Ufouria : the Saga
This little exploration platformer, originally for the NES, recently appeared on the Wii. I never owned a NES myself so I never had the opportunity to play obscure titles back then, but that is truly the nice thing about emulation.
Anyhow, so in the words of mcc whose recommendation I followed this looks and plays like “the horribly deformed child of Metroid and Hello Kitty”. You explore a small world in order to find your friends, once found you can swap to play as them at any time and use their abilities to reach new areas of the map. Standard metroidvania and rather lightweight on the exploration – it is very easy to find everything there is to be found in the game.
For a NES game, Ufouria is very nice looking. The animations of the characters are uncommonly smooth and give character to every creature you are controlling, the tilework is crisp and in some places it sports 2d scrolling. Controls are usually fairly good but tend to be a bit sluggish whenever the game’s framerate drops – which sadly happens quite often. Overall, the gameplay sometimes lack polish and feels uneven; enemies are placed at unfair positions at times and feel pointless at other times, certain design decisions only serve to make it more cumbersome in order to be thematically consistent… But held up against any other NES titles (except for the possible exception of Nintendo’s own) this is nothing out of the ordinary.
The game is fairly short and finding everything interesting requires little effort, so I do not really see myself playing this again… Although it is a very nice game and well worth playing through once.