1999
The closest any singular video game has ever come to being designated as an SCP
It's like Street Fighter/King of Fighters/Super Smash Bros, if its character roster was built out of the Akashic records and took the form of an impossible shape optical illusion
I don't know how the community is now, but back in the 2000s/early 2010s it was a bureaucratic nightmare hellscape ruled by Napoleons, the worst possible community for a game reliant on user-generated content, with so many rules, moral prohibitions, and warring factions (warehousers vs. creators) that it'd make Kafka shit his pants and die
This game is basically the video game equivalent of the King in Yellow, an impossible forbidden game that drives its players to madness, when I was a 12-year-old autistic child with strong convictions about preservation, my actions in the community made people threaten to kill me and dox me and send fake reports to the FBI over me (which is a felony btw! epic win) which definitely has NOT fucked me up for life with anxiety issues
There used to be a list of "unrequestable characters" that were prohibited from distribution due to stolen code, or stolen art, or because they just didn't like who made them, and that instantly turned every character on that list into a hot commodity all of us WAREHOUSERS just had to find
We were all assholes and deserved each other, like we had all sinned during a previous life and this community was our punishment
P.S.: a "warehouser" is defined as somebody who engages in unauthorized distribution of MUGEN content, you would become a social pariah if you shared characters without permission, even if those characters had been offline for years and would be lost permanently without reuploading, you are still catching a ban
It's like Street Fighter/King of Fighters/Super Smash Bros, if its character roster was built out of the Akashic records and took the form of an impossible shape optical illusion
I don't know how the community is now, but back in the 2000s/early 2010s it was a bureaucratic nightmare hellscape ruled by Napoleons, the worst possible community for a game reliant on user-generated content, with so many rules, moral prohibitions, and warring factions (warehousers vs. creators) that it'd make Kafka shit his pants and die
This game is basically the video game equivalent of the King in Yellow, an impossible forbidden game that drives its players to madness, when I was a 12-year-old autistic child with strong convictions about preservation, my actions in the community made people threaten to kill me and dox me and send fake reports to the FBI over me (which is a felony btw! epic win) which definitely has NOT fucked me up for life with anxiety issues
There used to be a list of "unrequestable characters" that were prohibited from distribution due to stolen code, or stolen art, or because they just didn't like who made them, and that instantly turned every character on that list into a hot commodity all of us WAREHOUSERS just had to find
We were all assholes and deserved each other, like we had all sinned during a previous life and this community was our punishment
P.S.: a "warehouser" is defined as somebody who engages in unauthorized distribution of MUGEN content, you would become a social pariah if you shared characters without permission, even if those characters had been offline for years and would be lost permanently without reuploading, you are still catching a ban
2002
Probably the best conversation piece in my collection, which is saying a lot, Terrifying 9/11 is a strange work of heated anti-imperialist schadenfreude gestating a surprisingly competent Metal Slug port for Game Boy Color that outdoes its Neo-Geo Pocket Color siblings in terms of faithfulness to the original game
Some speculate, based solely off the game's remarkable adherence to its source material, that this may have been an official port from Takara (who made numerous SNK ports for GBC) that got canceled, and I can definitely see that
The dialogue is incredibly tone-deaf, especially because this came out in 2002, but it's precisely its status as a cursed artifact that makes it interesting
It's the kind of thing that feels like it should only exist as deliberate satire, like somebody made a video game out of an article from The Onion, but yet this game bafflingly occupies the status of being naïve camp, and not deliberate
It's a weird sight as an American who lived through its cultural shockwaves in the haziest fog of early memory, who knows people who were personally impacted by this tragedy, to imagine the people who created this in 2002, a room full of people so far removed from the national trauma that shaped multiple generations that they found it fit to use our seismic cataclysm as gag gift wrapping for a (probably) laundered incomplete prototype game?
Who can forget Osama bin Laden himself telling GWB "I DIDN'T DO THE ATTACKS. NO EVIDENCE."? and then having that juxtaposed with a shockingly faithful rendition of one of the best run-n-gun games ever made, on a platform where it shouldn't exist, on top of knowing that this isn't some rom hack or another form of satire but rather a real commercial product somebody found fit to sell on store shelves?
Don't mean to be disrespectful towards people who were impacted by 9/11, rather, I think this game's existence makes some sort of point on just how quickly 9/11 entered a purgatorial state of existing as a cultural unreality. 9/11 became realer than real, for us it redefined the boundaries between private and public for the next century, the rest of us rebuilding our cities and psyches around the negative space the towers left, for them, they were so far removed from it that within a year they laughed at us, or, if you prefer, were so far removed from our psychic scars that 9/11 was just another brand to capitalize from them, either way, this game was immaculately conceived by the anonymous cultural subconscious in some twisted act of hyperreality, outside the mortal bounds of good taste, and copyright, trauma, and visible intent.
