Si hacemos una comparación con el cine Wanted: Dead sin duda sería una película de serie b. No destaca absolutamente en ninguno de sus apartados. Gráficamente se limita a cumplir, su banda sonora suena sin pena ni gloria, tiene buenas ideas en torno a su jugabilidad, pero se presentan como un puzzle de un rompecabezas que parece no tener solución... Sin embargo, me ha tenido enganchado desde que lo he empezado hasta que lo he terminado.

Wanted: Dead no es una experiencia para todo el mundo, quizás no sea una experiencia recomendable para nadie, muy pocos sabrán valóralo y dudo que alguien sea capaz de disfrutarlo, pero el que si pueda, posiblemente se de cuenta de que esta ante lo que podría ser un videojuego de culto.

So, I decided to do a little digging on the development and circumstances of Wanted Dead and im convinced this is like a money laundering scheme or something. Like, this is definetly a crime right. Some rich asshole forms an entertainment company in switzerland called 110 Industries, which seems to consist almost entirely of this, Vapourware, and selling the debut album of Stephanie Joosten - most notable for playing quiet in MGSV - on Vinyl. He seems to really want to just make a game that's john wick, so he picks up Soleil and they just use his money to make a sequel to Devil's Third instead, being sure to cast Joosten and a Phillip-Morris model in lead roles, and put in the movie references the rich funder wanted in.

And yes, this game is just Devil's Fourth. Whilst Itagaki is oddly absent considering this game feels like a scam, It's the same Valhalla game studios team from Third, and it plays remarkably similarly. The main change is that combat is slightly less shit. You get pretty standard combos with your sword intermixed with a ludicrously powerful pistol used to stagger and parry enemies at a pretty high range. There's a heavy emphasis on canned finishers to restore health (Think doom 4), and the general sense is the game really wants you in the thick of things at basically every moment, slashing and dashing amongst the gunfire. It's a very chaotic system, and I would hesistate to say it's good, the enemy variety just isnt there, and enemies are just a bit too tanky to keep the flow great, but it's far improved from Devil's Third and is a serviceable action game with a pretty nice high degree of difficulty. I would go as far to say that it's bosses are pretty good, and I really like how fast the player dies - make the wrong mistake to even a single grunt and they'll kill you straight up, even on the difficulty that gives you cat ears.

But let's be real, that's really not appeal of Wanted dead when you get down to it. What is - is that will not see a game as truly baffling as Wanted: Dead in a long time. So many times it will make you question why. Why is there a relatively high production value full shmup included? Why is there this kinda rad mix of animated cutscenes intermingled in? Why do some scenes feel pieced together out of dialogue from different drafts? Why does the game clearly jab at some heavy stuff like health insurance and Margaret Thatcher for like 2 seconds and then drop it? Whats up with the Cooking videos featured heavily in the advertising but not in the actual game? Why is there a single (one) ladder that you can climb in the whole game? I legitimately could go on for much longer than this you have no idea, you go like ten seconds in this game and you wonder what the fuck the motivation behind the decisions was.

The game is all over the place to the point where I am in denial that it's just incompetence. A police officer pulling stuff from an interview that the SUPECT REFUSED TO TELL HER to go on to the next plot point is something Neil Breen would catch in the edit. The game's developers have been open that it's a throwback to cheapo PS2 games (presumably oneechambara being the point of reference?) but I seriously feel like this is all a bit. Am I being made fun of? Are Soleil making fun of this rich swiss asshole by making a shitpost? Am I now an accessory to money laundering?

Wanted: Dead is not a "weird game" in the way something like a Suda51 or Swery game is, or even LSD Dream Emulator. I'm tempted to compare it to kane and lynch 2 but that game is a million times more focused in it's vision and what it's trying to portray. I can't stop thinking about it, every decision it makes is so... wrong, yet also so deliberate. I've seriously never played anything like it.

It also, at times, also shines legitimately super brightly. I really like the banter between the gang, as weirdly odd as the voice acting is. I really like that one of it's primary characters is straight up mute and its a nice representation even. The mixing of media types and stuff is sick, there's one absolutely brilliant boss fight and the very final moments of the game provides a legitimately ace story twist which honstly makes me view the whole thing much more fondly.

The whole thing is bewildering. I can't stop thinking about it.

