no amount of words could possibly do enough justice. pure unhinged teenage profoundness. a masterclass in the culmination of elements from its inspirations. almost a parody of its pop-culture and on-rails influences, using them as a basis for both its sci-fi-action foundation and exceeding the player’s initial expectations. its face filled with complacency in admitting “yeah, we added a fully fledged cinematic-robo-socio-political narrative on top of the enigmatic disproportionately beautiful gameplay.” a blood-pumping, sharply concentrated soundtrack follows suit to wrap everything together into a somewhat messy package, but it’s an incredibly attractive and addicting package. confidently puts the “mecha” in mechanics.

I think what makes sin & punishment so great — other than the exhilaratingly snappy paced set piece monster sandwich of a campaign, killer soundtrack, and pristine level design paired with a borderline sexual difficulty curve — is that it's the perfect crystallized representation of the core elements of the "shooter game"

Anyone whos played a shmup, run & gun, FPS or TPS knows these games are made up of two core elements. Move to avoid getting hit, line yourself or your reticule up with the enemy and press the shoot button to win. Move and shoot.

What makes S&P stand in contrast to its contemporaries is that there's virtually zero interplay between these two aspects. Moving doesn't affect your aiming (considerably) and aiming has no effect on the camera or your movement.
This disconnect between the two elements ends up creating a unique appeal where you're essentially playing two different games at the same time, a 3D shooting gallery and a 2D "dodge em up".

This inherent multitasking element plus the set camera let the designers create deliciously demanding scenarios like having to focus your aim on a mobile enemy in the top right while noting the missile arriving from the bottom left in your peripheral vision and making a bet with yourself that you'll reflect it without ungluing your eyes from the top right.

Were this a standardized FPS/TPS, the dynamic camera and 3D movement wouldn't afford the same level of clarity or precision that allows S&P's obstacles to be as tight & demanding as they are.
Were this a shoot em up, you'd have the clarity and precise movement but the (generally) restrictive way that shooting works doesn't allow for the multi tasking element to emerge.

This isn't either of those things though. It's straight up moving and shooting at its rawest and most literal. It's Sin & Punishment all the way through, baby.

Para la mayoría, resumir Sin & Punishment suele reducirse a algo tan sencillo como señalar sus locuras y esperar que ello le haga justicia; una acción realmente floja que no empieza siquiera a esbozar las proezas de lo que posiblemente sea el mejor videojuego de la consola: un inquebrantable estilo, una dirección cinematográfica que apoya al ritmo, una banda sonora frenética que se acopla perfectamente a su acción, un fuerte pulido en sus controles para nunca romper el flujo de juego, una cohesión brillante entre sus sistemas para atrapar al jugador en su bucle, un diseño de enemigos que prevé de un reto justo y variado, y una serie de niveles que otorgan un sentimiento de escala constante a sus eventos.

Sin embargo, lo que se suele ignorar es la narrativa que su caótico relato ofrece al paquete, el cual nos esconde un mensaje sobre los desafíos de la intimidad humana, y nos advierte del cómo construir relaciones sin afecto y vulnerabilidad nos lleva a la manipulación, y a algo no muy diferente de bestias sin libre albedrío. Se acopla admirablemente a las pretensiones jugables: es un trabajo que, al igual que sus protagonistas, entiende perfectamente su propia naturaleza, dejando a relucir la total sinceridad de sus creadores.

~ ANÁLISIS COMPLETO: https://youtu.be/GxGmLpnvPxM ~

(I didn't have this logged already...?)

The ever-shifting perspective in Stage 2-2 (the aircraft carrier level) is one of the biggest flexes that the genre has ever experienced, and it being on the N64 of all consoles makes it even better.

I emulated this game but I could still hear the hardware crying.

Cool incarnate, like if you scanned a mecha-enthused 10 year old's idea of cool and just plastered the unfiltered thoughts onto the screen this is the result. Everything you do just goes from one to another in a series of hype moments with barely sensical threads (complementary). And it's also like, really competently put together top-to-bottom. It's Treasure! Gotta love treasure.
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This next bit is just scattershot thoughts of a sort of malaise in my head, feel free to skip over it or pretend they don't exist. I honestly don't really have any 'real' issues with Sin and Punishment, not so much in a "mm yes critic's job is to-", but more in a "I don't know how I can condense my sort of npc-feelings I had at times into actual justifiable issues". I think just the n64 dirty-drab palette chosen here's like an instant turn-off for me and I turned my internal resolution way up. Although, I still lost my shit at the naval segment, and the finale. There's certainly not a lot of mechanical meat on its bones, but also it has more than any other rail shooter I know of? Normal is also not THAT hard for me and I managed to beat it without credit feeding. Idk, it's a great time! I just feel it really slipping from my grasp in impact quicker than I expect and it's only been 45 minutes ;;

Edit: WAIT hold on I figured one part out. The music blends so heavily together that it undercuts so much, you could randomly change them around and it'd do NOTHING. They should've at least done something to the final fight track!!!