Worth 70 bucks to me, when faced with the financial choice between a new-in-box next gen game and...this, the choice is obvious, 4/5 would "buy off an obscure regional competitor to eBay in a country I don't live in" again
Limited Run wouldn't have the balls to reprint this lmao
Some speculate, based solely off the game's remarkable adherence to its source material, that this may have been an official port from Takara (who made numerous SNK ports for GBC) that got canceled, and I can definitely see that
The dialogue is incredibly tone-deaf, especially because this came out in 2002, but it's precisely its status as a cursed artifact that makes it interesting
It's the kind of thing that feels like it should only exist as deliberate satire, like somebody made a video game out of an article from The Onion, but yet this game bafflingly occupies the status of being naïve camp, and not deliberate
It's a weird sight as an American who lived through its cultural shockwaves in the haziest fog of early memory, who knows people who were personally impacted by this tragedy, to imagine the people who created this in 2002, a room full of people so far removed from the national trauma that shaped multiple generations that they found it fit to use our seismic cataclysm as gag gift wrapping for a (probably) laundered incomplete prototype game?
Who can forget Osama bin Laden himself telling GWB "I DIDN'T DO THE ATTACKS. NO EVIDENCE."? and then having that juxtaposed with a shockingly faithful rendition of one of the best run-n-gun games ever made, on a platform where it shouldn't exist, on top of knowing that this isn't some rom hack or another form of satire but rather a real commercial product somebody found fit to sell on store shelves?
Don't mean to be disrespectful towards people who were impacted by 9/11, rather, I think this game's existence makes some sort of point on just how quickly 9/11 entered a purgatorial state of existing as a cultural unreality. 9/11 became realer than real, for us it redefined the boundaries between private and public for the next century, the rest of us rebuilding our cities and psyches around the negative space the towers left, for them, they were so far removed from it that within a year they laughed at us, or, if you prefer, were so far removed from our psychic scars that 9/11 was just another brand to capitalize from them, either way, this game was immaculately conceived by the anonymous cultural subconscious in some twisted act of hyperreality, outside the mortal bounds of good taste, and copyright, trauma, and visible intent.
Worth 70 bucks to me, when faced with the financial choice between a new-in-box next gen game and...this, the choice is obvious, 4/5 would "buy off an obscure regional competitor to eBay in a country I don't live in" again
Limited Run wouldn't have the balls to reprint this lmao
2023
My long journey to Hi-Fi Rush began when I was 7 years old, during the absolutely sweltering summer of 2003. It was one of those weekends where my family and I were "driving into town", because everything good was in Chattanooga and not where we were living. They took me to the local Circuit City (lol) and on the clearance rack they were "pennying out" (selling for a single penny to remove from the inventory system) a variety of cast-off video game and computer merchandise. One of these cast-offs was a little demo disc known as the Nintendo GameCube Preview Disc. It contained four demos, but my parents would have had a shared aneurysm if they saw me playing Tom Clancy's Splinter Cell, so really, it only had three.
- Sonic Adventure DX, which was what got me to pick it up in the first place after playing the absolute shit out of Sonic Adventure 2: Battle.
- A strange game called Billy Hatcher and the Giant Egg, which I had a close eye on because they were talking about it in Nintendo Power and it was from the Sonic guys.
- And finally...a little game called Viewtiful Joe that absolutely blew my little 2nd grader mind.
I played that demo over, and over, and over, rewinding and fastforwarding and slow-moing with my newly-acquired VFX powers, and my parents, bless them, actually cared about and paid attention to what got me excited and passionate, because being inured to child-raising with a then-in-vogue-but-now-outdated pediatric dogma that children with autism are "stuck in their own little worlds" meant they felt an intense pressure to pay attention and reward any sign of neuron activation.
My dad thought it looked promising, because he's always had a fixation on superheroes, and he was online but not extremely online enough to differentiate "superhero" from "tokusatsu", so they preordered it for me.
Maybe I'm overstating it, but what followed on October 7th, 2003, was something of a religious experience. We picked it up from Rhino Video Games (rip, you're excused if you're too young to remember when there were tons of cool video game store chains before GameStop bought them all just for the land value), and I played that game like crazy. Back then I could never get past the absolute brutal boss rush that has you fight every boss you've already fought back to back, ending in a fight with the vicious and cruel boss of bosses Fire Leo, which, if memory serves, sends you all the way back to the beginning of the boss rush if you fail. Pretty far for a 3rd grader though it may be, I didn't quite have what it takes to reach the ending, but that game planted a seed that altered my personality for good. Henshin-a-go-go baby!
A few months later my dad handed me down his GameFAQs.com forum account so I could ask for help being stuck on the opening stage of Sonic Heroes where you play as Team Chaotix. With not a ton to occupy my time, I went on the the online to go "surfing" on this new and exciting ""web"". GameFAQs had this sidebar where they would show game industry news from their sister website, GameSpot. This meant I started paying attention to industry news, and it became apparent to me that Viewtiful Joe didn't just come out of nowhere, it came from a small outfit within Capcom called Clover Studios, that benefited enormously from institutional knowledge imported from other parts of Capcom.
I gobbled up every mention of Clover, they quickly became my favorite of all studios from the moment I even had a concept of developers.