----------------------------------------------

Other "huh?" things I didn't mention for the sake of pacing

- Final level is absurdly long after the rest of the game was pretty good in this regard
- Claw minigame does basically nothing
- Difficulty curve insanely and blatantly all over the place, the first mission is one of the hardest.
- The degree to which the world is altered from the real world is odd and excessive.
- There's like 6 shower scenes
- Why do you get a free single revive like half the time when the game is overwise commited to being a tough classic action game? But you only get it when one member of your squad is there?
- Why is there such detailed gun customisation in a 5 hour action game
- Why is the one loading screen a very dated meme.
- Why does the one ninja elite enemy look like it's from a different game
- Why do the protagonists just not even mention sometimes why they're going to do a thing.

Make it make sense.

This reminded me of No More Heroes in that the combat is shallow but effective. It doesn't get old, and is satisfying, cool, and empowering. It also reminds me of Sifu as in the goal is to get into a flow state where you are slashing, parrying, dodging, and activating finishers. I think it is more successful at that than Sifu because the controls are more responsive here. I didn't think the parrying worked well in Sifu. The story and characters are offbeat, funny, but they are also intriguing. The game sets up a alternate history 2022 that immediately sounds wild. It keeps a lot of the story to a minimum, but still managed to pack an emotional punch at the end. The game is buggy (crashed twice on me and some framerate drops), but it never got too bad for me.

An interesting hack and slash action game! Playing as Stone, the badass katana-wielding special agent in this thrilling game had its ups and downs. The combat was fast, intense and fluid, while feeling clunky and uneven in different sections.

The narrative seemed like it was getting somewhere with the cutscenes between the games and the interesting anime cutscenes between levels intrigued me and made me interested in playing further. Sadly, you experience less of the cutscenes and more of frustrating combat sequences. The checkpoint placements are all over the place, the enemy spawns can be punishing and the damage you deal does not feel nearly enough to what you think you would deal to enemies.

I did enjoy getting a hang of the combat and sequences towards the end of the game, as understanding the mechanics and combat fully felt very rewarding. Funny enough, I did find the enemy encounters to be harder than some of the bosses, which I found very odd and an interesting, so-to-speak, design choice

This is a game that I enjoyed very much but would only recommend if you are into games like DmC or Ninja Gaiden.

Feels like a barely finished product made entirely by an AI.

I only watched the opening cutscene, played the tutorial, then another "first mission" cutscene, and about 30 seconds of "real" gameplay before deciding this game is a mess. The cutscenes are so stiff in both animation and performances that I don't see how a human being could watch them and go "Yeah, looks good, ready to ship!" I have the feeling they're kind of going for a parody/homage of '80s action movies with how everybody is a caricature, but none of it is written or performed in a way that sells anything. It just looks and feels terrible.

The gameplay is also rough, with the cover system feeling like Kane and Lynch's and the shooting may as well feel that old and janky, too. There are apparently three whole combos to choose from when engaging in the suicidal melee.

I just think this needed several more months of polish along with an entire rewrite and rehiring of actors. The textures look alright, I guess, but again the animations are pretty bad so I can't call the graphics "good" overall.

I don't see myself ever coming back to this one. More like Wanted: Dead on Arrival (I'm so clever).

Wanted: Dead is a very unruly throwback to the PS3-360 era of third person action games. It's one of those games that has a clear vision of what it wants to do, and yet can't help but be distracted and stumble the whole way through its path.

Let's start with the best part: the combat. At its peak, the combat is absolutely ferocious, brutal and stylish. You'll be juggling your ballistic armaments and katana as enemies approach you with either the intent to intimately cut you up or blast you from afar. The game communicates its "intended" playstyle from early on quite well, as melee enemies are much harder to take down with guns even with headshots, and enemies with guns shoots you just enough to put a chunk of your health down if you run straight at them. You can customize your main long gun and pistol to change how it behaves (sacrificing damage for stagger, recoil control for accuracy, and so on). The pistol works more like a stagger button, as you can immediately start attacking them with a katana after you use your pistol to stun them for a second. You can also dodge, and parry attacks with your katana and handgun. Some attack are only parry-able if you use your handgun, but you can unlock an upgrade through the skill tree to remove this limitation. You can replenish your health with stimpaks that are replenished in each checkpoint, and you can also get one free revive in each checkpoint (although they take away this ability sometimes). You can also get some of your health back if you do a finishing move fast enough, but its usually not easy enough to be a reliable option. There's more to talk about, but in short, it's an absolute hoot of a combat system that only gets much more satisfying to handle as you progress through the skill tree. While the enemy AI and level design are mostly average, and many of the encounters doesn't quite showcase the full potential of the system, the combat always manages to shine through the rubble. It's honestly one of my favorite combat systems in recent memory, if we're just talking about the core mechanics. The only thing about the combat that I purely dislike is the regular fragmentary grenades, they're so hard to throw accurately and thus becomes unpractical.

