YMMV / Ultraman: The Ultimate Hero

• Awesome Art: The monster suits in this series are widely regarded as some of the best-looking rubber suits in the entire franchise. However, this also made them very fragile and cumbersome, hence the poorly done fight scenes.
• Awesome Music:
  • The opening (either with vocals or instrumental) is a thing of beauty.
  • The background soundtrack, provided none other than Toshihiko Sasashi himself:
    • "Ultraman Powered Main Theme ~Opening Titles~" had a heroic feel.
    • "Space: The Undiscovered Country" has a nice blend of mellow to tension to an epic ending.
    • "Hikari no Senshi ~The Ultimate Hero~", one of the more heroic battle themes of the franchise.
    • Other honorable mentions include "Destroy All Monsters" (not that Destroy All Monsters), "A Fighting Spirit", and "Skyhunter".
• Character Rerailment: One of the few things the series has going for it is returning alot of the menace back to the Baltans. Every time they returned since the original series they have been shown to be more typical invaders, and their last appearance before this show involved gaslighting a child, thinking it would cause world war 3. Here they're back to being shown as a mysterious and horror like threat again.
• Common Knowledge: When people mention the show, it's assumed that it's failure was a matter of ratings. It's actually a matter of budget. After the show wrapped Tsuburaya got saddled with massive production, union, royalty and debt costs that Major Havoc Productions refused to help with ^note  said Western producers also used the budget for, among other things, going on expensive vacations which cost it any opportunity to get sold to an American TV channel due to how expensive the show ended up being as a result. When the show played in Japan ^note they only had to worry about paying the main cast by releasing it there it was received well enough and along with fellow western show Ultraman: Towards the Future managed to bring the franchise back into the public consciousness after nearly a decade of absence.
• Ensemble Dark Horse: Just about every Kaiju in this series other than Powered himself. The stellar design updates help out a lot.
  • And lately, Powered himself has begun to take on shades of this, appearing with semi-regularity in the New Generation spin-off shows along with fellow foreign Ultramen Great and Ribut. Really, in a franchise as long-running and Mythology Gag friendly as the Ultra Series, it's hard not to eventually become this.
• Fan Nickname: The female Red King is sometimes called Red Queen by fans.
• Fight Scene Failure: The battles of the series are regarded as among the absolute worst in the Ultra Series, lacking the camerawork necessary to create a sense of scale or the dynamism to make it actually seem like the suit actors are fighting, with the fact that the suits were quite fragile only making things worse. Perhaps the most egregious example of this is the fight between Powered and Powered Dada after he increases in size; while Ultraman Powered himself is able to move a bit more freely, Dada is reduced to turning on the spot with his arms outstretched, and his reliance on energy techniques was probably to avoid having the suit move to much and risk getting damaged!
• Never Live It Down: Go ahead and ask any Japanese fan of the franchise about Ultraman Powered. Chances are, they'll either mention his clunky battle scenes, his show's budget being handled so badly it caused the cancellation of several Tsupro projects, or the fact that his cameo in Mega Monster Battle: Ultra Galaxy Legends involves accidentally giving a Friendly Fire to Ultrawoman Beth after being used as a Human Shield by Ultraman Belial.
• Nightmare Fuel: DADA! Even worse, the end of its episode shows that Ultraman didn't completely destroy it, and it's still lurking out there, plotting its next move.
• Poor Man's Substitute: Rob Roy Fitzgerald is very obviously trying to emulate Bill Murray's performance in Ghost Busters 1984.
• Retroactive Recognition:
  • Fans of Super Sentai might know Kenichi Kai better as Ninja Black Jiraiya
  • Jeffrey Combs?! What are you doing alongside Red King and Pigmon?!
• So Bad, It's Good: Despite all of the sluggish fight scenes that the series provides, the series still got a cult following from the fans, and it even got a Blu Ray release!
• They Wasted a Perfectly Good Plot: Honestly, an America-based version of Ultraman that reimagines and redesigns the monsters of the original series with Baltan as the Big Bad is an awesome idea, if only to see "Powered" versions of Antlar, Zarab, Bemular, and the rest^note Figures of several monsters given a "Powered" redesign that never appeared in the show suggest this was the case. Alas, the resulting series was too short-lived and mediocre to do such a remake justice.

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