Shit owns. It's definitely in contention for THE best N64 game of all time.

The incredible set pieces Treasure managed to eke out of the 64's limited processing power are just stunning, from front to back. It doesn't control the best -- it always feels a bit clunky -- but it's almost like the game knows this, and so it passes out continues like candy, and offers super-generous checkpoints. It doesn't want to frustrate you, or grind you down with difficulty (though there's always 1CC attempts, hard mode, and playing for score if you WANT that); it just wants you to have a fuckin' rad time.

My sin is not having played this earlier.

My punishment is sitting at my PC for half an hour trying to come up with a review, but the words just don't come to me.

I'm glad I'm not the only one that didn't understand what the hell transpired in this game. It doesn't matter, though; enemies go boom.

Gotta be one of the coolest rail shooters of all time just from its art direction alone. I love how the low poly models lend themselves perfectly to creating horrific masses of flesh and metal. It's also really exhilarating to play, once you get into the flow state of dodging, shooting, and parrying there's nothing else quite like it (other than the sequel of course). The Evangelion influence is extremely apparent, but my favorite way it manifests is in the color palettes, it captures the visual identity of some of the best moments in Eva better than most imitators could hope to.

an adaptation of the fevered sugar-fueled scribblings in the margins of your maths textbook, impossible battles and astonishing reveals and incredible images streamed directly from the imagination of a bored 11-year old. zero restraint, zero conception of what is and is not "enough", pulling from all the things they love with reckless abandon, rendered with all the technical mastery of one of the most legendary studios in the industry at the height of their powers.

sin and punishment reeks of a dense inner mythology that it almost never lets the viewer peer into, not so much beginning in media res but existing almost entirely in the head of it's creator, assuming an understanding that could only be found inside there. i mean this as the highest possible praise, sin and punishment channels an effortlessly positive adolescent enthusiasm that other games could only dream of replicating. pairing this with an understanding of cinematic technique in gameplay years ahead of the curve, turn-of-the-millennium eco-warrior themes screamed loud enough to be heard above the glorious cacophony, a beautiful tapestry of rail shooting that entices perfection like few other games manage and what else could Sin and Punishment possibly do? what more could we possibly ask for?

well, one of the best final bosses that video games have ever seen certainly helps.

A warning from Beyond The Time, from futures wrapped in themselves: Kill the future they say Must Be. Preferably with a gunblade.

Beat this one on NSO and all I can say is that it's definitely a fantastic on-rails shooter and one of Treasure's best. Gameplay-wise, it's near perfect, the difficulty feels just right and the shooting and swordplay are simple and extremely fun to use. There are only a few things that bring the game down a little bit.

Like the controller for the console this was originally on, the controls are a little unconventional and take a bit of getting used to. However, once you do that, it is pretty much smooth sailing from there. One other thing I'd like to point out is that the aiming is a little too slow. It gets annoying when I'm trying to get rid of a bunch of enemies and it takes five seconds to go around aiming across the screen when the aiming could definitely be just a tad faster. It really becomes a prominent issue during the final boss when you have to shoot down all of those tiny green orbs. The last flaw is just that it's pretty short and could have used a few extra levels.

Even with all of the minor issues aside, it's a fantastic game and easily one of the best games on the N64 and out of Treasure's portfolio.

There’s still plenty of games by Treasure that I still haven’t played and hope to play, but I think I’m starting to get a good idea of what makes their best games so captivating, not incidentally because it’s showcased so strongly here. Treasure have this sort of repertoire of mechanics which serve as a constellation around a central idea - encouraging the player to view and approach encounters in different ways - which is always surprising the player with the extent of the interactivity of the experience, and I’ve noticed that how much I like each game can be strongly correlated to how frequently and strongly this central idea is expressed. I understand that this is very abstract, so let’s try and make it more concrete:

Treasure loves parries; the idea of taking a projectile being fired at you and turning it back around. The frequency with which this mechanic occurs in their games really just makes it seem like somebody at the studio thought it was cool as shit (which it is), but it also serves a wider purpose: Projectiles are rarely just obstacles to be avoided, they’re just as equally potential tools. The best iteration I’ve seen of the idea is Mischief Maker’s Cerberus Alpha but Sin and Punishment makes major use of this idea too to provide moments of realisation for the player in a variety of ways. Enemies which initially seem to be threats because they fill the screen with more projectiles are recontextualised as things which help you through your own skill to deal with them, and this is integrated with decision-making; it’s not just “Oh, I can parry this projectile” but also “Oh, I should kill this guy with the rocket launcher last, because he is just giving me rockets to parry.” It's a really great complication to the simple loop of shooting everything that appears on the screen which can make a lot of shmups feel homogenous sometimes.

