Holy fucking shit it's GOD HAND baby!!!!!

WHOOOOOO I could suplex a TRAIN right now it's GOD HAND motherfucker!!!!

We're coming up on 20 years from its release and no other game has bested God Hand's sheer exuberance, its attitude, its GOD HANDness.

I swear I tried to write an actual review like I usually do but every time I started to italicize a line of dialogue or write a paragraph that was more than three sentences someone would break into my house and beat the shit out of me.

GOD HAND

Shinji Mikami you are a LEGEND Clover Studios you will NEVER DIE

Perfect pacing, incredible encounter design, boss variety off the charts, GOD HAND

GOD HAND GOD HAND GOD HAND GOD HAND

this game is a must-play, it's really fun, unique and 2006 goofy. you can tell eveyone involved had tons of fun making it. with that being said, you can also tell that it was made with a low budget and with not that much time to balance it out in some aspects. here are some observations:

the game feels snappy and clunky at the same time. the controls can be awkward at times but overall the game systems are solid and building combos makes a lot of sense. in the last stretch of the game, there's a massive difficulty spike which is inconsistent with the difficulty of the last 3 bosses (the bosses are easier than the stages themselves).

i will be keeping this game ready to play as well becuase it's highly replayable. i urge you all to become Alexander the Great.

9/10 - THIS GAME KICKED MY ASS AND I WOULD LET IT HAPPEN AGAIN

GOW 2018 but good, this game was such a great experience. There's def a lot of stuff about this game that I think a lot of people don't give credit towards which I do wanna go over. I know the game isn’t supposed to tell an incredibly serious narrative but god damn it I had so much fun with the story. It knows it’s not supposed to take itself seriously and it just has fun with a lot of stuff it tries to do. There wasn’t a single cutscene in this game that had me bored or made me want to skip. The voice acting itself is also insanely good. Yes some of it is cheesy but it fits with the tone of this game and is incredibly entertaining. I especially love Gene and Azels voices. I didn’t expect going into this game to be loving the soundtrack. There isn’t a single song in this game I even thought about wanting to turn off. All of the songs are just bangers. I’m very fond of Floating Fort. The combat is well, fantastic but I don’t think I needed to tell you that. The different movesets you can create take this game to a whole nother level. I like the approach the game takes with its utilization of the combat since it felt more about efficiency than trying to be stylish. The difficulty level meter is just genius. The enemy design is very good as there aren’t any enemies I had gripes with off the top of my head. While the general stage design is usually straightforward I don’t mind it since I prefer they focus on the gameplay for the whole game.
There are a few gripes I do have. Just mainly with some bosses as a handful of the big demon guys were just kinda alright but they never reached the level of awful. Despite it being incredibly hard, it never felt unfair as you’re always in control of each situation that you’re in and the tools you’re given are more than enough to complete each stage. All in all I can say that this game, despite being one of the most difficult games I’ve played, is also one of the most fun.

YOU'RE NOT ALEXANDER!!
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My favorite game! and the fact that this game not successful on market just because of a false review is so sad :( they said the control is bad but the newest god of war game have almost the same control meaning it was not that bad at all. The game is challenging. Cringe yet funny jokes. memorable funny moves. memorable weird design character. the best difficulties difference (not only just make the enemies thicker and stronger, but also make them have different moveset, combination and more agile).

"Character action" has never done it for me. I feel the floaty combos and distant cameras really dampen the impact of combat. I'm so glad that we live in the timeline where instead of representing the future of the Resident Evil series, Devil May Cry became its own franchise. Resident Evil 4 was a game that Capcom attempted to make several times, before begging Mikami to come back to the director's seat, and even he scrapped a couple of false starts before he settled on the game he ought to be making. The change in camera was the big thing that players talked about, but it was the shift in focus and tone that really made Resi 4 so beloved by its biggest fans. Mikami had gained skill, establishing multiple complementary mechanics and tying that to a campaign, but he was also more confident in his own sense of humour and whimsy. Resi 4 was a game with a real sense of personality, but it was compromised by the pressures of the surrounding franchise, the publisher and the fanbase. For his next game, he'd disregard all these aspects and make it entirely for himself.

When I first played God Hand, it took about five seconds before I knew I loved it. It's very much built on the back of Resi 4, but makes no apologies for its eccentricities. It takes the weight and impact of Resident Evil 4's shotgun and puts that behind each punch. Resi 4 utilised the sensibilities of modern games just enough to adopt a mostly useless camera manipulation system to the right analogue stick, but God Hand foregoes those conventions entirely, tethering it to your critical dodge system. God Hand doesn't care about any other game. It's fully confident in what it's doing.