The combat sections always end with a boss fight, and for the most part they're decent. They don't really have a lot of unique moves, but the challenge they provide is a step above the rest of the game, in a good way. The notable ones include the third boss, which has a cool invisibility cloak, and the very last one, which has the most flashy moves. I did not like the two tank boss fights.

The story is, simply put, incomprehensible. Nobody talks like a regular human, and none of the conversations gives you an idea of what is really going on with the story. All I know for sure is that you're playing as a former war criminal turned Hong Kong "special" police, and you have 3 other compatriots (and a cat-loving gunsmith) in your crew. None of these characters are likable. There's some semblance of a story with your main character that only gets clearer when you finish the game, but even that is not really substantial. Despite all of this, I still enjoy the cutscenes and dialog ironically, mostly because of how weird the voice acting is in this game. It's like they're deliberately trying to sabotage the story.

Outside of the combat sections, you get to explore the Police HQ. You can talk to other policemen (and find out how unpopular your crew is), pick up some documents, and most importantly, play minigames! There's a crane game where you can collect character figurines and music tracks, a karaoke and ramen eating minigame (both are rhythm based), a firing range complete with time and score attack modes, and a original side scrolling shoot em' up arcade game. These mini games add a strong flavor of quirkiness to the game, and is much appreciated, even if they're infected by the unpolished-ness of the main game.

This game is quite rough around the edges. On the PS5, the game has randomly crashed on me 5 times in my 9 hour playthrough. There are times where the framerate plummets for a couple seconds, although it's not too often. The very last hour of the game features a lot of tight spaces that can be hard for the camera to handle, resulting in you getting surprised by an off screen enemy. There's more quirks here, just know that they can be quite annoying if you end up getting the short end of the stick.

In short, Wanted: Dead is much more interesting than the sum of its ingredients, for better and worse. And yet, that's why I enjoyed it so much. It represents mid-budget video games at its most chaotic form, born out of a desire to stand out and provide a breath of fresh air, and it definitely accomplishes that. Maybe the best it can hope for is a cult classic status in the future, and I'm sure the devs will be okay with that.

As someone who saw promise in the developer’s previous works, and after seeing the interesting flavor Wanted: Dead was putting on display in its advertising, I was truly hopeful that the game would finally squeak past that threshold of being just short of greatness and deliver something flawed but truly excellent or interesting in its own right. Unfortunately, this one just wasn't it for me, either.

Everything is just a tad too clunky for my liking, even by the standards of a game trying to evoke an era of clunkiness, and the mechanics feel like they needed another pass or two in making sure they all work together in a captivating and fun way. Yet again I get the feeling while playing a Soleil game that there might have been something here, because (very) occasionally everything clicks and I feel like I see the vision, but I don’t think it hits that point nearly enough unfortunately. Most encounters are kind of a mess of bullets flying and tenuously rushing in for your strikes, with every melee hit feeling like it lacks impact, and every gunshot floppy in aim and flat in delivery.

The story is being compared to Deadly Premonition or other "so bad it's good" games, but it instead feels like it exists in a weird middle space where they didn’t go far enough on either end of the spectrum. Yes, there are weird and wacky minigames that try to accentuate those aspects of the game and the sudden presentation bending into anime and the like does give the game some sort of flavor as well, but on the moment to moment story, I never felt it really went far enough in embracing its camp to truly sell me on it.

Maybe with whatever roadmap they’re working on they’ll sand off the rough edges, but for the moment, especially at the midway~ point where the story starts to drop off, I simply couldn’t bring myself to play any more of it. At least the soundtrack kicks ass.

Wanted: Dead is an exceptional game that takes bold risks with its design, creating a PS2-themed funhouse hall of mirrors that is both audacious and captivating. This game embodies the true essence of what a game should be- free to explore, experiment and embrace creativity.

Every decision seems intentionally made to either confound or elate, and it doesn't walk that line; it backflips on it.

Why am I watching Stefanie Jootsen spend 15 minutes teaching me how to make Lasagna? Why is there only one song in this fully fleshed-out karaoke mini-game?

Why does the ramen noodle-eating mini-game run forever until you decide to press start and quit? Why does the game have to state that the Gunsmith reeks of cat piss? Why did Maserati allow the developers to use the 1992 Shamal as the game's police cruiser?

