for some reason the last time I played this like maybe 15 years ago i wasn't really into it despite loving it a whole lot when it first came out. i guess i wasn't feeling like getting into all the mechanics again and just kinda dropped the replay.

i can attest now after a long while that i was initially correct there's no other game like this in every aspect. it's stylish, it's gorgeous, it's really fun, it might genuinely be the Kamiya game with most attitude imprinted in it and that's saying a LOT.

Viewtiful Joe tells a fun light story both about how fictional worlds suck due to how stagnant they are and how shitty it feels to be a one-hit wonder in any art career. which is extremely ironic considering this game got like two sequels, one spin-off, a whole anime and then simply -disappeared- from the face of the earth aside from getting costume references and being in 2 vs. titles. No ports, no interest, nothing.

at the end of the day i think i might like this more than Bayonetta in regards to which is my favorite Kamiya game... while Bayo was definitely influential to me in a lot of important aspects, Viewtiful Joe might just have changed how i viewed videogames as a whole.

there's something unimaginably beautiful about games that feel just like when i'm really tired with a drawing and i just decide to do whatever and put it out into the world, then i see so many wrong things with it that could have been fixed with time but then again i'm very tired so in no way i'm touching it again. makes me think how human work will forever be valuable, we're able to develop apathy for imperfections due to fatigue and that's honestly beautiful.

excluding the obvious deadline constraints the team had to put up with, this kind of ambitious, large scale, unpredictable, weird, aggravating, difficult, time consuming, tiring, agressive, livable world barely has any space in the sanitized UX focused world but yet here we are, yet after all the misinformation efforts by 20 year-certified dumbass Stephanie Sterling here we are experiencing what is probably one of the most feverish mainstream gaming efforts done by a big studio in the last decade. this is probably the most important game Capcom has released in a lot of years and i'm all here for it, because if you play the game you end up realizing the boxart is extremely funny and there are simply no other games that do this kind of thing anymore. like, my bf missed seeing a major scene with a character around the last part of the game because he never got any of the optional quests involving him how is this not pure art.

also gotta love the genre of games that you could easily swap a "thank you for playing" at the end with "fuck you for playing!!" and it would still make perfect sense. they're dear in my heart and i will protect them always