God Hand's vibe is a very divisive thing, and not something you can choose to opt out of, but a truly cultured mind will undoubtedly side with it. Its sense of humour comes from a very specific place. It's a deep affection for Fist of the North Star and low-budget 70s kung fu films, but there's so much fondness for late-80s and early-90s action games, too. It loves the ridiculous, digitised voice clips from Altered Beast and Final Fight. The greatest joy is when you encounter an absurd, one-off, late-game disco miniboss, and he hits you with the same audio clips as the standard grunts from Level 1. This is a game full of explosive barrels and giant fruit. Shinji Mikami started production on Resident Evil 4 trying to fulfil the obligation to make his scariest game ever, and by the end, he got so bored with that direction that he created a giant stone robot Salazar that chased you through brick walls. God Hand was the logical next step for him.

There's a focus to God Hand's ambitions that implies Clover really knew what they had with it. A few ridiculous bosses and minigames notwithstanding, the levels are typically fairly boxy and nondescript. All the attention is on the distribution of enemies and items. It's spectacularly un-fancy. Flat ground and big brick walls that disappear when the camera gets too close to them. It doesn't care. The fighting feels great, and we're having a great time with all these stupid baddies. Fuck everything else.

Your moveset is fully customisable. Between levels, you're given the opportunity to buy new moves, and apply them to your controls, either as specials tethered to a specific button combination, or even as part of the standard combo you get while mashing the square button. It offers players real versatility as they figure out their preferred playstyles, and what works for them, while trying something less intuitive can open you up to new approaches. There are quick kicks and punches that overwhelm opponents, heavy-damage moves that take longer to pull off, guard breaks, and long-range attacks that can help with crowd control. There are certain moves and dodges that are highly exploitable, and risk breaking the game's balance. Clover are aware of this though, and whenever they found a strategy that made the game boring, they made sure to penalise you for using it by boosting the difficulty massively whenever you try it.

That's the big feature. The difficulty. God Hand starts out really hard, and when the game registers that you've dodged too many attacks or landed too many successive hits, it gets harder. This was a secret system in Resi 4, but in God Hand, it's part of your on-screen HUD, always letting you know when you've raised or lowered a difficulty level. Enemies hit harder, health pick-ups drop less frequently, and attacks become harder to land. The game's constantly drawing you to the edge of your abilities, and if you die, you have to try the entire section again from the start. It never feels too dispiriting, though. You retain all cash you've picked up after you died, and you feel encouraged by a drop in difficulty. If you do well enough on your next attempt, it won't take long before the difficulty gets back to where it was. There's also some fun surprises for those who get good enough to maintain a Level 3 or Level Die streak for long enough, with some special enemy spawns and stuff. You feel rewarded for getting good, but never patronised or pandered to. Your reward is a game that felt as thrilling as it did when you first tried it.

It's the little eccentricities in God Hand's design that I really admire. Pick up a barrel and Gene will instantly shift his direction to the nearest enemy, eliminating any extraneous aiming bullshit, and pushing your attention towards the opportunity for some cheap long-distance damage. If an item spawns, it remains there until you pick it up, giving you the opportunity to save it for when you really need it, even if the backtracking route becomes a little ridiculous. Since the camera is so stubbornly committed to viewing Gene's back, they've implemented a radar system to keep track of surrounding enemies, and it makes little sense in the context of the scenario, but the game doesn't care about that stuff. It's another thing that makes the fights against gorillas and rock stars more fun, so run with it. Between each section of the game, you're given the opportunity to save, or warp to a kind of mid-game hub world, with a shop, training area and casino, which you can use to unlock better moves and upgrades when you need them most. You can gain money by taking the honest route and chipping away at its toughest challenges, or take the less honourable route with slot machines and gambling on poison chihuahua races. It's blunt, utilitarian, and it's entirely complementary to the way God Hand feels to play.

It's the consistency in tone and intention that completes the package. God Hand knows what it is, and how it feels, and it never betrays that. It doesn't obsess over lore or characters, but it really has fun in introducing new baddies and scenarios to put you in. And I really like its taste. I like that all the big bosses meet up at a secret hell table to exchange barbs between levels. I like the fight on an enormous Venetian gondola. I like the dumb, weird, repetitive soundtrack. The developers are world-class talents, and they just wanted to make a dumb, stupid, fun game.