The second expression is the use of alternate modes, an idea which has gone through several evolutions in Treasure’s history. In the transition from Gunstar Heroes to Alien Soldier, it was decided that allowing the player to switch aiming modes mid-level was superior to a one-time choice, not only because it was more flexible, but because choosing the best mode for the situation in real-time is a deeper expression of skill and knowledge. The next evolution, occurring in Sin and Punishment, was that this choice can be integrated with the skill curve of the game. The lock-on mode of Sin and Punishment drastically helps the player reduce their mental stack, but it makes you do less damage than the manual aiming, so while it’s always ideal to manual aim, every section is essentially asking the player “do you think you have the skill to dodge all this shit and aim simultaneously?”, which rarely has a static answer. Sections where you relied on the lock-on in one playthrough you might “graduate” to manually aiming in the next, and this is such a dynamic, player-driven approach to difficulty.

I would say almost objectively that Ikaruga is the highest expression of this connection between mode-switching and a skill curve (for reasons that I probably don’t need to explain but could probably spend way too long doing anyway), but I really like this incarnation of it simply because of its connection with the early 3D era of the N64. This was Treasure’s first foray into true 3D and their use of it in this game is so joyous and imaginative. Part of why the use of lock-on as a tool for dealing with the mental stack is so effective is because it tasks you with aiming at enemies in the background, enemies above and below you, enemies next to you and even enemies in the foreground in front of you, all of whom can be sending projectiles your way in different 3D planes, it’s a lot to deal with, but that only enhances the foundational shmup satisfaction of feeling like a god because you just dodged a seemingly undodgeable pattern of bullets - which would not be as effective if you were only fired upon from one dimension. The way the game uses shifts in perspective is incredible: traditional rail shooting and run-n-gun blends together in subtle combinations, but then you’ll suddenly fight a boss in an arena where you can rotate 360 degrees around a central point, other parts, like the railcar section evoke a shooting gallery, and there’s a full Gunstar Heroes-esque run-n-gun section in the final level, and the pace of these shifts is so fast that it feels apt to call it a tour-de-force of various 3D shooting-game concepts.

The third expression is the interplay between close and long-range combat. Treasure shooting games very often break up purely ranged combat with degrees of close-quarters combat, an idea which bookends Treasure’s major works, beginning with the claustrophobic fight against Orange on top of a plane in Gunstar Heroes and ending with the fistfight against Deko Gekisho in Star Successor, Radiant Silvergun found a way to sneak in a sword into a genre traditionally dealing only in bullets, and Sin and Punishment’s moments of melee combat are some of the best in the game - flinging Radahn off a cliff and Brad through a window just doesn’t get old. It works, again, because you have to think about the situation and choose which type of attack is best, further fostering this interactivity that purely moving a reticle over an enemy and holding down the shoot button doesn’t.

I wouldn’t say having these elements alone constitutes a good game, but harmonising them to create a complex experience is why I think this and Treasure’s other games are so great. That isn’t to say that Sin and Punishment doesn’t have its own unique things going on though: I think the approach to story here is quite interesting and complements the short yet highly-replayable structure really well. On the first go, story beats like the dream sequence or characters like Achi or even allegiances and motivations of certain characters are incredibly hard to parse, but the fact that they’re so confusing gives the story relevance beyond the first playthrough, since it makes progressively more sense each time. It’s something that I’m surprised more developers don’t take advantage of, kind of like how the way Hades’ story is structured complements its repetitious roguelite structure, this complements the replayable arcade structure.

The music is also really great. Toshiya Yamanaka has remarked that this was thanks to some programmer at Treasure who was capable of programming the N64’s pulse-code modulation, which results in higher sound quality. I don’t really understand that myself, but the music here goes hard, even if it does have some questionable repetitions.

The difficulty modes are also incredibly well done. Easy, medium and hard aren’t just differentiated by damage sliders, sections can be quite radically different on each difficulty as there are added enemies and new attacks, which is basically a perfect execution of difficulty selection in a game like this.