It's unabashedly what it sets out to be, and there is beauty in that brazen confidence.

Once you understand the intricacies of guard canceling and how to correctly utilize the games firearms, the combat evolves into a dynamic interplay of visceral melee and third-person shooting.

There is "jank," but the jank serves as an intentional obstacle, adding an off-kilter layer to the combat. This distinctive blend contributes to the game's overall uniqueness.

Wanted: Dead touches on things like fascist police states, the military-industrial complex, the predatory nature of the healthcare industry, and neocolonialism, but only in passing. It all feels deliberately unfocused and, coupled with the mixed-media presentation, it results in a surreal, addictively confounding, fever-dreamlike experience.

Conversely, it has a deliberate focus on emulating the essence of a 6th-generation AA title and it adeptly accomplishes that particular aesthetic and feel.

There's truly nothing else on the market today like Wanted: Dead. While this game may not resonate with a broad audience, for the niche group it targets, it will hit like heroin.

Wanted: Dead is a great game and I'll die on that hill, it's just super fun and entertaining above all else. I won't pretend the game isn't rough around the edges and the gameplay isn't pretty janky because it is for sure and there's no denying that, but many miss the fact that is also kinda the point considering the game is trying to emulate the sixth gen of consoles (in every way, even the ones most would consider outdated) where a lot of the games were exactly that, rough around the edges and janky though there's also so much creativity, charm and passion put into every inch of the product that it is simply impossible for me to not love it.

I will tolerate no slander or hate against the devs and especially the creative director and writer Sergei Kolobashkin because he never lied nor did he ever give false promises and the game is exactly what he said it would be. A passionate love letter to the sixth gen of consoles back when devs weren't afraid to do different and unique things and put out games that simply weren't going to be for everyone and wouldn't get critical praise, but they put these games out because they had a vision and they wanted to make it a reality. That's exactly what Wanted: Dead is for better or for worse because I have never played anything else quite like Wanted: Dead which reminds me heavily of many things like Deadly Premonition, Ninja Gaiden, Yakuza, Metal Gear Rising and basically anything with Suda51's name attached to it all rolled into one insane hybrid fever dream of a game.

Wanted: Dead is unapologetic about its influences down to its core and everything from the unique blend of gory, flashy melee hack and slash and 3rd person cover shooter combat (Which just gets better the more you play as you unlock more skills and abilities) to the over-the-top and slightly convoluted B-movie plot about a group of former war-criminal inmates who get a second chance at freedom and become an elite team of police officers that also happen to get tangled up into a corporate conspiracy complete with eccentric archetypal characters (Like the loose canon katana wielding badass cop who plays by her own rules Hannah Stone, the awkward pop culture referencing, cat loving genius gunsmith Viviane or the ramen connoisseur and ladies man Herzog) and influenced by Hong Kong action cinema and 80s/90s Cyberpunk anime like Ghost in the Shell or the purposefully amateurish voice acting done by the devs themselves, the awkwardly lip-synched cut-scenes, self-aware goofy dialogue, weird mini-games and especially the linear to a fault level design and punishing difficulty with checkpoints few and far between (I would go as far to say that your enjoyment of the game could hinge upon how good you are at action games with nuanced controls) was all deliberately added to further fully encapsulate that PS2 era charm in every way possible.

Wanted: Dead feels like a long-lost classic PS2 game in the best (and some of the worst) ways possible and while that isn't going to be for everyone, hell it won't even be for most people, but I personally adore it and respect the creator for sticking entirely to their creative vision and simply putting out a game for no other reason than it was something they were passionate about and wanted to release for the ones who will enjoy and truly "get" it and for the ones that do "get" it, you'll get an incredible retro throwback to a time when games weren't afraid to just be weird and fun.

P.S. I can already tell that much like games such as Deadly Premonition, NieR, God Hand, Killer7 or Killer is Dead this is the epitome of a truly misunderstood gem of a game that will be heralded as a cult classic 5 or 10 years from now, but for now it has already reached that status for me.

Wanted: Dead is as befuddling as it is bloody. Players will find the plot of Soliel's slasher/shooter hybrid varying levels of coherent depending on their interpretation. What's undeniable is the fun to be had in its streamlined slaughter. Come for the demanding and gory action gameplay, and stay for the odd voice performances, anime flashbacks, and karaoke with Stefanie Joosten. It's sometimes frustrating, often satisfying, and almost always janky and weird; I can't stop thinking about it.

Full review: https://finalweapon.net/2023/02/19/wanted-dead-review/

What is even going on ?