I probably ought to give the soundtrack a little more credit. This is from Masafumi Takada, out on loan from Grasshopper Manufacture before he became a real gun for hire, working on Vanquish, Kid Icarus: Uprising, Danganronpa and Smash Bros Ultimate. He's great at elaborate, high-energy compositions, but his work on God Hand is some of his dumbest stuff. It's great. The constant Miami 5-0 surf rock, the warbling Elvis boss fight music, and the Flight of the Bumblebee guitar for the fight against a giant fly. He's having the time of his life on this one, fully liberated from the pressures to convey a consistent tone or atmosphere. It's stunning work, and he makes the correct call every time he has to write a new piece of BGM for God Hand.

Shinij Mikami is a bit of an enigma, and his work on Resident Evil has unfortunately typecast him as a horror director, but he's never expressed a real affinity for the genre. He was put into that position under an obligation to Ghouls 'n Ghosts' Tokuro Fujiwara, and the game he ended up making was full of corny heroes and giant snakes. The subject matter was a shock to audiences in the mid-nineties, but in reality, it wasn't that far removed from his work on SNES Aladdin. By my estimation, God Hand's the closest we've come to seeing the real Mikami through his work. He's made Resident Evil 4, and he wants to leave that behind him, but EA and ZeniMax kept dragging him back to his biggest hit.

God Hand feels like the only point in history God Hand could have happened, and it's pretty wild that it did in the first place. I mean, it makes sense that once you hand Capcom the Resi 4 Gold Master disc, they'll let you do whatever you want, but they were so rattled by the result that they fired all of their key talent and started making calls to Canada to produce Dead Rising 2. Confidence in Japanese development was at an all-time low after 2006, and the PS3 and Xbox 360 resulted in some of the most embarrassing entries in many legacy franchises. The PlayStation was born out of a SNES project, and that ethos was what drove the first decade of Sony Computer Entertainment. Afterwards, a new game proposal would not be greenlit without referencing the design of the latest Grand Theft Auto. The Konami, Namco, Square and Capcom that we have today don't reflect who they were in the nineties and early 2000s. To me, God Hand feels like the final page of that chapter. But, man, what a fucking statement to close out on.

greatst Character InAction Game ever made...are You a bad enough dude to help solve Gene's predicament??? tensions abounds (AND KEEPS ON RISINGS!!! DO NOT LOOK AT THE PORNOS...AVERT THOU GAZE...), distractory&predatory gambling games, demons needing to be Smitten, WILL YOU rise up to the challenge and VOLUNTARILY DO THE NEEDFUL???????? no need to worry, difficulty is dynamic, will find Your Match!

ps:almost was cryingtears when Elvis was kill...
pps: wonder why he is called ジーン...........rly makes me think (FunnyMeme)

The fact we lost the chance to have Gene God Hand in a Marvel vs Capcom game is absolutely criminal. There is a lot I can say about God Hand but honestly this is a game where you really need to see to believe. Is it ballbustingly hard? Sure, but thats the true fun of it, its been quite awhile since I've felt this rewarded for getting better at a game's combat system. Everything flows quite nicely for the most part, a couple difficulty spikes withstanding, and the freedom you get for creating your own strings is a ton of fun. God Hand also has one of the most enjoyable Capcom OSTs to date, and that is one hell of a catalogue to be put up against.

You'll laugh, you'll cry, you'll get angry, but most of all, you'll dragon kick someone's ass into the Milky Way (milky wayyyy)

Hey remember when IGN gave this game a 3/10, tanking it?

Anyway, this is an incredible action game, with a lot of fun ideas that I haven't seen done elsewhere. This right stick is used to dodge, which gives you a lot of option when trying to move out of the way or cancelling your combos. Speaking of combos, your entire movelist is made by you! You select the moves and the order, which leds to different people having different playstyles! Personally, I like quick hits, with a big finisher, while others might prefer more powerful moves, or moves with a bigger range. There's still tons I haven't talked about, like the Roulette Wheel, funny story or great soundtrack! This game is incredible, highly recommend! (Though you might find one or two bosses have aged poorly)

one fucking day i'll beat this game. if i ever had a white whale, this is it.

combat years ahead of its time and nothing like it was ever made since. the only game where when i lose, it feels like it's MY fault for sucking ass, and not the game's.

with every replay of the game i make it that much further towards the end. the first two areas. the next two after that. three more afterwards.

i'll fucking get you yet, god hand