Character Action games are similar to roguelikes in the sense that their design facilitates many playthroughs of the game. However, the difference is that in a roguelike, multiple playthroughs are needed in order to master the gameplay systems to the point where you can beat the game for the first time. In character action games however, replayability is necessary in order to master its systems, but there is no extrinsic motivation. Why I am putting all of this genre discussion at the beginning of a Viewtiful Joe review, is to say that, I haven't played through VJ more than once. I think that I would enjoy this game's combat much more if I really dug into it on harder difficulties and tried to V rank all the stages. That being said, I think I would also grow to dislike the game more because Viewtiful Joe is a game with many flaws. And it seems all of my biggest problems revolve around this component of the game, the replayability. Some of the flaws, I suspect, would be completely removed if I sunk more time into the game, but others would only get worse. For that reason I feel hesitant to go back to Viewtiful Joe before writing this review. I know I would have a deeper understanding of the game, but to be quite frank, I don’t want to go back. So I am left with evaluating Viewtiful Joe off of one playthrough, and only making educated guesses on how I would feel on replay.

If we are viewing VJ as a one playthrough game, then I think that its biggest problem is that for the majority of its run time, the player is learning how to play the game. Maybe this was just the case for me, but I felt like I was playing wrong for the first 6 chapters. This was when I hit a brick wall at Fire Leo, where I died many, many times. This wasn’t uncommon for me, Viewtiful Joe is a very hard game, but this time I wasn’t making any leeway and/or improving. After about 1 hour of bashing my head against a wall, and once again feeling like I was playing the game wrong, I fled to the internet to discover that I indeed was playing wrong.

Now before I get into how I was playing wrong I want to address the notion that people can play games wrong. In most cases, I would firmly reject the idea; Games are interactive, and however you choose to interact with said game is just that: your choice. With all that being said, there is a difference in play style and effectiveness of play style. If you decide to play Hollow Knight without using spells, more power to you. If you don’t engage with the movement tech in Celeste, that is perfectly fine. The problem arises when one specific way to play the game is unviable. In my previous examples, you can engage with the game in those ways, and still be satisfied with the results, overcome the game's challenges, and have a relatively good time. In Viewtiful Joe however, this is not the case.

You see, the problem I had run into was that I hadn’t figured out one very specific way of dealing damage, that being Punch + Slow + Zoom. Without using this, I was dealing about 25% of the damage I would otherwise be dealing if I were using this. That is not an insignificant gap, especially taking into account the relatively high difficulty of VJ. Viewtiful Joe is a game with a lot of different combat combinations, so it seems weird to me that one combination does a vast amount of damage more than others. For the remainder of my play-time, I found myself hardly struggling because I now had a way to deal damage that felt adequate. Instead of slowly shaving health away, I was now fighting back, which removed much of the monotony of the combat that I had been experiencing up until this point.

I liked Viewtiful Joe’s combat from the start, it was engaging to learn an enemies moveset, figure out the best times to attack, and then execute as best as possible. My problem that I had prior to this discovery, was that it was boring to execute the same solution over and over again, until the enemy finally died. This made the game a slog to get through, and I found myself very bored of what would otherwise be a very fun game. But now I’m at a crossroads, because while I did enjoy the combat moving forward using the Punch + Slow + Zoom combination, it was such a very specific thing to figure out, that I’m not sure if I would have done so without consulting the internet. So now I feel my choices are between:

1. Being okay with a combat system that is really repetitive.

2. Forgiving a game that put me through hell, because there is a solution to that hell, it's just one very specific combo.

And to be honest, I don’t really feel satisfied when over half the game wasn’t fun to play. This is something that would be resolved on replaying the game, but for my first playthrough, I’m unsatisfied.

“But why don’t you just replay it then?” I hear you asking. It would (I suspect) fix this aspect of the game for me, but as previously mentioned, I have more problems with the game. The first being reused content and enemy variety. These go hand in hand, so I will cover them together.