I learned that games were not the subject of immaculate conception but rather an intense process of iteration and cultural feedback, that they existed within a canon.
I learned that Viewtiful Joe was part of a miniature canon of five games for the Gamecube known as the Capcom Five, which was really more like the Capcom Four because one of them, Dead Phoenix, got cancelled before I even heard about it. You know, for a game that never was, its title is so on-the-nose you'd be excused for thinking I just made that up.
I learned that I was supposed to be angry at an evangelical Floridian lawyer named Jack Thompson.
And, most influentially, I learned that Viewtiful Joe was the singular vision of a cooler-than-cool motorcycle-riding custom-Oakleys-wearing 80s John Hughes movie protagonist character of a man named Hideki Kamiya.
The very next year (wow, remember when amazing sequels used to only take a year? what the fuck happened?) I got Viewtiful Joe 2 on release date. I followed every bit of news about Clover Studios, heard about these wild new games they were making called Okami and God Hand, had my little pre-teen heart absolutely shattered by the news that Clover had shut down, and then subsequently kintsugi'd by the news that they had reformed into a new studio fittingly named Seeds. And then Seeds merged with another studio, and became this new studio called PlatinumGames, and that the auteurs behind Viewtiful Joe, Okami and God Hand had went with them, and they signed a contract with Sega to give them a whopping FIVE new games, all of them being next-gen, paralleling the famous Capcom Five.
In 2003 I played Viewtiful Joe. In 2004 I played Viewtiful Joe 2. In 2005 I played Viewtiful Joe Double Trouble for the Nintendo DS (and Phoenix Wright: Ace Attorney! but aside from Shu Takumi's bromance (and possible unrequited love?) for Hideki Kamiya that's not particularly relevant).
In 2008 we were really really poor that year (huh I wonder why) so that Christmas my parents bought me a used PS2 Slim to replace the PS2 that had broke to where it keeps showing that scary red screen, and with it came a newly-released Greatest Hits reprint of Okami, which had me jumping up and down with joy that I had finally found a copy, because it had become low-print-run eBay scalper bait from pretty much the moment it came out. I subsequently do every sidequest and acquire every Stray Bead, leaving absolutely no stone unturned to adequately pay tribute to my idol Hideki Kamiya.
In 2010 I finally find a sunfaded-to-the-point-of-disintegrating copy of God Hand at the local outdoor drive-in theater/swap meet, for the low low price of 5 dollars. I remember it got bad reviews which is why I never played it, that on top of the aforementioned parental-aneurysm-inducing M-rating, but hey, I'm a teenager now, my parents just said they think I'm mature enough for the M-rating, and I end up playing the fuck out of that too. My online Venezuelan pen-pal who ended up introducing me to so, so many games I adored due to South America's vibrant culture of piracy, I mean, he said God Hand was fantastic, and I trust his word, so why not? (we haven't talked in probably a decade but we're friends on Backloggd so a shout-out to you if you're reading this, thank you for everything! thank you for Deadly Premonition! I hope we get to talk again one day, so much has happened!)
God Hand was directed by a man named Shinji Mikami, and word of mouth got around that he was really, really good at designing action games. 4chan-adjacent contrarians exalted it and used the famous IGN 3/10 review as fuel for their paranoid distrust of and superiority complex to game journalists. It became the subject of a meme comic template based on how the game's hidden excellence took everybody who played it by surprise. Tim Rogers then writes a review wherein, among many other extremely colorful metaphors, he compares moments in God Hand to "the feeling of catching a bully's punch, effortlessly uncurling his fist, and snatching out a fifty-dollar-bill". My bullied 15-year-old self nods, agreeing with his assessment.
In 2012, I played Devil May Cry 1 and 3 out of the HD Collection after the sage advice of the net told me to skip 2, and I played Ninja Gaiden Sigma Male, and I played the return of the Mikami and God Hand design ethos, a game called *dramatic title-screen-announcer voice* VANQUISH. I adored Vanquish, and I spent the next 11 years rawdogging estradiol and waiting for, finally, another action game bearing the stamp of Shinji Mikami. Thank you for reading so far into something this personal, you probably get where this is going, yeah? Keep going though.
In 2013, I buy the last game of Platinum's Sega deal, Anarchy Reigns, and I have an excellent, very fun month with this hypermasculine game while its online was still alive, getting my mind off the crippling anxiety of having just came out to my parents. The next month, I play Platinum's Metal Gear Rising, the first game they've made outside their deal with Sega, and like Jack, it rips. In 2015 I finally, finally get to play Bayonetta, because I always heard the PS3 version was bad, so I avoided it until I got a Wii U, and I am reminded of my intense fondness for Hideki Kamiya's trademark embracement of stylish action, camp, and cringe. Meanwhile, the man himself begins blocking basically everybody who speaks English to him on Twitter because most of them are begging for Bayonetta 2 on their preferred system and calling him slurs.
