five or six notes? Am I being generous? This starts to grind while sitting here waiting for some sort of demo, that never comes. The screen is red with the title, what?! Come on! No artwork here? No intro? At the very least they could have had all of the characters in a pose like the box art. But come to think of it Fatal Fury Special wasn't fancy either. But still, this is supposed to be something special because it has been such a long time since we have seen a release of a fighter on the SNES. Okay I get it, no love here...mumble.. mumble, mumble. A loss of creativity?

Each stage's background is like a painting, no animation. There is a hint, at times, of parallax scrolling between a foreground and background, but it is subtle, spoiled by a poor use of color. Background should had been a little lighter to create depth. Maybe it should have been implemented in a different way? Or at least give me some animation. (The whole screen will not fit on my cathode tube TV, it is a little cut off on the left side. What gives, this is the SNES.) So the backgrounds look good, but lack any life and are flat in appearance while fighting. Characters seem small. Marking my screen with tape, I quickly put in Fatal Fury Special, Oh my, Fatal Fury Special's first stage with Andy Bogard, blows away Unholy Night, I'm serious, that first stage alone destroys the whole game Unholy Night, sorry. (So does the first stage of Garou Densetsu 2) The Fatal Fury characters are a lot bigger, taller and the Unholy Night fighters are about 20% smaller. And there is not much distinguishing difference in character height among the six fighters in Unholy Night. I do find Unholy Night character designs appealing, but lacking in detail and part of that is due to the size. The animation is really no different than a lot of other fighters on the system, except for Street Fighter Alpha Zero 2. (Unholy Night is gum stuck to the bottom of Sakura's shoe when it comes to that fighter.) Still, it works, you just feel like you are sitting farther away. The artwork, and story, of the game, as a whole, gives me a sort-of, a Night Warriors Castlevania slant, feel, atmosphere in a very vague way. That just came to my mind as I was playing, which is not a bad thing. And this flavor sort-of stays with you whenever playing. With only six fighters to choose from, not including, maybe, your mirror image of a different color? But I have found no way, as of yet, how to access those other colors. Adding two more fighters would have placed it in the ballpark of the norm for the time period. I am not sure where to go with that. I don't know if there is anything to unlock at this point. With a good game design, plus hidden things, unlockables, that type of challenge in a game motivates me to play, sort-of like a tease. I am hoping the end boss is playable after he is defeated. Not holding my breath on that one. If there is nothing more, this game is going to be short lived in the re-play department. Some of the fighters seem a bit clunky and stiff. Some were more responsive, with noticeable frames missing in their attacks. I found only half of the fighters enjoyable to control.

I don't think enough effort was put into making the game a good single player experience. The AI is very poor. Your opponents aren't even aggressive until you put it in hard mode. Easy mode the only challenge was the end boss. In the normal mode it was like knocking over bowling pins until I got to the character I was using, then I felt it was actually fighting. I have not been able to defeat the end boss yet. You really feel unprepared for his difficulty having no challenging opponents leading up to the match. In Fatal Fury Special you are not going to blow through that game on easy first time you pick it up. And Unholy Night just does not have that "arcade feel" I want in a fighter. Now here is where I switch gears. Practice mode is a great single player experience. Who would have thought? Set your opponent up to attack and the AI to 8. It is a blast to play. If only you had these adjustments for the story mode, it would have changed this review tremendously. And this is where I had most of my fun apart from a two play game. The only place this game shines. It is a shame that you cannot play through the game in practice mode. Grab someone who likes fighters and are into retro gaming, two player is more fun. Learning the special moves is a must. My first experience with two player, the game crashed after the bout was over, reset. I wonder why there was no VS CPU for a single player game? I guess story mode covered that?

In the option menu you have two choices, turn off the sound and adjust the games difficulty. No controller configuration? Just listening to the music during gameplay will answer any question as to why the options did not include music sampling. The music, I would grade it as 8-bit game tunes with many 8-bit games destroying anything this game has to offer. The capabilities of the SNES is better than this. Okay I will leave it alone. I would have liked an added feature of putting in my initials when I have achieved a highscore from the fights I have won, whether it saved it or not makes no difference. And the story line is a very bad translation to English with bad mis-spellings and poor sentence structure. To even complicate that more, I don't have time to read it. Playing the game, you have the choice of , story mode, verses mode, survival, and practice. Only three attack buttons (weak, medium, & strong) with one button to build your energy bar for special attacks and same button for defense, or crouching also acts as a defense against an attack.