❤ :
- Cools mini games that makes you want to master them.
- A few funny dialogues.

💔 :
- Graphics straight from 2015, even knowing this is a love letter to the good old games, this isn't working for me.
- The art direction is janky and forgettable.
- Ennemies are bullet sponges, even in normal mode which make the combat long and tiring.
- Overall bad voice acting.
- No new main weapons or combos.
- The story and dialogues are absolute nonsense. It's all over the place, it just made me lost from start to finish.
- Empty environment with no map.

Don't be fooled by this game being made by ex-Team Ninja staff. Lower you expectations if you're going in expecting anything remotely as good as Ninja Gaiden Black when it comes to the combat. It's a janky, clunky game with only 3 different combos you can do. On top of that, you have some basic 3rd person shooter mechanics that are just like... alright? The weakest enemies take like 5 shots to the head to put down, so it feels like your guns are a damn joke. Enemies being tanky as shit isn't limited to your guns, either, they take a lot of hits from your katana to put down too.

On top of that, the bosses pretty much suck. The first boss is lame and the second boss is kinda bullshit. The rest of the bosses after that I can only describe as "we have Sekiro at home" as you're forced to use your parry, gun counter and shitty combos to chip away at their health. The thing is, the bosses do nothing interesting and you have have a limited set of tools so they're just easy and boring as shit.

Despite all that, when the combat does work it can be pretty fun. But it just isn't good enough. Besides the combat, you have basic straight-line level design. It's just combat arenas but it works for what it is.

The first few levels break up the pace by letting you explore the Police Station, where you can find documents that are more important to the story than 90% of the cutscenes are. You can also partake in some minigames! Such as a shitty crane machine (which barely fucking works but you suffer through to see Stefanie Joosten cooking), a shitty rhythm game with a few songs, a Yakuza karaoke rip-off that's funny but only has one song and a garbage SHMUP. Yeah, not much to see there.

Now, what had me hooked from the get go was the story and characters. I instantly liked Hannah Stone and her bizarre voice acting and I wanted to see what the deal was with her Zombie Unit pals. I was like "okay, the gameplay is mid but everything else is interesting!". I expected a Deadly Premonition for character action games!

Light spoilers in this paragraph, however, so skip if you want to see for yourself but... the story doesn't know what the fuck it wants to do. The shit with the synthetics seems to just be thrown in there but it amounts to nothing. Hannah has an interesting backstory which the game does jack fucking shit with. In fact, there's not even ANY story in the last third of the game until you reach the ending, where the game just kinda ends and the credits roll while I ask myself "that it?????". So yeah, the game completely lost all its charm at one point and then it just was going through long ass stages fighting the same 5 fucking enemy types and a couple shit bosses until the game just rolled credits. In the end, it does NOTHING with ANY of its plot beats or characters other than scratching the surface on Hannah's past. In fact, this review is 10 times longer than a summary of the game's story would be!

Visually, the game can't decide on what it really wants to look like. Sometimes it looks genuinely amazing, other times it looks straight out of the PS3/360 era. However, it WILL give your PC trouble no matter what, because it's optimized like shit and also fairly buggy. I saw AI spaz out and break more than once, one time with an enemy that was out of bounds... but I needed to kill to progress. Thankfully I had like 3 clips of my rifle to empty into his head from far away so he went down.

Also the game's short and takes 5-8 hours?? Playtime on my save glitched out, talk about a masterpiece, plus it deleted my save after the credits anyway. So I can't say how long it really is. It's short as shit tho, that's for sure, despite the last third feeling padded.

In short, a janky character action game that can be fun when it does work (which is rare) but amounts to nothing in the end despite starting out very charming. I didn't even spend any money on this game and I feel ripped off, do not buy this for full price. Or even half price. It's worth like 15 bucks maybe.

You know I knew exactly what I was getting into with this game and yet somehow I still left disappointed lol. While this game has a lot of charm and fun combat ( can be clunky at times ) there is still so much wrong with this game.

Lets get this out of the way first of all this game is on purpose trying to replicate the era of 6th gen consoles which is fine! I LOVE that era to death which is why I bought into this game right away. Issue is they are selling this game at a full $60 which quite frankly is a huge ripoff. I didn't mind myself because I had coupons for my store so I saved a good amount so I didn't buy the game full price I instead bought it at the price that is should have costed day 1 which was $20 lol ( $40 at MOST). You are paying $60 for a older type of action game with insane amount of issues ( at least on PS5) that will take about 6-8 hours to beat just let that sink through your head lol.


