Retro Replay Review

Gameplay

The first hour of UltraBox 3-gō is mostly about discovering which of its many little attractions catches you. Kamen Victor is the most immediately legible: you pilot a flying motorcycle through side-scrolling shooting stages, fight bosses, and collect heart-shaped power-ups that strengthen defense. It is the kind of direct arcade setup that gives the disc an instant pulse amid its more magazine-like material.

Rusher Kimura’s horoscope board game is the other substantial competitive diversion. Up to four players choose wrestlers with different statistics, roll across a Monopoly-like board, and deal with encounters that can change both attributes and money. Battles come down to attack and defense cards, where the higher number inflicts damage. That is a simple system, but it gives the board-game section a pleasingly scrappy, luck-and-numbers character when friends are involved.

Not every item has the same staying power. Reverse 3 is a compact color-flipping puzzle across three board sizes, and its goal of turning every square one color is clean enough to make it a dependable palate cleanser. UB Club and Making of Dorayaki Quest are choice-driven comedy and romance diversions, while Princess of PC Engine layers a character database with a sliding puzzle, slot machine, and affinity quiz. They are amusing because they are so specific and strange, though they feel more like bonus pages brought to life than reasons to own the disc alone.

Cusuto’s second chapter asks more patience than the quick-play material. Its shift toward a menu-based, verb-object Japanese adventure gives you a more deliberate problem-solving thread, and the reduced number of full-screen cutscenes means you spend more time making choices. If you enjoy poking at adventure-game commands, that is an improvement; if you came for immediate action, it can be where the compilation’s momentum cools.

Graphics

The visual highlight is easy to picture: Kamen Victor’s hero rides a flying motorcycle through side-scrolling stages, with boss enemies and bright heart-shaped pickups punctuating the action. Elsewhere, the disc moves between board-game screens, puzzle grids, character database pages, and cutscene-driven adventure material, matching its deliberately mixed magazine format.

Story

UltraBox 3-gō does not build a single story across its contents, and that is important to understand going in. Kamen Victor continues its hero saga through shooter stages, while Cusuto continues a retro-science-fiction tale from the prior issue. The latter follows Gilbert as he meets Royce and Royce’s daughter on his journey, giving it the closest thing here to a conventional narrative continuation.

That fragmented structure makes the disc feel like an issue of a magazine you play rather than a world you inhabit. UB Club narrows its focus to a party conversation and a romance meter; Making of Dorayaki Quest turns the process of producing a video game into a humorous decision chain. These are small premises, but their oddball variety is more memorable than a generic collection of disconnected minigames would be.

The accompanying PC Engine catalogue, fan photography and drawings, and Princess of PC Engine character material also matter to the tone. They root the package in the culture around the machine, not just the games on the disc. If you enjoy archival game-magazine ephemera, that context is part of the reward; if you only want a self-contained adventure, it will feel peripheral.

Overall Experience

UltraBox 3-gō is charming precisely because it is unruly. The shooter, the four-player wrestling board game, and Reverse 3 give you actual game loops to return to, while the dating, comedy, database, and catalogue sections make the whole thing feel like a time capsule from a very particular corner of PC Engine culture.

Its weakness is consistency. The components are short and wildly different in tone, so there is no accumulating campaign-sized payoff; you are sampling, not settling in. Cusuto offers more sustained interaction than the novelty pieces, but it still sits beside activities designed to be picked up and discarded quickly.

Give it a chance if you like compilations as artifacts and enjoy finding a few favorites inside a larger assortment. Bring friends for the board game, dip into Kamen Victor when you want uncomplicated shooting, and treat the rest as curiosities rather than demanding that every segment carry equal weight. That mindset makes its patchwork design feel generous instead of scattered.

Retro Replay Score

6/10