To put it bluntly, the amount of reused content in this game is baffling. This is mostly enemies, but it extends beyond that to the bosses. For the vast majority of the game, you will be fighting the same basic enemy types, and all of the bosses (with the exception of 2) are reused at some point). To go on a semi-brief tangent, I would like to compare Dark Souls and Viewtiful Joe. With both Viewtiful Joe and Dark Souls being action games, I find this to be an interesting comparison. If we look at the player character, Viewtiful Joe has many more actions that they can perform. I think that this is a clear improvement from Dark Souls, where the player is mostly trapped into one button, but I found myself enjoying Dark Souls combat more. Why? Well it’s because Dark Souls combat never bored me, since I always had to engage with it mentally. There are so many enemies that you have to constantly learn: which attacks they have, the best way to avoid those attacks, how those attacks will overlap with other enemies when facing more than one enemy, the best windows to attack said enemies, etc. You do this in Viewtiful Joe as well, but the problem becomes that after the initial learning portion (which I want to stress I did enjoy) it becomes less about engaging mentally with the opponent and more about executing correctly in combat. Dark Souls has this problem to, hell most games do, but Dark Souls avoids this issue by having a vast array of enemies.


Over the course of any game, it needs to increase the challenge in order to keep the player engaged. If the player is doing the same easy actions over and over again, I think it’s clear to see how much more engaging a game would be if you designed it to challenge the player. That being said, there are very few ways to make execution harder for a player. The first option is to make a task more complex, so that responding to said task and correctly executing has more possible variables. This is a mechanical change, and while harder to implement, I think it is a vast improvement over the next option, because complexity adds depth to interaction. The other option is a numerical change. We can make a challenge harder for a player if they have to execute the same action multiple times successfully, or if we punish them harder when they fail. This usually leads to tedium among other problems, and is the route you have to go down when you reuse content. An easy example would be to imagine a game where you have to shoot a target without missing. Assuming that’s all there is to the game, in order to increase challenge we could just ramp up the numbers. Shoot 10 targets, 100, 1000, etc. I think the point becomes clear that eventually length doesn’t make a challenge fun, even if shooting 1000 targets without missing is harder than 100.

To return to Viewtiful Joe, it becomes either boring or frustrating when it reuses content. When it spams the same enemy types over and over again, it gets extremely boring. When it reuses its bosses in a ‘boss rush’, it becomes frustrating if you die. Its frustrating because the increase in challenge was not to make the bosses harder, it was to force the player to show their mastery over the bosses by beating them back to back. On paper, this makes sense, but in practice it means repeating the same bosses over and over if you Game Over. You have already shown mastery over these bosses by beating them, but the game insists on lengthening the punishment because by definition, it is harder. But replaying a boss doesn’t show mastery of the boss that you died to, so I think it is easy to see that there is a disconnect between developer intentions and how a player will approach that.

This issue of repetition, while not super abhorrent you’re first time through, would become exponentially worse on repeat playthroughs. This is why I am so hesitant to return to Viewtiful Joe, because I don’t know if mastering the combat is worth the monotony.

Before I finished, there were things I liked about Viewtiful Joe, so I figured I would backload this ‘review’ with what I enjoyed.

I love the visuals of this game. The artstyle is one of the best I’ve seen. It consistently impressed me how good it looks, which is especially impressive considering its 20 years old. All the colors pop, the character designs are fantastic, it really all feels cohesive in this department. The animations are so well designed, focusing on key poses to accentuate the fighting, and then seamlessly flowing between more poses. The way the camera functions in conjunction with the Zoom ability to highlight Joe’s actions really gives the ability its own unique flair, and the game is full of more little touches like this that go a long way. Viewtiful Joe is a visual feast all around, and might be the aspect of the game I enjoyed the most.

I really liked the presentation of Viewtiful Joe. The cheesy story, characters and writing were all cheesy in a good way, which is something that I don’t find often. The voice acting was really good, especially paired with some of the animations. When Joe sticks his tongue out and cackles, or decides to go full anime protagonist and poses, it really builds his character. He’s just a goofy guy that watches too much media, and the game leans into it. This extends to other characters of course, but this review is already getting long, so I’ll cut it there.

I do like the grading system a lot. It’s not needlessly complicated, the three core aspects are essentially fight well, don’t take damage, and do it fast. A lot of games I find obscure this information, so I enjoyed seeing it be so transparent, especially considering how core it is to the design of this game.

That about concludes my thoughts on VIewtiful Joe. It was a game that I definitely had a lot to say about, which at least means it made an impression on me. I don’t have nearly as much to say, positively or negatively, about most AAA games nowadays, and for that I found it refreshing. It's a game with its own identity, as a cartoon mashup of beat 'em up and character action games, and for the most part, I think it succeeds. I do wish it wasn’t so frustrating in some aspects, and I don’t know how much it will hold up on replay, and yet I think it won me over by the end.