In 2016 I play Furi, a particularly inspired indie game specially crafted for "genetic freaks!" who are "not normal!" such as myself, while living out of a motel, on a Wii U Pro Controller while my dad sleeps in the same room. I finish the game at like 5 AM. The credits give a very special thanks to Shinji Mikami, Hideki Kamiya, Keiji Inafune (lol, I'd put Akira Kitamura if only for Cocoron), Hideo Kojima, Hidetaka Miyazaki, Genyo Takeda (director of Punch-Out), Platinum Games, Grasshopper Manufactures (sic), and Treasure Co, in that exact order, probably close to the order I'd put them in too. Thank you for all the great games and memories! so they wrote.
In 2017, under conditions of more stable housing, I play Nier:Automata from Platinum, and it's great! But this review isn't about how I've been Facebook friends with Yoko Taro since before Drakengard 3 came out. Where are you, Yoko Taro? I miss you.
Also in 2017, Hideki Kamiya's next big effort, Scalebound, is cancelled by Microsoft, making me shake my fist in anger at the Xbox brand and how anything good it produces seems to be in spite of themselves. I make a post online about how they should retrofit it into Drakengard 4.
In 2019 I back The Wonderful 101 Remastered Kickstarter, because somehow I hadn't got around to playing it yet. Surprise surprise, as expected from a Hideki Kamiya joint, it was incredible. In 2020 I buy Vanquish AGAIN, the moment it got released on PS4, and in the midst of intense anxiety over an incoming plague and Bernie Sanders primary results, I finally accomplish the infamous "Tactical Challenge 6", iykyk. Sega has posted a survey for people who bought the Bayonetta/Vanquish collection, I spam every field with "VANQUISH 2 VANQUISH 2 VANQUISH 2". My longing for the return of Shinji Mikami intensifies like a kid on their birthday remembering their dad who stepped out for a pack of smokes and never came back.
It is 2021. I finally play another Capcom Five game from way back when, Mikami and Suda51's Killer7, in 4K widescreen. They never collaborated again, anyone who tells you otherwise is lying. It is everything I was told it was. The m4m craigslist guy was right. I continue to miss Shinji Mikami so fuckin bad
It is late 2022. God Hand is selling on eBay for the high high price of 160 dollars, and people are buying, because it's worth it. I am reading the r/gamingleaksandrumors subreddit, as I am wont to do, even though I don't have a Reddit account. Some guy is posting about Microsoft registering a trademark for a new game called...HI-FI RUSH. They think, via process of elimination, that it could be an unannounced project from Tango Gameworks, Shinji Mikami's studio. They think it might be an action game! I excitedly message my one friend who watches my streams, similarly obsessed with this canon as I am, in the hopes that it could be that fabled second coming of God Hand. Could it be? Do I dare to hope?
It is January 25th, 2023. Microsoft just straight-up drops the game I've been waiting for for most of my life during a presentation I'm not watching, with zero fanfare. I immediately buy it based solely off reflex from my sympathetic nervous system, before my conscious mind can even comprehend what just happened. Despite having been ravenous for this for most of the time I've been a conscious human being, I save it for a rainy day.
It is late 2023. I am on mushrooms. I remember there is a new Shinji Mikami produced action game I still haven't played, and so I boot up Hi-Fi Rush. I quickly realize that by my personal barometer, it is one of the greatest games ever made, and that I would still be feeling this way even if I wasn't on drugs. It means the world to me that this game was allowed to exist, it feels like coming home.
The character action genre is my favorite genre of game, and I’ve always considered it the most pure, joyous, evocative genre of video game, they represent everything uniquely special about the medium while radiating a tangible aura of inspired fun, mechanical depth, flashy setpieces and an effortless sense of “cool” that shaped my personality more than I could ever untangle from myself.
I guess what I'm trying to get at by autobiographizing like this, is that I am glad this game exists at all, and from a young age, younger than I should have been to learn such a life lesson, the shutdown of Clover Studios taught me something really important. Don't be sad because it's over, be happy because it happened. Because it could've been so easy for it not to, you know? Everything about your life and mine only happened because everything landed in the right place, this game only existed because everything landed in the right place, it's so incredibly easy for something to never come together, or get cancelled before we ever even heard about it. With how many minds are warring for supremacy, it's an absolute miracle anything ever gets made at all, let alone a game this good and coherent and visionary. And just like I saw growing up alongside them, watching them rise from the ashes like a (dead?) phoenix with how Clover became Seeds became Platinum became Tango, you can kill a studio but you can't kill their spirit, the influence they have on the family tree of design. Tango will return.
It is February 29th, 2024. Leap Day, a liminal space that only comes around once a presidential term. I am on mushrooms again. I decide now is the time to finish Hi-Fi Rush. I beat the game a couple minutes after midnight, which disappointed me slightly because I wanted the achievement date to say the 29th. My first playthrough was on Very Hard difficulty of course, because this personal history has made me into quite the tryhard. I sit through the credits as a gesture of respect, of course. How could I not? I waited most of my life for this game, it's the least I could do. The director himself starts serenading me. I look around nervously, wondering if I am hallucinating this or something. I am not. Everything I wrote about in this review comes flooding back. It becomes apparent to me that the world is filled with overwhelming beauty, that it is truly beautiful that people can collaborate and make something with so many moving parts, and that it is beautiful that everything I've experienced and the ways those people like Mikami, Kamiya, and now Johanas contributed to a shared lineage made me who I am, and I feel loved and personally spoken to in a way I've never felt before. Of course, of course I cry my goddamn eyes out.
