1845: HEBEREKE Enjoy Edition PC \\ Options, Extras, bugs! Wild Famicom port playthrough 1/3
0Checking out the new HEBEREKE Enjoy Edition port of Famicom game Hebereke (PAL territories: "UfouRia: The Saga"), the Steam version played on PC!
My other platformers playlist: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLZO3OPzPjIzOWr1pi99Ns1_tS0BqLFsf_
0:00 - menu
4:11 - Extra
7:39 - Option
12:14 - story
23:23 - battle 1
29:00 - O-chan
35:04 - battle 2
40:16 - messing around
The PAL region name "UfouRia" might've come from having four characters? Wikipedia: "the North American [NES] localization was cancelled after Sunsoft of America did not approve the game due to its quirky character designs." (What did they think their business model actually was??)
The PAL sprites are different! And I don't think as good--like, PAL main character wears a jacket & beanie, & has huge pupil-less goggle eyes, while the J main character sprite is a cute baby chick in a winter pom-pom hat! & the 2nd character I met was a kid in a cat(?) suit, whereas in PAL they're a young dinosaur (I mean an actual bipedal animal, not a human in a costume--I think?) w/ massive dead staring eyes. (I guess it was likely these versions of the sprites that Sunsoft of America saw & rejected, sheesh.)
The English translation PAL territories got was...well, you can see it & the sprites alongside the new(?) translation in Enjoy Edition: looks like the PAL translation threw out the Japanese script & made up its own story, diverging about as possible from the Japanese text, at least as shown side-by-side in Enjoy. In PAL, the first character meeting needed that #1 ol' writer's crutch, amnesia, to explain why they fought; the Japanese text, in the Enjoy translation, did not.
Wikipedia summarizes:
"In the original Japanese [...] Hebe [seeks] his colleagues [...] who fell into time and space during a large-scale war, in order to fight an alien [...] and return to their homeworlds. In the western localization, Bop-Louie [...] stumbles upon a crater, into which his friends fall. Bop-Louie climbs in, but suddenly blanks out. He finds out that he must find [...] his other friends, all of which suffer from amnesia and take on Bop-Louie as a threat."
The version played here is JP (eBay $200 cart-only), with delightful interactions. The 2 boss battles I've had so far have been full of character & creative & challenging gameplay.
You can pick what looks like 4:3 or NTSC aspect, unfiltered (sharp) by default, but the L/R screen edges flash when scrolling, w/ no option to hide them. The optional sidebar art options are pretty nice.
You hold DOWN while jumping on baddies to hit them, which takes some getting used to--but you also find more abilities as you go along.
Oh, O-chan (cat suit) is a girl! ( https://city-connection.co.jp/hebereke/en/ )
When I first ran the game, the main menu came up in Japanese--I had to click the Japanese menu item ABOVE the "- ENGLISH -" line to switch it to English.
In the default "Type FC" control layout, Famicom button B is on the bottom face button, & FC button A is on the right face button--which is CLEARLY sick & wrong; everybody knows Jump goes on the bottom face button, which means THAT's got to be Famicom A, & then the LEFT face button has to be Famicom B--because to make Mario run and jump you hold B with the tip of your right thumb to run, then press A with the base of your right thumb to jump while still holding B--& you can't do that if "A" is on the right face button, higher up than "B," unless you're gonna turn your thumb halfway upside-down!
Reported as a bug. Mario is rolling over in his grave.
I don't get why--even if they didn't want to or couldn't for some reason edit the translation into the Famicom ROM itself, like the fan translation (probably?) does--they didn't just show the translation live in the right-hand sidebar while the conversation happens, rather than making you go look it up in the sidebar of a screenshot afterwards.
Looking the game's story translation up in the menus as "Special Snap" simulated screenshots that unlock with annoying notifications sometimes before, sometimes during, or sometimes after you sit through an in-game conversation in Japanese text for the first time is a pain & takes away from the immediate impact of the conversations. Bizarre!
& it feels deceptive that the Steam store page does not clearly say that the in-game text has been left in Japanese; the videos they show show Japanese text in the port's menu so you figure oh well that's just the Japanese release of Enjoy Edition, of course the English one will be showing English in those animating text balloons--but it doesn't.
3/31/24
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