I would be remiss to not mention some of the flaws as I don’t think this is a perfect game. The voice acting is terrible. Don’t get me wrong, I love me some campy, trashy voice acting, but this game is clearly going for a more serious tone and that really clashes with the bad line deliveries. While I prefer the conciseness of this game in general, Star Successor has a better version of melee options, as it’s too easy in this game to spam the attack button to parry anything you want, whereas the sequel demands timing. The first level is also such a snoozefest, even on hard, that it sometimes feels like a chore to go through on a fresh run. Having such an easy first level isn’t even necessary for new players since this game already has quite a good tutorial.

On the whole though this is probably my favourite Treasure game I’ve played so far and the flaws are really not that big of a deal. Really looking forward to playing the Treasure games I haven't played yet (Dynamite Headdy, Gradius V, Bangai-O, Silhouette Mirage, possibly more)

Funny story on this one, so one time at a convention, I learned that you can break the region lock of Japanese N64 games by unscrewing the back of the cartridge and replacing the back of it with the back of an American N64 cartridge. Never thought I'd be using that trick again until I found out about this game, where now I own a copy that has the back of a now useless copy of Nascar '99 that I bought at a local retro game shop for 3 bucks.

Doing it this way made me feel like I was popping in an old fuzzy VHS tape of a 90s shonen anime movie that never made its way over seas. I mean that literally, because this games presentation gives that vibe. You have these unhinged over the top scenes that uses all the power the N64 can render, backed by the most groovy soundtrack imaginable (my personal favorite in any Treasure game) and voice acting that sounds like it was done by 5 fans of this shonen who have no idea how to voice act and took a lot of translations very literal, and they were lazy to include english subtitles to help the audience differentiate what they're saying from all the loud sound effects. And the story beats go by so fast it felt like I only watched like part 5/17 in a larger narrative. It's super cheesy and is basically jibberish, but no other game has ever emulated that feeling of 90s anime cheese before like Sin and Punishment, so it's presentation arguably leaves a lot to be desired but for me is such a guilty pleasure.

However, the reason why I popped this tape in wasn't for it's story, but it's "fight scenes".

The reason why I bought this game physically to begin was, upon doing research, I found out this game was designed around the N64 controller itself. The premise for the development of S&P was to design a game where you use the left side of the controller rather than the right side. S&P is an on-rails shooter where you move your character with the D-Pad (double tap a direction to dodge roll), aim with the analog stick, shoot with the trigger, double jump with the left bumper, and switch weapons with the A button. This unorthodox control scheme was actually extremely easy to get used to, which helped that the game had a great tutorial that was easy enough to made someone like me who isn't very good at Japanese to understand. (Although granted I wished this game didn't suffer from inverted aiming controls.)

Because of this control scheme, you will not also be tested on your aiming, but when to strafe, jump and dodge roll. You are given a lot more to look out for and the game will constantly test you on this principle. I was pleased to see this game was directed by Hideyuki Suganami, the same man behind Alien Soldier, collabed with Nintendo EPD1, so the levels just keep offering idea after idea that will both challenge you while offer so much variety in it's ~1 and a half hour run time.

My only major gripe when it comes to gameplay is the time limit. If reach zero, your characters health bar drains until death. Normally I don't mind time limits if they're done right as they're a means to prevent a player from stalling, but because S&P is an on-rails shooter, you can't exactly beat the time if you want to. It can make one hit that knocks down your character more frustrating than it needs to be, and some stages that don't give time bonuses like Stage 3 can make it a lot more infuriating.

Despite that however, Sin and Punishment's charm and polished gameplay left me in total awe, and is now possibly one of my personal favorite N64 games behind Majora's Mask and Banjo-Kazooie. Unfortunately this game isn't as well known as the other two, because of it's Japanese only release. There was a release of this game for Wii virtual console but.... yeah that's gone. However, I can't recommend this one enough because I think this game is very special. One day when this pandemic blows over and conventions roll back around, I can't wait to show this game to everyone of my friends, and watch them marvel in this insane 90s anime movie that is bundled in a video game at it's most purest, much like how people traded VHS tapes of old anime films before their mainstream popularity.

"GET BONUS" -Sin and Punishment, 2000.

Treasure is one of those companies that once you've learned their existence, you begin to want to tell everyone about them. They're such a free flowing development team that output a lot of insanely good games, with a diversity of genres. Sin And Punishment is just one within their ranks, and it's take on an arcade shooter is phenomenal.

Their specialty are boss fights, they really understand the push and pull a boss fight should give the player. There's a lot you can study by replaying the game and understanding the mechanics of how they function, what they set up for the player, and how to take them down.

I haven't played this in quite a while, so I don't have a lot of pungent things to say that really get into the nitty gritty of what makes the game work, but it's such a great game, you guys, holy shit, go play Treasure games.