Based on an underappreciated action-horror TV series, Golden Knight GARO is generally your typical tie-in game affair, not at all unlike the Kamen Rider PS2 games Bandai were publishing around this time. The menu design, the earning points from the story mode to unlock things in the gallery, which in turn unlock more content because weird forced replay value...it all feels very familiar to me at this point. Too familiar, as for once I had no drive at all to unlock anything beyond the base campaign.

Said campaign is distressingly simple - as in the show, you play as Kouga and take on jobs dispatching Horrors, monsters who prey on people with enough inner darkness by possessing and transforming them, with the sole purpose to feed on the innocent. Of course, you get very little actual explanation, as the game assumes you're down with the lore and just throws you into fights with little fanfare (save for Kouga's sentient ring, Zaruba, offering guidance and encouragement). You pick a job, enter a small battle arena, and kill the thing. Repeat until the credits abruptly roll.

Gameplay is, to be brutally honest, a poor man's Devil May Cry, and I mean broke-ass dirt poor, just after being robbed blind by a mugger and losing your house in a fire. There's a lock-on feature by holding R1, at least in theory, as it seems to make your attacks a lot harder to combo. Without the lock-on, however, you just flail madly at the air no matter what. You have a light attack and heavy attack, but they turn into single-strike dash attacks if you so much as think about the left analog stick while pressing them, making getting combos harder than it should be. There's also a dodge button, which is useful but just as floaty as all the wirework in the show, allowing you to basically move freely in midair. The game really wants you to pull off aerial combos, but the movement is just too janky to make it viable.

The Triangle button is the most variable button: if you build up a combo, a meter fills in the top right of the screen. When it's completely full, you can end a combo by pressing Triangle, accumulating the energy built up into your sword or something. This is what's necessary to activate the game's instant win main feature, a spectacular transformation into Kouga's Golden Knight armour. This significantly increases your stats, and also now turns Triangle into a ranged attack of massive damage (which you only get 3 charges of - more than enough to kill anything that moves). The only downside to this form is that it's limited to 99.9 seconds of uptime (exactly like the show), but almost every enemy will be dead long before then.

So, why the harsh score? First, there's not much in the way of content (though perhaps a little more than the 2000s Rider games?), just a brief half-hour story mode, a weird bonus mode where you play as the main antagonist in a...therapy mode? You fight the bosses once again, but have to use a counter mechanic to steal their abilities and customise his moveset. A neat gimmick is that the main antagonist in the story mode will use the moveset that you've given him in this mode, but it's very weirdly framed. There's also a second story mode where you play as deuteragonist Zero, but as far as I'm aware it's almost identical to Garo's campaign.

The other reason I'm docking points is that final boss. After an entire game of encouraging fast-paced combat, the rules suddenly change without warning and it becomes a damn souls fight. You now get actively punished for attacking first, and have to play a calculated waiting game, as a single strike from the boss instantly deactivates your armour and essentially KOs you. So you have to be very slow and methodical...oh wait, your armour has a 99.9 second time limit. So, take your time, but hurry up. I sense a contradiction.

Ultimately, it's not the worst way to spend half and hour to an hour, and fans of the series will likely appreciate the finer details (the Garo theme playing when you transform/KOing a monster for instance) but it's ultimately just another mediocre experience that poorly imitates better games.