Review By

Andrew Fletcher

Curiously, Viewtiful Joe's genius struck me whilst I was asleep. I found that my dreams had started to play out in slow-motion. The people in them began randomly leaping around and performing graceful, arching mid-air twists, reminiscent of the time a late-night Tetris session had turned them all into long thin blocks. Like Tetris, Viewtiful Joe is a bewitching old-school experience, and serves as a wake up call for those who think that immersive gameplay has only emerged since the advent of 3D technology. However, to consider this a victory of substance over style is not quite accurate. It is, first and foremost, a game of effortless beauty.

Quite probably the most visually arresting 2D platformer ever made, Viewtiful Joe's chaotic-yet-intricate graphical style grows on the player surprisingly quickly. For anyone who still holds a candle for the halcyon days of side-scrolling beat-'em-ups, Capcom's radical reshaping of the genre can look almost too good to be true. In the same way as Rockstar's Grand Theft Auto series highlights the inherently restrictive nature of most (mainstream) games, Viewtiful Joe makes practically every other title on the shelf look aesthetically pedestrian. The importance of such distinctive and striking game art cannot be overestimated in raising the public profile of the medium.

But let's be honest, didn't side-scrolling beat-'em-ups die off for a reason? We all have our own favourites, but as a genre it's hard to expound the merits of such an inherently shallow and restrictive game template. Unsurprisingly, therefore, Viewtiful Joe lives and dies on the strength of its party tricks, and initially it can't help but feel a little gimmicky. Yet once all of Joe's abilities have been mastered, the experience really starts to gel. The slow-down, speed-up and zoom special effects consolidate the traditional combat system rather than needlessly complicating it. They also help to underscore the incredible animation, which distils the fluidity of (super)human movement as well as any 3D platformer of this generation.

Joe's superpowers ensure that the initial frisson of entering his comic book universe never really wanes—such is the calibre and consistency of their implementation. The most brilliant examples of this are probably the delightful environmental puzzles, which Gene mentioned in the main review. Asking the player to bend the laws of physics in increasingly imaginative and bizarre fashions, they require a kind of illogical logic. Whether it's speeding up time to hurry under a falling barrel, or slowing things to a crawl so that an airborne platform might plummet to Joe's feet, the developer's ability to think outside the box rubs off on the player in immensely satisfying ways.

There is, however, a guilty secret at the heart of Viewtiful Joe's exemplary design ethic. Put simply, I believe the game is several degrees harder than it should have been. Gene claimed that it is "as difficult as the player wants it to be," yet I fail to see how this can be true of a game which so stubbornly refuses to offer the player mid-level saves. This alone creates an unsettling conflict between the wealth of invigorating gameplay touches and the energy-sapping nature of the levels in which they are featured.

I think an old-school sensibility can only justify so much unnecessary punishment. In a game like Ikaruga, for instance, the difficulty arises from an expertly honed risk/reward structure, and F-Zero GX's hardcore credentials were won thanks to its elaborate track layouts and a thrilling sense of speed. By contrast, the impenetrable toughness of Viewtiful Joe's higher skill settings can only draw attention to some flagrant design problems. Why are the end-of-level bosses endowed with such vast reserves of stamina? Why must this arcade action be played in chunks of at least an hour for any progress to be made? And how come success brings more relief than it does satisfaction?

Still, there is never any question about sticking with Viewtiful Joe to the bitter end, and once completed, it really is tough to sustain any criticism with such a wholly admirable title. It works very hard to impress the player, and I am delighted to say that all of Capcom's toil has been well directed. Joe's creator, Atsushi Inaba, wanted Team Viewtiful to produce a game "portraying beauty in fighting." They have succeeded. Viewtiful Joe is an aesthetic marvel and, for the most part, a triumphant return for a long-neglected genre. And it plays like a dream.

Review By

Brad Gallaway

VJ gets kudos for the excellent backgrounds, and the unique sort of celshading it sports. It's also cool to see Joe's time powers in action. But after you've seen him do his Zoom-ins and Speed-ups, there are too many issues to let VJ be called a classic.