I know nothing about programming a game like this, let alone something for the SNES. So it is easy to sit back and give a critical analysis. And I am sure developing for a 27 year old gaming system that has long been thought dead by the gaming community, I'm sure there was no help from Nintendo, can be daunting. 32megs? I am very puzzled by that. Maybe no compression was used? Little to no options, only six fighters, poor music, missing frames of animation, small characters sprites. Not sure what they were trying to avoid by limiting this game. They built this game up, "from creators of past masterpieces," "32 MEGS of 16-bit fighting bliss," and "developed by a team of ex-SNK staffers who had previously worked on the Samurai Showdown and The King of Fighters series." When you make promises like that you build the expectations and you had better be able to deliver. I see an opportunity here that falls flat in many ways. Maybe it was the failed Kickstarter campaign that crashed and burned this project? I say this because I see so much potential. I have got to keep in mind that this is only going to appeal to a niche market. When compared to other top fighting games on the SNES, this game is only average. I know there were good intentions, but I am not sure how this is going to be received by the retro community. I really want to like this game. But it is not that deep of a fighter. I am thinking that this is really for those who collect every SNES game. I personally want to support efforts like this because I want more. This game, hmmmm, it just might be an acquired taste. I did start to enjoy it more as I learned moves. With Nightmare I am able to do a 7 hit combo, and accomplished a 9 hit with Emily. I find Nightmare, Emily, and Wurzel the most enjoyable and playable fighters.
I keep asking myself, "Is this worth the price of admission?" To the one who loves SNES fighting games, "Would this be enough?" There are mixed feelings here about this game.
A Final Word:
I think with a bit of tweaking, it could have been awesome. All they had to do is refine the one player mode a little, allow some options from the "practice mode" into the rest of the game(like AI adjustment), add a couple of more characters, throw in unlockables, get someone to beef up and work on the music arrangement, slow down the cut scenes to give time to read, and it could be a winner. Most gamers that purchase this game will possibly be using the single player mode, which is poor, IMO. Two player mode is fun because it is two gamers playing. I feel like the game is unfinished. In certain ways the game is unbalanced. In a round about way I really like the game. It is because, I can sense what they were going for, but did not quite achieve. Bottom line, If you can make the one player mode sweet, then everything else will fall into place.

[BLUEVOODU]

I'm still reading through this and will edit this post.  But no need to apologize for the full review. Good stuff , retro!   Thank you for posting it here.  Keep up the great work.

Edit:   I read the review... good stuff. 1st how did they pull off releasing A Snes game without having to pay royalties?  I looked into this back when I had my business. I wanted to release games on multiple retro platforms -  such as Snes and Atari Jaguar.

2nd - It's very cool (even though not polished as well as it should be)  a game was released for the Snes in 2017.  It really does amaze me. Hats off to them for putting forth an effort. It's also cool to see someone accomplish what I dreamed about many years ago. 

3rd.... Your mentioning of the chip led me to a cool wiki about Snes  chips. There were more types of chips used than I realized. I play to make a topic on this at some point.

Hopefully more people /  companies will try their hand to release games for retro consoles.  I know the Jaguar had some active developers a few years back. I need to look into those again to see if they're still around. If I find the company, I'll post them up.

Good stuff, retro

[retro junkie]

I have been thinking about your post and my response. This whole thing is what used to be considered pirating, I think. Or something like that.
It specifically says on the box "not licensed" by Nintendo. I think that in and of itself says "no royalties."
There was some unlicensed games during the SNES era. For example Wisdom Tree. (Suposedly a "Christian" company, the irony of that.  ) They produced a number of games for Nintendo systems, SNES, NES, Gameboy. Even had games for the Genesis. They just backward engineered and produced their own carts, box, etc. I think Pro Action Replay was unlicensed.
This game is not the only game that has been recently released for the system, Nightmare Busters is another. Not sure how all this is viewed. Maybe Nintendo is looking the other way and do not feel threatened. I think clone systems would fall into the same category.  Didn't Tengen produce a lot of unlicensed games for the NES? I don't remember what the fallout was from that ordeal. My memory is fuzzy, but I do remember lawsuits flying around back then.

[targetrasp]

That legal wrangling was how Nintendo ended up with Tetris