We somehow made it through
All of this.
Making things is hard,
Things never go as planned.
Too many features, not enough time.
We want the best
But can only do so much
With what we have.
So this is what we made.
We've never been more proud.
A game, a song, a million different pieces working together
Brought to you by all of us.
It may not be what you expected,
Everything
(Everything that you want)
But we did our best
And here it is:
A piece of our heart,
The hard work from all of us.
So please don't complain
And just enjoy.
Because at the end of the day, it's all just a game.
One we spent thousands and thousands of hours
Arguing, building, and polishing.
But hey,
No sweat. 😅
- Sonic Adventure DX, which was what got me to pick it up in the first place after playing the absolute shit out of Sonic Adventure 2: Battle.
- A strange game called Billy Hatcher and the Giant Egg, which I had a close eye on because they were talking about it in Nintendo Power and it was from the Sonic guys.
- And finally...a little game called Viewtiful Joe that absolutely blew my little 2nd grader mind.
I played that demo over, and over, and over, rewinding and fastforwarding and slow-moing with my newly-acquired VFX powers, and my parents, bless them, actually cared about and paid attention to what got me excited and passionate, because being inured to child-raising with a then-in-vogue-but-now-outdated pediatric dogma that children with autism are "stuck in their own little worlds" meant they felt an intense pressure to pay attention and reward any sign of neuron activation.
My dad thought it looked promising, because he's always had a fixation on superheroes, and he was online but not extremely online enough to differentiate "superhero" from "tokusatsu", so they preordered it for me.
Maybe I'm overstating it, but what followed on October 7th, 2003, was something of a religious experience. We picked it up from Rhino Video Games (rip, you're excused if you're too young to remember when there were tons of cool video game store chains before GameStop bought them all just for the land value), and I played that game like crazy. Back then I could never get past the absolute brutal boss rush that has you fight every boss you've already fought back to back, ending in a fight with the vicious and cruel boss of bosses Fire Leo, which, if memory serves, sends you all the way back to the beginning of the boss rush if you fail. Pretty far for a 3rd grader though it may be, I didn't quite have what it takes to reach the ending, but that game planted a seed that altered my personality for good. Henshin-a-go-go baby!
A few months later my dad handed me down his GameFAQs.com forum account so I could ask for help being stuck on the opening stage of Sonic Heroes where you play as Team Chaotix. With not a ton to occupy my time, I went on the the online to go "surfing" on this new and exciting ""web"". GameFAQs had this sidebar where they would show game industry news from their sister website, GameSpot. This meant I started paying attention to industry news, and it became apparent to me that Viewtiful Joe didn't just come out of nowhere, it came from a small outfit within Capcom called Clover Studios, that benefited enormously from institutional knowledge imported from other parts of Capcom.
I gobbled up every mention of Clover, they quickly became my favorite of all studios from the moment I even had a concept of developers.
I learned that games were not the subject of immaculate conception but rather an intense process of iteration and cultural feedback, that they existed within a canon.
I learned that Viewtiful Joe was part of a miniature canon of five games for the Gamecube known as the Capcom Five, which was really more like the Capcom Four because one of them, Dead Phoenix, got cancelled before I even heard about it. You know, for a game that never was, its title is so on-the-nose you'd be excused for thinking I just made that up.
I learned that I was supposed to be angry at an evangelical Floridian lawyer named Jack Thompson.
And, most influentially, I learned that Viewtiful Joe was the singular vision of a cooler-than-cool motorcycle-riding custom-Oakleys-wearing 80s John Hughes movie protagonist character of a man named Hideki Kamiya.
The very next year (wow, remember when amazing sequels used to only take a year? what the fuck happened?) I got Viewtiful Joe 2 on release date. I followed every bit of news about Clover Studios, heard about these wild new games they were making called Okami and God Hand, had my little pre-teen heart absolutely shattered by the news that Clover had shut down, and then subsequently kintsugi'd by the news that they had reformed into a new studio fittingly named Seeds. And then Seeds merged with another studio, and became this new studio called PlatinumGames, and that the auteurs behind Viewtiful Joe, Okami and God Hand had went with them, and they signed a contract with Sega to give them a whopping FIVE new games, all of them being next-gen, paralleling the famous Capcom Five.
In 2003 I played Viewtiful Joe. In 2004 I played Viewtiful Joe 2. In 2005 I played Viewtiful Joe Double Trouble for the Nintendo DS (and Phoenix Wright: Ace Attorney! but aside from Shu Takumi's bromance (and possible unrequited love?) for Hideki Kamiya that's not particularly relevant).
