Adjusting
to their patterns and experimenting to find their weaknesses is quite fun, but
it's difficult to keep one's guard up for very long against their protracted assaults.
Reel 5's boss is particularly noteworthy for both the encounter's difficulty and
ingenuity. To break through Frost Tiger's chilling aura, players must use either
Joe's zoomed in Red Hot Kick (the zoom adds the flames) or smatter environmental
objects with punches and kicks in machspeed to temporarily grant all of Joe's
attacks fire properties. Figuring out exactly what to do was a bit tricky for
me, but rewarding when I finally got the hang of it. Putting my plan into action
proved problematic, however, as all bosses have huge energy bars-long, multilayered
energy bars that is, while Joe typically has but a few health tamales to spare
when he first encounters them. Thankfully, most bosses leave themselves vulnerable
at various points to Joe's Red Hot One Hundred attack, which does a decent amount
of damage in a short time. Once players become accustomed to all of Joe's and
Sylvia's attacks through a little experimentation-zoom, especially-bosses become
less imposing, although there are still a couple of problems. For one, the game
exhibits some awkward hit detection: low sweeps from bosses attacking from a high
slope will go right through Joe if he uses a high dodge, yet he only needs to
be in the proximity of certain sharp objects to take damage. To add insult to
injury, Joe's tougher opponents like to take cheap shots here and there, especially
right when the fight fades into view, meaning that certain hits seem almost unavoidable
without either prior knowledge or extra sensory perception. Bosses can feel unfair,
rather than just challenging.
The game's often awkwardly-implemented
puzzles can be equally testing. They frequently involve utilizing some bizarre
combination of VFX powers against one object or another and their logic is most
often well-grounded in absurdity. In retrospect, a few of the puzzles are quite
ingenious, especially the more environment-based ones, but a lot of them were
frustrating for me the first time through as the game's logic just doesn't always
click. Indeed, instead of reasoning my way through troubles and exploring surroundings
for answers, I often found myself throwing random VFX powers at things and inflicting
pain on Flats until a solution appeared. Sometimes I could kick myself for not
figuring specific puzzles out, but many of them are quite the stretch.
And, should players get stuck on such a puzzle, it will be reflected in the rating
system, returning from the original game. I've always found the ranking system
to be a little rigid, personally, because it forces (or at least encourages) players
to perform particular moves and to attack only during specific opportunities.
Whereas fighting in general offers an open canvas to paint violence as one pleases,
trying to make rank feels more like staying inside the lines of a coloring book.
Walk toward an enemy until he prepares to attack, trigger slow motion, dodge the
attack, counter, combo and repeat. Strict. Never one to be pressured by high scores
and grades though, I can ignore all that.
Now, Viewtiful Joe is
supposed to take place in Movieland, but Clover Studio rarely capitalizes on the
theme all that well. There are a few cinema elements cinema elements in the presentation,
like a grainy film stock filter and aspect ratio bars, but I found them to be
more distracting than anything else. The dialogue is also supposed to be something
of a tongue-in-cheek movie parody, but it doesn't quite hit the mark. The game
is supposed to be "cheesy" but it doesn't pull it off like Sega's over-the-top
F-Zero GX or that model for voice-over thespians everywhere, the House
of the Dead. Instead of sounding intentionally goofy, most characters just
sound like the comic relief out of a poorly done Saturday morning children's cartoon.
That has a certain charm of its own of course, but I doubt it was the original
aim. If it had been reworked a bit, I think the Viewtiful Joe series could've
actually made a better send-up of the Capcom videogame formulae.
And
while the game tries to present itself as a caricature of Western films, it unintentionally
mimics one of Western filmmakers' most common mistakes: it films the action too
closely. Granted, the game is about style, cameras on Joe and all that, which
I understand. But throughout the game I had the consistent desire to pull the
camera back and take a good look at Joe, my enemies and my surroundings. Under
rare conditions, the game would oblige and I could see that with the angle just
a little further back than default, the game conveys a lot more than it normally
does and actually becomes a lot easier to focus on, especially as enemies are
less likely to fly in from points unseen.
I don't think it's unnatural
to want to get the optimum angle on the game either: it looks good. The characters
all have a certain flare to them. Screenshots say more than words, but they speak
little to the fluidity of the animations. Just as in the last game, enemy robots
fly apart in layers, with gears and sprockets soaring every which way in glorious
slow motion. Joe still has his cape, and Sylvia has her long ponytail, and they
flow along to add stylish flourishes to every movement. Joe and Sylvia look great
of course, and the enemies, mostly robots of one kind or another, also have a
lot of character in their design. I particularly like the rifle-wielding snow
ninjas that attacked me in reel 5 though I wasn't such a big fan of the recurring
boss: a hulking dinosaur named Big John who gets a little tiresome by the end
of things. There are also too many distracting special effects for my tastes,
like motion blurs, but they're obviously in keeping with the movie superhero theme.
The sound, on the other hand, is fairly standard. Mid-action voice-overs
are typically Capcom, with Joe shouting inspirational "yeah!"s and "alright!"s
and villains spouting one-dimensional taunts and calling out their attacks. I've
always loved that about Capcom games, ever since "hadoken!" The smashes and crunches
of combat are nice and visceral, as they should be, but it's the occasional annoyance
here and there that sticks with me after I turn the game off. There's a part where
Joe has a remote to control a rocketing platform that emits a constant, incessant
"beep beep beep," and a mid-boss fight against a UFO set against the constant
ringing of a loud, obnoxious bell that won't go silent until the aircraft is felled.
The music is also pretty typical Capcom which, while nothing extraordinary in
itself, is nicely familiar to people who've played a lot of Capcom games in their
days.
Overall: 6.5/10
While using zoomed in attacks to beat
a major boss, all of whom die without appropriately dramatic or satisfying death
animations, I realized I was more focused on his energy bar than the on-screen
action itself. The Viewtiful Joe series has personality to spare, but it's
simply not used to its full potential. I began to really enjoy the game's mechanics
once I got used to them, but by that point I was close to finishing things up
and I didn't really feel like replaying it. Still, I appreciate the style and
the basic action, and though the game wasn't a spectacular experience for me,
it was solid enough to keep me interested for the initial play-through and it
has me curious to see what tweaks and improvements, if any, future installments
might hold. Where the almighty dollar is concerned, I don't imagine it disappointing
the niche audience that replayed the first game over and over, but I also don't
picture it keeping most players hooked for very long.
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