So... That will not fly. Not with me. Yesterday I decided to give the game another go since I most certainly are even better at games today than I was back then. Viewtiful Joe is the debut title for Clover, the people that went on to make Ôkami and God Hand (as well as a Viewtiful Joe sequal and a couple of spinoffs). They have a unique way of designing the artwork in their games, I think I would have been able to tell it was Clover even if their logo was not featured in the beginning of the game. Viewtiful Joe also combines two weaknesses from Ôkami and God Hand but I will get to those in a minute. First let us talk about Joe.
"It's energetic, frantic, violent and douchebaggy."
Joe is a douchebag on a night out with his girlfriend Silvia to watch a douchebag movie. The villain in the movie suddenly reaches out of the cinema screen and snatches Silvia. Joe jumps after and finds himself being a super hero in a movie mashup. That is pretty much it as far as story goes. Viewtiful Joe is a 2D platformer beat 'em up that is short but hard. There is seven episodes in total, where each one has two parts and a boss fight or something similar. The visuals are cartoony and does a good job conveying the over the top attitude of the game. It's energetic, frantic, violent and douchebaggy (I think they went for "awesome" here, but I do not agree). I had fun going through the episodes once again, re-learning all of Joe's cool moves and I really did not remember the game being this much fun. Nice! But then I reached the later episodes and the feeling came over me like a wave. Tedious gameplay that overstays its welcome. It just takes a bit too long to get through it, even if it is just seven episodes. So the Ôkami weakness of dragging on forever was present. And then it also inherited God Hands "enough already, it was fun in the beginning but now I am bored". In small doses Viewtiful Joe is a great action game. But in small doses the player will not be able to completely master the controls and keep up with the speed that the game demands. So... It falls somewhere in between a fast action fix and a full fledged hardcore game and it does not nail any of them.