In 2008 we were really really poor that year (huh I wonder why) so that Christmas my parents bought me a used PS2 Slim to replace the PS2 that had broke to where it keeps showing that scary red screen, and with it came a newly-released Greatest Hits reprint of Okami, which had me jumping up and down with joy that I had finally found a copy, because it had become low-print-run eBay scalper bait from pretty much the moment it came out. I subsequently do every sidequest and acquire every Stray Bead, leaving absolutely no stone unturned to adequately pay tribute to my idol Hideki Kamiya.
In 2010 I finally find a sunfaded-to-the-point-of-disintegrating copy of God Hand at the local outdoor drive-in theater/swap meet, for the low low price of 5 dollars. I remember it got bad reviews which is why I never played it, that on top of the aforementioned parental-aneurysm-inducing M-rating, but hey, I'm a teenager now, my parents just said they think I'm mature enough for the M-rating, and I end up playing the fuck out of that too. My online Venezuelan pen-pal who ended up introducing me to so, so many games I adored due to South America's vibrant culture of piracy, I mean, he said God Hand was fantastic, and I trust his word, so why not? (we haven't talked in probably a decade but we're friends on Backloggd so a shout-out to you if you're reading this, thank you for everything! thank you for Deadly Premonition! I hope we get to talk again one day, so much has happened!)
God Hand was directed by a man named Shinji Mikami, and word of mouth got around that he was really, really good at designing action games. 4chan-adjacent contrarians exalted it and used the famous IGN 3/10 review as fuel for their paranoid distrust of and superiority complex to game journalists. It became the subject of a meme comic template based on how the game's hidden excellence took everybody who played it by surprise. Tim Rogers then writes a review wherein, among many other extremely colorful metaphors, he compares moments in God Hand to "the feeling of catching a bully's punch, effortlessly uncurling his fist, and snatching out a fifty-dollar-bill". My bullied 15-year-old self nods, agreeing with his assessment.
In 2012, I played Devil May Cry 1 and 3 out of the HD Collection after the sage advice of the net told me to skip 2, and I played Ninja Gaiden Sigma Male, and I played the return of the Mikami and God Hand design ethos, a game called *dramatic title-screen-announcer voice* VANQUISH. I adored Vanquish, and I spent the next 11 years rawdogging estradiol and waiting for, finally, another action game bearing the stamp of Shinji Mikami. Thank you for reading so far into something this personal, you probably get where this is going, yeah? Keep going though.
In 2013, I buy the last game of Platinum's Sega deal, Anarchy Reigns, and I have an excellent, very fun month with this hypermasculine game while its online was still alive, getting my mind off the crippling anxiety of having just came out to my parents. The next month, I play Platinum's Metal Gear Rising, the first game they've made outside their deal with Sega, and like Jack, it rips. In 2015 I finally, finally get to play Bayonetta, because I always heard the PS3 version was bad, so I avoided it until I got a Wii U, and I am reminded of my intense fondness for Hideki Kamiya's trademark embracement of stylish action, camp, and cringe. Meanwhile, the man himself begins blocking basically everybody who speaks English to him on Twitter because most of them are begging for Bayonetta 2 on their preferred system and calling him slurs.
In 2016 I play Furi, a particularly inspired indie game specially crafted for "genetic freaks!" who are "not normal!" such as myself, while living out of a motel, on a Wii U Pro Controller while my dad sleeps in the same room. I finish the game at like 5 AM. The credits give a very special thanks to Shinji Mikami, Hideki Kamiya, Keiji Inafune (lol, I'd put Akira Kitamura if only for Cocoron), Hideo Kojima, Hidetaka Miyazaki, Genyo Takeda (director of Punch-Out), Platinum Games, Grasshopper Manufactures (sic), and Treasure Co, in that exact order, probably close to the order I'd put them in too. Thank you for all the great games and memories! so they wrote.
In 2017, under conditions of more stable housing, I play Nier:Automata from Platinum, and it's great! But this review isn't about how I've been Facebook friends with Yoko Taro since before Drakengard 3 came out. Where are you, Yoko Taro? I miss you.
Also in 2017, Hideki Kamiya's next big effort, Scalebound, is cancelled by Microsoft, making me shake my fist in anger at the Xbox brand and how anything good it produces seems to be in spite of themselves. I make a post online about how they should retrofit it into Drakengard 4.
In 2019 I back The Wonderful 101 Remastered Kickstarter, because somehow I hadn't got around to playing it yet. Surprise surprise, as expected from a Hideki Kamiya joint, it was incredible. In 2020 I buy Vanquish AGAIN, the moment it got released on PS4, and in the midst of intense anxiety over an incoming plague and Bernie Sanders primary results, I finally accomplish the infamous "Tactical Challenge 6", iykyk. Sega has posted a survey for people who bought the Bayonetta/Vanquish collection, I spam every field with "VANQUISH 2 VANQUISH 2 VANQUISH 2". My longing for the return of Shinji Mikami intensifies like a kid on their birthday remembering their dad who stepped out for a pack of smokes and never came back.