For a game with 2D movement/presentation, why are so many things completely offscreen? The game's bosses don't fool around, and it makes them even more aggravating when you have no idea where they are or what they're doing. That's just cheap. Besides the bosses, I could never shake the feeling that I should be seeing more of what was going on around me.

The charm of beating up hordes of enemies also wore off halfway through the game in spite of Joe's various techniques. Punch punch, Kick kick... once you've seen slow-motion uppercuts a few dozen times, what's the point?

I applaud the visuals and I can see what Capcom was going for, but for my money Viewtiful Joe fails to deliver the kind of fun, engaging gameplay that I look for in action games. More annoying than amazing, I say "no" to Joe.

Nicato says...
What makes Viewtiful Joe so intriguing is not it's comic book-come-to-life visuals, it's near flawless combat system, or time manipulation effecting environments. What raises eyebrows is that through the course of play, Joe performs acrobatic jumps, corny one-liners, viewtiful combos, and poses that are "just too cool." You're constantly reminded that you are a super-hero, with all the style and showboating (and corniness) that comes with it.

Although Joe's got the moves and means to defeat swarms of foes at a time, he is the only one who is vulnerable to their attacks; if an enemy is caught by an ally's stray punch, no damage is inflicted upon them. Instead of mincing their attacks, every individual foes are free to "fire at will" without consequence. This may seem like a common, if dated mechanic, but when eight or nine are on screen at time, it can cause frustration. For this reason, one might conclude Viewtiful Joe as being too difficult.

Besides the "so bad it's good" plot, occasional simple puzzles, and obstacle platforming, nothing detours you from the intense combat. Viewtiful Joe can be so demanding that at times, it's even psychically exhausting. No hardcore gamer or action fan should skip.

RATING: 8.5

*padan_fain* says...
While there is no doubt that Viewtiful Joe looks absolutely wonderful, I was left with the firm impression that the game is a triumph of style over substance.

A well-designed game will enable the player to come up with his own solutions to the challenges that the game presents. Joe fails miserably in this respect. The solutions to the game's so-called puzzles are hard-coded into the game, meaning that the designers allowed for one and only one way to solve a given puzzle.

For example, during the second level there is a ramp where buses drive off and crash into a pit that Joe must cross. Remembering that speeding up time made the propellers underneath certain platforms rotate faster, I attempted to make the buses fly off the ramp at a faster speed to fly farther and enabling me to get over the pit. The bus landed in exactly the same spot as it normally did, exploded, and I was forced to play the entire level over because a reasonable solution to a puzzle did not work. This inconsistency reduces the game into a trial-and-error fest that is highly cumbersome.

In addition, many enemies were designed to get very cheap hits on Joe by taking advantage of the too limited field of view by attacking you from off-screen (e.g. the shooting cowboys and the charging rhinoceros). The result is that many times the player feels as though he or she has done nothing wrong but fails anyway.

RATING: 6.5
Published: May 26, 2004

ViewtifulLi says...
What makes Viewtiful Joe so intriguing is not its comic book-come-to-life visuals, its near flawless combat system, or time manipulation effecting environments. What raises eyebrows is that through the course of play, Joe performs acrobatic jumps, corny one-liners, viewtiful combos, and poses that are "just too cool." You're constantly reminded that you are a super-hero, with all the style and showboating (and corniness) that comes with it.

Although Joe's got the moves and means to defeat swarms of foes at a time, he is the only one who is vulnerable to their attacks; if an enemy is caught by an ally's stray punch, no damage is inflicted upon them. Instead of mincing their attacks, every individual foes are free to "fire at will" without consequence. This may seem like a common, if dated mechanic, but when eight or nine are on screen at time, it can cause frustration. For this reason, one might conclude Viewtiful Joe as being too difficult.

Besides the "so bad it's good" plot, occasional simple puzzles, and obstacle platforming, nothing detours you from the intense combat. Viewtiful Joe can be so demanding that at times, it's even psychically exhausting. No hardcore gamer or action fan should skip.

RATING: 10
Published: January 26, 2005

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