U.P.P. [ユーピーピー] Game Sample - Playstation
42Obscure and average Playstation puzzle game with a fairly mediocre soundtrack and excellent illustrations and attack animations. Published by Panther Software for the slightly budget price of 4,800 yen, it was distributed in limited quantities like most of PS' late releases (Kitchen Panic, U.P.P., Aoi Namida, etc.) and original copies have since become quite expensive -- the title was fortunately made more readily available for download to play on the Japanese PS store (for PSP/PS3/PSV/PSTV). Originally released in 1998 and produced by Kenji Satou (like almost all PS games) with character designs by Kazuhiko Okuno (a small-time designer and animator with some cool designs, who mostly had bit parts in the game and anime industry, such as with work on specific parts of "Shin Megami Tensei: Tokyo Mokushiroku", "Macross 7", "Gatchaman", etc.), the game is rather rudimentary in the context of a PS1 puzzler, but is worth seeing for its attractive special attacks, if nothing else.
The game is basically an up-side down version of Columns with strange anime characters and special powers. Roughly every 20 years or so, the "Soul Fight International Championship" or "S.F.I.C." takes place where numerous "Soul Specialists" gather to battle and determine who will be the new king or queen of the Soul World (Tamashii Sekai... would've said something else, but it would've been confused for "Bleach"). The game offers you the basic rundown on the plot, characters and terminology (should you choose to refer to the in-game manual or basic exchanges near the end of each character's main mode) and gives you an animated opening sequence that's a compressed compilation of all the main character's most powerful special attacks. You will also see all of these attacks, uncompressed, during actual gameplay (where you can fortunately skip them if you're so inclined). You will want to see these attacks at least a few times and it is not an exaggeration to say that 75% of the game's budget went into these animations.
Matching like-colors vertically, horizontally or diagonally will remove them from play and give you "Soul Energy" for your "Soul Gauge" to execute "Soul Attacks", with character-specific colors and chains increasing the gauge faster. To the game's credit, each character has three techniques (Lvl.1/2/3) that correspond to different buttons and are fairly varied in their utility, making almost every character feel unique enough to correlate to your particular playing style. Some examples of attacks include preventing the soul gauge from accumulating, "poisoning" your drops and decreasing your soul gauge, making your drops invisible, making them "sticky" (preventing them from dropping and filling gaps), turning them into sturdy blocks, incinerating them to make them useless, etc. It's a cool concept, but the A.I. aren't pushovers and it can take ages to defeat a single opponent... at least the matches are a single round by default.
Depending on your selection, you will also face off against the "true" final boss, "Buoh", but the game is lacking in in-game options, game modes and additional / unlockable content. It's just one of many obscure novelties that never left the land of the rising sun... it's worth a look if you want to get it legally on PSN, but it goes for a silly amount of money for an original physical copy. This is a video of the game in action. Enjoy.
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