The story was there but uninteresting and boring you will find yourself really not caring lol. As I stated there are bugs and issues with this game ranging from poor performance in some levels , AI issues , Hard crashes , Save loses ( didn't happen on my end but I have seen it happen) , Annoying difficulty spikes later on, Trash bosses etc etc the list can go on for awhile honestly lol.

The last 2 levels are some of the worst designed levels I have played in a long time where the game just throws tanky enemies by the pack at you back TO BACK TO BACK TO BACK. While this may not seem like an issue the checkpoint system is utter trash and if you die anywhere in these segments you are starting from the START and this issue really shines in its final 2 levels that are simply atrocious.

There are some mini games in here and some are fun and some are not. there is a Shump game that was pretty cool , crane games which were fine and 2 Music Rhythm games that were terrible with strict timing on when you have to hit buttons and the screen layout making everything seemed cluttered making you get confused a lot and losing your combo.

Voice acting is cheesy and bad imo but honestly its a part of the charm and I did not mind it honestly but the comedy bits sucked.


I really wanted to like this game more and to be frank I did enjoy this game in its early levels. The combat can be very fun hitting combos and parrying into combos its all around very fun and they had something going for this game. There is so much charm in this game and I cannot knock it for that because it did nail the era so well but man by the end the issues just started being more prevalent to the point of unenjoyment which sucks.


I recommend this game on a deep sale at like $30 or below.

This game is not very good. I had a very good time though. It’s flawed, but oozes charm. Like, the bizarre dialogue coupled with iffy voice acting with an extra dose of horrible sound mixing should be a recipe for a bad time. But I found it very endearing. The actual story is not good, though. It starts off interesting, but has absolutely zero pay-off in any way, shape, or form. I don’t know if this is a time or budget constraint or it’s just bad on its own. Either way, it doesn't really matter to me.
The gameplay is a mix of linear combat levels, with some minigames and exploration of the police station in between them. The minigames are fun on the first go, but I never went back for seconds. And exploring the station was fun the first time, but after that you just kinda mindlessly run around it looking for new intel pick-ups after every level. It’s nothing special, but offers a nice repose from the combat. The combat is pretty simple, but effective. You have a sword, and some guns. I mostly played aggressively, not using guns for the most part. Just slashing around, and finding it very fun. Attacking, and parrying. This being a game made by former Ninja Gaiden devs, I’m sure there’s plenty of secret techniques that deepen the combat. But I’m a scrub, and don’t know anything about that. I did discover block canceling tho, and felt like a genius. The actual game is pretty hard. Those ninjas, man… A nice challenge is a good thing, but the checkpoint placement really grinded my gears. Dying could mean having to repeat like 5 minutes of constant combat which gets pretty annoying. But other than that, I honestly had a fun time.

It's really weird that the narrative around this game has become that it's some kind of corporate money laundering affair or some other cheap passionless writeoff when it's just, like, no? Obviously this is an extreme passion vanity project the likes of which rarely gets mass distribution in video games even in the indie scene, let alone a boxed product by a reputable developer. This is more like something that would get dropped by Pendulum Pictures on a box of 50 shot on video flicks than anything else. And guess what? That is my entire vibe.
Every moment of a cutscene in this game is an unhinged surreal delight, CGI PS360 cutscene anime filtered through 9 layers of google translate. I can't tell you a thing that happened in this game but I can tell you that Herzog's stories have more male nudity in them than a Joaquin Phoenix movie and I did a stunningly difficult karaoke minigame to 99 Luftballoons while my character and Stephanie Joosten looked like they were singing at gunpoint.
The weirdness carries over into the traditional levels too, with dialogue peppered in and just an incredible awkwardness to every combat encounter. Guns are formally useless (one of the things I think is surprisingly worse about this game next to Devil's Third, a modern gaming classic) and swordplay is very simplistic, but there's fun to be had in the RSI inducing button mashing, mostly because it's really difficult so you have to actually learn parries and shit. There are encounters that are like pulling fucking teeth though, the boss fight against August is one of the absolute worst I can remember, the game is just not fair or deep or varied lol. It is fun tho. I like the lil hub zone too, love a hub, love wandering around hearing the inscrutable cop dialogue.
This game is set in Hong Kong but there's like no Chinese characters at all?
Also it's explicitly set in 2022 so I guess it's alt history?
Sometimes the cutscenes are anime?
Sometimes you see actual Stephanie Joosten playing with her band?