I bought myself this for my birthday:
This is a limited Ultraman version of Bandai’s Vital Bracelet electronic toy. Think of this as Fitbit meets Tamagotchi. I didn’t know too much about it when I preordered it (for $70) on Bandai’s collectors site, but since my birthday was on the horizon I couldn’t resist.
The bracelet came with a memory card containing five of the Showa-era Ultra’s, and it is these you can take care of in your bracelet.
After putting it on and initializing it my first Ultra was born… and it was a disturbing baby in a swaddling cloth:
Very quickly this child evolved twice into Ultraman himself:
The device has a pulse detector on it and a vibration-based pedometer. However they are both wildly inaccurate and it’s made very clear the values measured ‘are for game purposes only’. Ultraman seems to gain energy as you wear the bracelet, and this powers him up and eventually evolves him into advanced forms. After a week or so mine is now Taro:
You can do missions (fight battles, walk a lot of steps) to power him up, and the bracelet has a NFC chip so you can get in battles by moving a phone near it, but it’s all a bit random and less interactive than I thought it would be. For instance the battles are completely non-interactive, over in seconds and are against other Ultramen. They could have at least added some monster graphics!
I think he will eventually evolve again, and I also think there’s other options that become available when he gets to a higher level, but since there are no English instructions (this is not intended for an English market) I’m going by the ones they translated for the similar Digimon device that doesn’t seem to have as many features as this one. There’s also an app available that somehow connects to the device but it’s not on the US App Store so I don’t have it. Of course these devices connect to each other as well and you can battle your friends, but since I’ll never ever know anyone else with one that feature may as well not exist for me!
So far I have to say this is a cool little toy, and I’ll certainly keep wearing it until I’ve seen more Ultras, but it’s certainly less functional than I expected. Because of that, and since the battery life is awful (it needs daily charging) I suspect the attraction will fade sooner than later.
That said the collector in me likes this thing for what it is, and if I ever see the chips with the other Ultramen on them I may be tempted to pick one up 🙂