Urusei Yatsura: Lum no Wedding Bell

The Good
Urusei Yatsura is one my favourite animes of all time. The characters, the humour, the music and everything else is fantastic. So i was curious wether there are video games of this series or not and look what i have found. There are a few video games and i am going to review the first that was ever released on the NES. And i could not believe, what i have played. This game is just garbage. There is nothing good about this game.

Well, the only thing i like about it is that the music sounds decent but i have problems with it too so we are going to the bad section of this game.

The Bad
What makes this game bad is pretty much everything else. Let's start with the story or lack there of.

It's about Lum who just wants to go to her wedding but she has to go to buildings climb them up while avoiding gaps and defeating enemies. Why would anyone attack Lum, she just wants to marry and this should be happiest day in her life but i guess those monsters think otherwise. Honestly this story sucks. Well there isn't much story to begin with but what we have is just s*** ad even if it where a chapter in the manga or an episode in the anime, i would not like anyway. And what's worse that at the end of the game she actually marries Ataru. They kiss and he dies at the end. That's right he dies. They have a weird relationship in the anime already but i don't think that Lum wants Ataru dead. Well that's it for the story, nothing more to say. Let's talk about the gameplay.

To be honest, the gameplay feels stiff and awkward. You have to basically climb up a building to reach the top of it. Than Lum's UFO comes and takes her to the next level. There are only five levels in this game, which makes this game incredibly short. You'll need probably 15 to 20 minutes of your life to beat it. So the question is why playing this to begin with if it is this short. Anyway, you control Lum with the d-pad and you can thunderbolts with the b-button. The a-button is for jumping. To begin with the jumping feels really stiffs. If she jumps it feels like she is floating in the air. Her movement feels stiff as well. As i said, with the b-button you can shoot thunderbolts but these are so short and tiny and going to miss your opponents most of the time, especially those who fly in the air, So you get constantly hit by enemies and before you know it, you are dead. The enemies are just boring. In all five levels you come across the same type of enemies. There no variety here to be found.

The leveldesign is just the worst. It feels like every building looks and feels the same only the color and maybe the backgrounds change but i barely notice it at all. To get to the top of the building you have to use those escalators to reach the top. while doing that you have to jump over pits and avoid enemies at the same time and this is easier said than done. Since your thunderbolts are likely to miss, the enemies and especially those who fly are going to kill you very easily and making your progress much difficult than it should be. By the way, every building you are is on fire so not only you have to avoid enemies at all costs you are in a hurry because starts to slowly make it's way to the top. Do the enemies want Lum dead that much or am i over thinking things ? Maybe i am because games like these are driving me crazy.

As i said in the good section of this review, the music is decent but the problem here is that it has one song that plays during the entire game. While i like the rendition of the anime's first opening, Lum no Love Song, this track gets really annoying and it's not like Urusei Yatsura has only this opening theme. There are five other opening songs that appear during the series. Are the creator of this game so lazy that they can put more than one song into the soundtrack. ? You could easily have taken five of this songs made them into an 8.bit song. It should not be that difficult to do.

The Bottom Line
If your really a fan of this series, please don't play it. You are better of playing anything else than this game so stay away from it. That goes for every other person who don't know the series. Strangely enough this game reminds of this other game called Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde for the NES. They have basically the same story and our poor Dr. Jekyll, who just wants to marry his girlfriend, has to put up with enemies and bad controls too.

Okay, that's it for me. I am going to play a good game now.