One of the best games that was released for Nintendo 64 that sadly wasn't released in NA back in the day. Basically it's a wild ride from the start to the end ( I will never forget you, Pole Star).

And surprisingly it had voice acting ( which was terrible) and a sci-fi story with themes that you might find on many animes (even with a manga and a novel only released in JP), like end of the times, aliens, conspiracy, evil companies, etc.

If only Nintendo would remember this franchise...

I really wanted to love this game. I’ve been excited to play it for a while and it has the foundation to be something really cool, but sadly it kinda collapses under its own weight. I can respect the title’s ambition and I love “period piece” games reflective of a simpler and more experimental time in the medium but that doesn’t stop Sin and Punishment from being a pretty big mess. The story makes absolutely 0 sense and there’s not even any charm to be found in how bafflingly it’s presented to the player. The gameplay, at its best, is pretty fun but a little too mindless even for on-rail shooter standards. What really bothers me though is the lack of a ‘gameplay throughline’, stuff kinda just happens and gameplay style/perspective shifts very suddenly, which is cool in theory but pretty jarring in execution. Variety is nice but when there’s no connecting thread on how the game feels to control it ends up feeling like…this game.

Gameplay-wise, a relatively simple on-rails shooter that’s still really fun because of the constant crazy setpieces. Story-wise, this game is insane. It crams the entire plot of some over the top 90s anime into a 40-minute game without bothering to explain any of it. The pacing is crazy fast, and it evokes a weirdly surreal feel combined with the already odd concepts it’s tossing around. It’s really nothing too mindblowing of once you look back at it, but it’s an unhinged fun ride, and it gels well with the gameplay.

Absolutely unreal, I thought this game was incredible. It controls like nothing else on N64, it’s intended purpose is using the left D-Pad and centre joystick, I found the game controlled most comfortably using the Switch Pro Controller.

The story makes no sense, it’s almost like Evangelion in its coherence at times. Aesthetically it was a clear match as well.

For an arcade shooter from an behind third person perspective, the game does go that step further with a classic Treasure 2D side scroller perspective and a boss battle following a Street Fighter style combat. My favourite level has crazy winding on a floating platform that zooms across several naval carriers in a fleet. It’s basically the F-Zero stage from Brawl but on N64 hardware.

Very annoying control scheme. Hey, lets make a game where pinpoint accuracy is important... Then we should have the control scheme be pinpoint, right? NOPE. Make the player aim with the n64 analog stick! That should work...

Honestly just play star successor, you're not really missing much here. I want to be very clear: If this game had a PC port/wasn't released on the N64, it would be a 7 or 8/10. The negatives of this game are completely attributed to the system it was released on. The gameplay is a solid foundation but I honestly can't recommend people play this, especially with N64 emulators being hard to set up and this game not having plug and play mouse or wii pointer support.

I have issues saving controller configs on N64 emulators, what the hell man. BASIC FEATURE MISSING ALERT. I've spent hours tweaking GlideN64 so I'm not dropping frames... What is the deal with N64 emulators and their plugins???

On the opposite end of the spectrum, Sin & Punishment: Star Successor literally feels like the Wii was made for it, not the other way around, AND you can play it on dolphin which is one of the best emulators period.

To play devil's advocate, you're not really going through that much pain by playing this game because it has such a short playtime. I just hate the controls to pieces.

This is a frenetic dose of adrenaline , a rollercoaster ride of a rail shooter. This game doesn’t know what breathing is. In true fashion your relationship to the levels change based on new and and fresh run throughs (and you will die, so you will see how you will breeze through levels that gave you challenges before).The way your familiarity develops with the levels simply because the continuous set pieces is just remarkable, I can see myself really remembering the main sequence of this journey one day . Every new boss , every new reaction needed, is just consistently amazing. The way the camera pans and swooped especially in the ship level for you to see the battlefield who’ll in all sorts of fashion? It enhanced the amount of action and effort the player did, you had full control of the coolest parts of what’s happening. And how the levels feel often seamless in terms of traversal? This is splendid level design. The three pronged mechanic of lock on, free and slashing is issued thoroughly throughout. I mostly did the lock on because my skillset wasn’t too high, but man the extra damage you get from free enticed me to switch on harder bosses once I got used to some of their patterns. And having the ability slash back big projectiles with the lock-on never ever stopped getting satisfying. The movement in this game feels immaculate. The only thing that hampered my experience? The second to last level where you had to traverse certain corridors with your jump, the jump to avoid bullet hell stuff is great, but not great for platforming, and I hated those moments. A wonderful game

Not as insane as everybody says, there’s two segments that are clearly the star of the show when it comes to big set-pieces and the rest is… forgettable, really, it also feels extremely constrained by the limitations of an ancient hardware, the developer unable to reach the visual splendor they surely imagined. As a shooter merely one year before Halo, I’m sad to admit that this does not hold up, and as an art-piece, while not without its charm, is as juvenile as it gets, full of half-assed ideas and not much more, like they watched the end of evangelion and wanted to make something like that in game form but didn’t have the time nor the money so this is the result.