It is 2021. I finally play another Capcom Five game from way back when, Mikami and Suda51's Killer7, in 4K widescreen. They never collaborated again, anyone who tells you otherwise is lying. It is everything I was told it was. The m4m craigslist guy was right. I continue to miss Shinji Mikami so fuckin bad
It is late 2022. God Hand is selling on eBay for the high high price of 160 dollars, and people are buying, because it's worth it. I am reading the r/gamingleaksandrumors subreddit, as I am wont to do, even though I don't have a Reddit account. Some guy is posting about Microsoft registering a trademark for a new game called...HI-FI RUSH. They think, via process of elimination, that it could be an unannounced project from Tango Gameworks, Shinji Mikami's studio. They think it might be an action game! I excitedly message my one friend who watches my streams, similarly obsessed with this canon as I am, in the hopes that it could be that fabled second coming of God Hand. Could it be? Do I dare to hope?
It is January 25th, 2023. Microsoft just straight-up drops the game I've been waiting for for most of my life during a presentation I'm not watching, with zero fanfare. I immediately buy it based solely off reflex from my sympathetic nervous system, before my conscious mind can even comprehend what just happened. Despite having been ravenous for this for most of the time I've been a conscious human being, I save it for a rainy day.
It is late 2023. I am on mushrooms. I remember there is a new Shinji Mikami produced action game I still haven't played, and so I boot up Hi-Fi Rush. I quickly realize that by my personal barometer, it is one of the greatest games ever made, and that I would still be feeling this way even if I wasn't on drugs. It means the world to me that this game was allowed to exist, it feels like coming home.
The character action genre is my favorite genre of game, and I’ve always considered it the most pure, joyous, evocative genre of video game, they represent everything uniquely special about the medium while radiating a tangible aura of inspired fun, mechanical depth, flashy setpieces and an effortless sense of “cool” that shaped my personality more than I could ever untangle from myself.
I guess what I'm trying to get at by autobiographizing like this, is that I am glad this game exists at all, and from a young age, younger than I should have been to learn such a life lesson, the shutdown of Clover Studios taught me something really important. Don't be sad because it's over, be happy because it happened. Because it could've been so easy for it not to, you know? Everything about your life and mine only happened because everything landed in the right place, this game only existed because everything landed in the right place, it's so incredibly easy for something to never come together, or get cancelled before we ever even heard about it. With how many minds are warring for supremacy, it's an absolute miracle anything ever gets made at all, let alone a game this good and coherent and visionary. And just like I saw growing up alongside them, watching them rise from the ashes like a (dead?) phoenix with how Clover became Seeds became Platinum became Tango, you can kill a studio but you can't kill their spirit, the influence they have on the family tree of design. Tango will return.
It is February 29th, 2024. Leap Day, a liminal space that only comes around once a presidential term. I am on mushrooms again. I decide now is the time to finish Hi-Fi Rush. I beat the game a couple minutes after midnight, which disappointed me slightly because I wanted the achievement date to say the 29th. My first playthrough was on Very Hard difficulty of course, because this personal history has made me into quite the tryhard. I sit through the credits as a gesture of respect, of course. How could I not? I waited most of my life for this game, it's the least I could do. The director himself starts serenading me. I look around nervously, wondering if I am hallucinating this or something. I am not. Everything I wrote about in this review comes flooding back. It becomes apparent to me that the world is filled with overwhelming beauty, that it is truly beautiful that people can collaborate and make something with so many moving parts, and that it is beautiful that everything I've experienced and the ways those people like Mikami, Kamiya, and now Johanas contributed to a shared lineage made me who I am, and I feel loved and personally spoken to in a way I've never felt before. Of course, of course I cry my goddamn eyes out.
We somehow made it through
All of this.
Making things is hard,
Things never go as planned.
Too many features, not enough time.
We want the best
But can only do so much
With what we have.
So this is what we made.
We've never been more proud.
A game, a song, a million different pieces working together
Brought to you by all of us.
It may not be what you expected,
Everything
(Everything that you want)
But we did our best
And here it is:
A piece of our heart,
The hard work from all of us.
So please don't complain
And just enjoy.
Because at the end of the day, it's all just a game.
One we spent thousands and thousands of hours
Arguing, building, and polishing.
