 You think North America got a fair share of 16-bit licensed titles? Well, so it went for the Super Famicom as well. In this video, we've got Usuiototora, based on the Shonen manga that lasted from 1990 to 1996, and it eventually spawned a few different anime adaptations as well. What's kinda weird here is that this game for Super Famicom was released in January of 1993, but the Famicom got a completely different game six months later, with Usuiototora Shinen no Daioh arriving on the 8-bit system in July of 1993, and they're two completely different games. The Famicom title is a first-person dungeon crawler with turn-based battles, where the Super Famicom title is the side-scrolling beat-em-up that you see here. You get three lives and unlimited continues to get through 10 levels, an introduction plus nine chapters, and there's no saves or passwords here, which is no problem since this is a pretty short game. There is a problem, however, with how this game plays, and that it's not just a short playthrough, but it's a pretty dang limited one too. Sure, you get two different characters to play as. You get Usuiototora, who has a spear, and Tora, who attacks with its claws, and the two might as well be makeshift difficulty settings. Tora the monster can jump higher, and its attack is a bit stronger, where Usuiototora is a bit quicker, but takes forever to defeat a lot of these bosses. Usuiototora gets some cool attacks, like an upward and downward thrust with the spear, but still, these monsters do not let up and do a bit more damage to Usuiot than they do to Tora. And that's, uh, kind of what this entire game is. It's just one big boss gauntlet, after defeating all of the ghouls early on in the game, then it's just one monster after another. You get this dragon thing, then you get this knight guy that took the souls of these kids, then you got these worms that appear out of the roof of this house, then you get this orange thing, you get floating vampire heads until you face the ultimate vampire head with white hair, then it's just, uh, a regular ninja dude in a suit. You don't get to anything that resembles a level until maybe 30 minutes into the game where you have to fend off these arms coming through the windows of a train, then you have to fight the thing outside. So goes Usuiototora. I get the feeling that they were trying to replicate the monster of the weak formula that the manga presumably had, but there's not really any way for me to tell, since there's no English patch for this game. Rest assured though, this game is easily playable without it. You just miss out on a lot of cutscenes and dialogue. I will say this game is pretty dang forgiving. When you lose a life, you keep going right then and there where you died, and if you have to continue, you just start at the beginning of that same chapter. There's also power-ups that increase your strength and decrease the length of your health meter, but they're both lost if you have to use a continue. Now I can't speak to how well this game represents the manga, but the game does look pretty good. The monsters especially look awesome, especially the green monster here, although he makes some pretty weird sounds. It's like they needed a sound effect, so they just went to Gary over in a council receivable and said, hey Gary, make a weird noise. They just went, yeah, and they said, alright, that's cool. The music and sound design otherwise is pretty good, as long as you don't mind hearing the boss themes over and over. And that's kind of the game's weakness. Sure, this game is still a pretty good playthrough, but that's really all it is, one monster after another. There's essentially no platforming here making this one closer to a game like Ninja Warriors, which is fine, but some more special moves or something else would be appreciated, or maybe just a bit more variety. Still, what's here is fine, it just kind of gets stale after a while. This may look like an action platformer just based off the movement of the characters you control, but it's a lot closer to just a regular old beat them up, albeit with weapons. So yeah, this is one of those Super Famicom games where I'm sure fans of the source material will really dig it, but if you've never even heard of Ushio Totora, then this one is just a curiosity at best. It could really use an English patch, but not even the Famicom game has one yet, and I don't see that this game has one even started at this point. Ushio Totora might be a bit further down the list of unlocalized games of Super Famicom worth checking out, but it's still pretty decent for what it is. Alright, I want to thank you for watching, and I hope you have a great rest of your day.