Anyway, I only have the Japanese release of Saint Seiya Omega: Ultimate Cosmo so I had to do a little bit of exploring and trial and error before I was able to navigate the game. There are minimal English words (the “VS” and “CPU” words will be extremely helpful here) so this won’t be a pick up and play title unless you can read Japanese. Fortunately, this is a fighting game so you won’t need to bother with the story. Once you learn how to navigate the menu, you’ll be able to play your money’s worth out of the game.
Visually, Saint Seiya Omega: Ultimate Cosmo is one of the many games on the PSP that managed to look gorgeous even if compared with current gen console games, owing to the fact that it uses cel-shading, which age well compared to standard textured polygons. The characters look sharp and the backgrounds are crisp and colorful. You will be forgiven if you mistook the game as 2D sprite-based. Sound is also decent and crisp, although the sound of grunts and thuds can be repetitive at times.
As far as content is concerned, Saint Seiya Omega: Ultimate Cosmo doesn’t disappoint. It’s got all the modes you would expect if you’re coming from its PS2 predecessors, and it’s also got a fairly sizable amount of playable fighters (though I don’t recognize any of them, as per my note on the first paragraph), many of which need to be unlocked by beating the Arcade mode with a specific character – this means you can unlock all the characters just by finishing the arcade mode once with every character. There are thankfully no ridiculously complex conditions (e.g. “beat that character using this character without jumping, finish story mode without using an ougi, etc.)
Gameplay-wise, I am sad to say that Saint Seiya Omega: Ultimate Cosmo is a massive step down in quality from Saint Seiya: The Hades. The controls are still fairly similar. The complex minigames were removed, but it’s not such a big loss and may actually be a plus if you feel that they ruin the flow of the match.
Ultimate Cosmo still has the punch, the jump, the cosmo charge, the kick, and the special attacks and supers that can be triggered through different button combinations. It would be a really enjoyable fighting game if that was everything – unfortunately, all the bells and whistles are hampered by a laggy control scheme.
There are fighting games that work well with laggy controls, but not this one – the attacks happen fast, but the slight delay on the time between a button press and its intended effect is detrimental to a smooth game experience. You’ll have to practice adapting to the timing if you don’t want to be destroyed by the CPU. Not that the AI is anything special. The CPU is practically defenseless against throws, so if you want to win, just jump and press R when you get close enough. Lather, rinse, and repeat.
At the end of the day, it’s easy to write Saint Seiya Omega: Ultimate Cosmo off as a subpar fighting game that’s all flash and very little (or broken) substance, but what makes it a little bit worse for the wear is that there are other Saint Seiya games from before and after its time that are significantly better by virtue of having more responsive controls. Additionally, the flaws in the mechanics and gameplay are not due to technical limitations of the hardware, but just poor design.
