God or demon, what are you?
It's time for you to choose your path.
The power of... your God Hand.
No evildoer will get past.

Hand-to-hand or fist-to-fist.
Kicking nuts or twist your wrist.
God power will keep your pimp hand strong.
So trust yourself.... or you won't last very long.

Dragon kick asses intothe milkyway!
Don't act like you don't like the ball buster!

Your arm, your arm, your arm, your arm, your arm, your arm will summon up the power of the God Hand!

GOd hand is peak fiction, I won't elaborate on it. Just play it!

On a random day in 2005, after binging a few Quentin Tarantino flicks and a couple of Fist of the North Star chapters, Shinji Mikami looked at his masterpiece that was Resident Evil 4 and said "What if RE4 but Kenshiro and Tarrantino fr" and God Hand was born (This is my headcannon).

God Hand was a game I was ready to drop in the first 2 - 3 hours of playing as I was struggling with some of the earlier bosses and didn't wanna give myself an aneurysm while barely making it out of every fight that I've died to multiple times. But then I looked at the huge following this game had and saw all the singing praises, and I wanted to be a part of that camp too. So I decided I wasn't gonna be a little bitch boy and try to properly figure out how this game works.

When the game clicks, it finally CLICKS and you feel like a boxing god (intentional with the title?), but at the same time no matter how good you get the game will just get harder thanks to it's dyanamic difficulty system, just one of the mechanics borrowed from RE4. Unless you spend a good chunk of your life playing this game, it will remain challening no matter what. This is honestly, quite one of the hardest games I have ever played. Keep in mind though the game is also one of the fairest games I have ever played. I don't think I've ever died once thinking it was the games fault. Everything done by the enemy is clearly telegraphed and you are given a window to deal with it in multiple ways. And when you die, the checkpoints are mostly frequent bar a few exceptions, and it's generous enough to give you all of your health back when you die.

In regards to fairness and difficulty, the way it's hanlded here makes you not wanna put the controller down because as opposed to other what is considered to be "hard" games like Souls games, while challenging, are pretty punishing usually sending you back a bit if you die at a bossfight, and at the risk of losing some of the experience you gained. God Hand is hard hard in the sense where you need good reflexes and awareness for every single fight, but also very fair because of it's generous checkpoints. In a souls game, there are plenty of ways to cheese things if you're at a wall, but here you cannot cheese at all. It's just you and your skill, and you aren't getting past a point until you get better. Best way to put it, this is a discipline simulator.

When this game was initially released, the game was mostly overlooked by critics due to the criticism of the combat not being robust. This is far from the truth about the combat and to put it, God Hand's combat was way ahead of this time. What we have now as modern God Of War over the shoulder combat, which has endless praise from critics, was clearly inspired by God Hand. Similar to Resident Evil 4, God Hand employs the same control scheme where it is an over the shoulder tank controlling game, with not much control over the camera. This was highly ambitious for an action game back in the day, where action games were mostly 3rd camera-pulled-away types of games. It works really well in God Hand as the right stick is now used as it's dodging system, which is implemented insanley well.

God Hand is not an offensive based game where it's about pulling the best combos you can. In fact, there really aren't much button combos here.. 90% of the time you will be just mashing the square button to the tune of your preset combo. God Hand's gameplay is mainly defense and crowd control focused. 1 on 1 fights are pretty straight forward and purley defense focused. In these fights you are dodging attacks and retaliating when there is a window of opportunity, wheras if you put more than one enemy in a fight, the strategy has suddenly changed and it's about positioning yourself in a way where you don't get blindsided or stockpiled. Crowd fights are more about putting yourself in a position where you can get into a 1 on 1 with a enemy for a moment, before going back to controlliing the crowd again. Once the game systems click, you will be dodging and taking out baddies one by one like a champ.

The game isn't perfect, there were moments that kinda sucked for me, like that one section with the big claw machine. Moments like these are few and far between, but when they come it kills the momentum you have.

Apart from the gameplay, the setting and style reminds you of a Quentin Tarantino movie which brings immesne charm to the whole package. There are so many goofy cheeky moments that bring a laugh out of you in between all the chaos, it makes getting through the hard moments so much more worth it just to see these goofy scenes.

By the end of the game I felt like I had just conquered a mountain. Despite at the beggining feeling like this is game I probably couldn't finish, I made it to the end and had so much fun while doing it. I am now apart of the God Hand cult and "I love it".