Thanks to Red Art Games for the review code

Title: Ufouria The Saga 2
System: Steam (PC)
Price: $24.99
Release Date: 02/28/2024

---

Story

In this sequel to the NES Ufouria/Hebereke, you take control of Hebe as he sets out on a big quest to save his world from a invasion of contaminative globs! Being that this is more akin to the Hebereke side of things rather than the PAL story/character writing of Ufouria, this game is chock full of very funny dialogue and silly plot beats, managing to be a pretty goofy adventure from start to finish. Nothing is ever taken seriously, everyone is absolutely a goof, and the simple plot is perfect for that, with tons of funny character skits throughout.

Presentation

Hebereke has gone through a variety of styles since the original game, and while the original was an 8-bit metroidvania, the spinoffs on SNES were a lot more colorful, yet kept a wacky style to them with exaggerated animations. With this being the first full sequel to that original game, Ufouria 2 decides to not only avoid using a typical pixel art look, but go with a full force Wooly World-esque presentation, with the entire world coming to life with a lovely handcrafted art style that’s absolutely gorgeous.

Seriously! This is one of my favorite looking games in quite some time, and the plushy art really works well with the animations, which continue to retain the goofiness from past Hebereke games. The movement is good, the environments are lush and beautiful, and the entire game world pops out with this visual style, almost to the point I argue it’s on par with Nintendo’s own Yoshi’s Woolly/Crafted World games in how well it nails the look.

The only bummer here is that the Steam version has no display options whatsoever, so while the game will look stunning on your display of choice, there isn’t a way to tweak select aspects of it to make things look even better. Using my Steam Deck for this review, the game looks great both docked and in a portable fashion, but I do wish I was able to enhance some of the specific details or gain some sort of visual options menu to make the docked experience look even more outstanding. Still, the defaults you get here are great.

The music is also excellent too, and while a lot of the OST consists of remixed songs from the original NES games, these remixes turned out a lot better than I was expecting them to be, with a lot of these songs keeping the tone of the originals and working very well with the bright, cheery worlds you explore. There’s even a few tracks not from the NES game, and while I wasn’t sure if they were remixed from the Spinoff games or not, these newer songs sounded great as well, though I would have liked if there was some retro BGM toggle available to turn on, since playing with the OG chiptunes would have been a nice touch.

Gameplay

While the original Ufouria was a Metroidvania that tasked players with obtaining upgrades to find their way around a small map, Ufouria 2 kicks things off almost immediately, starting you off in a nice hub area that teaches the controls pretty effectively and without much interruption, doing great work at not wasting your time.

You start off as only Hebe, and he can jump, butt bounce and throw a popoon to attack any enemies that come in his way, but as you progress through the adventure you’ll quickly unlock the other three playable characters, each with their own attributes that make them useful in certain situations. Hebe can eventually climb up walls, O-Chan can walk on ice without slipping, Sukezaemon can do long, floaty jumps and is easily the most useful character in the game, and Jennifer can swim in water surfaces and eventually learn to make bombs out of barf, and while I found myself hardly using O-Chan at all, the other characters were each effective enough for me to swap between rather frequently, which was very appreciated considering how games like this often have the big flaw of just making one character better than everyone else to the point the other members aren’t even worth switching to.

It also helps that you can eventually buy special techniques for each of the four to use, which help to obliterate enemies and find even more secrets in the stages, such as Utsu-cans which are pretty much essential to progress in the story up to a point, and scattered around most of the areas in the game. While the cans may seem like the biggest return of a classic metroid element, even these aren’t as simple to get as just returning to an area after getting an upgrade, since the stages in Ufouria 2 are procedurally generated. Kinda.

See, each area has its own gimmick and assortment of enemies, and that will remain the same no matter how many times you go and visit the stage; the icy caves will always have downward shafts, the lava area will always have a minecart track, etc. Likewise, a lot of the challenges or hidden things focus on your typical secret stuff, such as hiding behind a false wall, behind a crawlspace or high up and requiring some minor platforming to reach. For example, you will need to get the barf bomb to blow up a wall for an Utsu-can in the Tree area, but that wall and can may be in a completely different part of the screen than the time before.

Thus, each run through an area is different enough that it doesn’t always feel 1:1, but I still felt that most of my repeat runs through the stages were rather samey after a while, especially considering the distance from the start of a stage to its boss room is really, really short, so you can clear a run of a stage in no time at all once you get good at the controls.

One positive is that a lot of stages connect to other stages, so you can keep your run going for more coins and items if you continue onward, but even this will eventually lead you to a dead end where you have to fly back to town and set out once again, and I really wish there was some sort of endless path you could take for the sake of being able to play a run until you died. It would make the few times you need to grind out coins in the game a lot easier, and make the post-game significantly more fun, since outside of collecting missing Utsu-cans and emptying out the shop, there isn’t much to it. Thankfully the game’s super polished and fun enough that I didn’t mind replaying these short bits over and over again, (and you even get fast travel to the end of stages, if you just want to skip to a boss for a rematch) but something more to increase the tension would have been nice.

Granted, you do unlock the option in the form of an old CRT TV to increase the difficulty, which does seem to lead to slightly better coin rewards, but even on this higher difficulty I found myself a bit surprised to have only died twice throughout my entire playthrough! The game isn’t insultingly easy or anything, it just has simple tells and patterns that you’ll be able to pick up on once you play it long enough, or if you’re remotely familiar with that first installment like I am, but man, I really would have liked that aforementioned endless mode or some sort of risk/reward system to make the coin grind a lot more fun and challenging. A lot of the bosses you run across and can rematch for coins are samey and extremely easy, and while the game does have brief in-game challenges you can complete for more coins or Utsu-Cans, none of them are really that hard at all.

Still, when it comes to going beat by beat and clearing the main story, Ufouria 2 is an absolute blast, and this pacing works a lot better when played as a more casual, fun romp to the end of the story, rather than trying to 100% everything during your story playthrough like I almost did. Collecting cans is fun, and going through slightly changing stages is fun, but I do wish that part had a lot more depth to it.

Conclusion

For such a gap between mainline entries, I was pleasantly surprised by just how damn well Ufouria 2 turned out. Sure, it ditches the Metroidvania focus of the original game for more of a semi-procedural stage layout, and the game is pretty darn easy even on the hardest setting, but the sheer amount of polish, fun platforming challenges, and love and care into the presentation come together to make a charming experience that I argue stands as an overall better game than that original entry, at least when playing it to the end.

The main experience is just pure bliss, and while it may be around 4-5 hours to beat that main game, it’ll still take a bit more to collect every last Utsu-can and grind out the coins needed to get everything from the shop. Still, I do wish there was more post-game variety, such as some sort of way to just keep playing stages until you died so you don’t have to constantly backtrack to the home area, as that would significantly help with the big coin grind for 100%. I also wish that the procedural generation was a lot more pronounced here, since a lot of the rooms the game threw at me felt pretty predictable and samey even with the shakeups in enemy layouts or obstacle placement, and nothing that felt too challenging at the end of the day.

Still, short experience or not, Ufouria 2 is an absolute joy for that playtime, and I’ll definitely be glad to revisit this gem for years to come just like I did with that original game. An absolutely charming and playful platformer that’s well worth your time, just maybe don’t try to 100% this one unless you like a lot of easy tedium.

I give Ufouria the Saga 2 an 8 out of 10.