But hey,
No sweat. 😅
TBD
I had to mark "played" to leave this review but that was a lie, just wanted to leave this review to say I had the chance to play this once at GEEX 2011 and I didn't, not knowing it would get canceled, which will haunt me for the rest of my life
2005
I think you need to leave
Servicable and inoffensive remake, but missing almost all of the mechanical and aesthetic peculiarities that make gen 1 interesting, like the chiptune music, the low-fi bichromatic GBC colorized visuals, the primordial off-model monster designs, and most importantly, the terrifying pantheon of the imagination that is glitch Pokemon and glitch interactions
I'd take Glitch City over the Sevii Islands any day, the most important part of gen 1 is the unauthorized feats of alchemy, Missingno multiplying your items, obtaining Mew to finish your dex by leaving a specific trainer alive and going on a fetch-quest, getting your game frozen by an infinitely screaming interdimensional creature with a gender marker for a name, stuff like that
FR/LG is missing all the cool stuff
I'd take Glitch City over the Sevii Islands any day, the most important part of gen 1 is the unauthorized feats of alchemy, Missingno multiplying your items, obtaining Mew to finish your dex by leaving a specific trainer alive and going on a fetch-quest, getting your game frozen by an infinitely screaming interdimensional creature with a gender marker for a name, stuff like that
FR/LG is missing all the cool stuff
2003
PLAY THE JAPANESE VERSION
The voice-acting is full English, they got new blander voice actors and completely butchered SWERY's script for the US/EU versions
The original Japanese version with its English script as originally written is a pretty great satire of MGS, Mission Impossible and John Le Carre novels
Don't forget to snap a picture of Nicklaus every time you see him to get the true ending
The voice-acting is full English, they got new blander voice actors and completely butchered SWERY's script for the US/EU versions
The original Japanese version with its English script as originally written is a pretty great satire of MGS, Mission Impossible and John Le Carre novels
Don't forget to snap a picture of Nicklaus every time you see him to get the true ending
Shut the fuck up. You say "I'm baby" but you're not. You are not baby. You are not capable of being baby. You possess neither the limitless potential of baby nor the driving curiosity of baby. You have some similarities. You cannot function on your own, you depend on others for your most basic needs. But where baby eventually outgrows these flaws, you are already hardened by your failures. You will not grow. You are not baby.
Quick go play this game while you can before it gets shut down to evade taxes
1993
Open the door, get on the floor, everybody Color a Dinosaur™
2021
Not an accurate portrayal of England, haven't seen a single TERF
do you remember that episode of Spongebob where the Krusty Krab gets bought out, becomes Krabby O'Mondays, and starts serving new synthetic burgers that look just like the old burgers, but once you bite into it, it's revealed that it's actually raw gray sludge that came off a conveyor belt, just painted to look like a burger from the outside
2023
This review contains spoilers
Simultaneously the most unoriginal and the most original game(s) ever made, Lies of P isn't a "Soulslike" game, the term that implies awful student projects made by Full Sail University graduates, armchair game devs with zero understanding of what works and what doesn't, putting slapdash ""cel-shading"" on top of asset flips, no, Lies of P just IS a Souls game, merely by a different hand. IP ownership should never exclude participation in an ongoing design dialogue, mechanics, game feel, all of that belongs to the people, hell, intellectual property belongs to the people but most aren't ready for that conversation yet.
Some may (and do) balk at the way this game carries itself with such unearned pomp, with such cringe swagger, but as a connoisseur of unhinged media I couldn't get enough of what this game was laying down and was marathoning it for days, barely tearing myself away to eat, which is not a reaction I've had in a while
70% of this game is made up of FromSoftware, much like how 70% of Hideo Kojima's body is made up of movies they both commit the necessary social transgression of creating transformative art, but let me tell you, the 30% of this game that doesn't come from From is so wonderfully and delightfully made stranger by incorporating it into the Souls framework
Characters overexplain and exposit in ways atypical of their work, they make their motivations clear, clearly tell you where to go to help them, largely make their quests unfuckupable, and to top it all off the menu design feels like a direct reply to internet brainwormed accessibility discourse that pops up every single time From releases a new game, doing things like pointedly marking when a destination has a character that needs helping
But lest this make you think they decided to go easy on you with this one, I love the way this game innovates on From's pantheon of spectacle bosses, with Leechmonger as a modern two-phase spectacle boss and Nier Automata carnival colliding with Raiden Metal Gear being some personal favorites, when parrying a massive string of freakishly moving attacks from the second phase known as Puppet-Devouring Green Monster, it dawned on me that with the way this creature is moving and lunging at you, this game would terrify children and you absolutely should not play it around them, and when it comes to design in this context it feels like an accomplishment
Level designs aesthetically cool as hell too aside from a couple that feel like padding, the Opera House scared the shit out of me, it almost feels like they developed the game in the order you progress through the areas because it feels like there's a consistent increase in quality as you go, alpha footage from 2021 being exclusively of early areas presented largely unaltered would seem to support this
They take a bold step of making the actual process of playing the game as frictionless as possible, the edges that Dark Souls III sanded off are further sanded down, shortcuts are way up, the elevator goes back on death without pulling the lever, less side paths, key items are within a stone's throw of their locks, everything is in service of relieving the mental strain of navigation and decision-making in favor of reusing the now-freed tension headroom for ramming the boss patterns straight up your ass, parry like your life depends on it because it does
There's something immensely satisfying about the way From's games cast you in the role of archaeologist piecing together 10% of a forgotten history, but there's also something satisfying about the way this game gives you 100% of recent history, you get told everything you want to know
And perfect optimization too! 4K120 and not a hint of a frame drop throughout the entire game
Despite those accessibility changes (which I must stress I don't think are better so to speak, moreso that they make the game feel tonally different in a way that befits it), my instinct is to say this game is for sickos who played all the """Soulsborkiring""" games prior though, and if that's you and you weren't feeling this game I question if we were playing the same game, and maybe we were! You might've been burnt out, but also patch 1.3 apparently improved the game design pretty substantially with clearer windup animations among other changes
I can't overstate how incredibly funny it is to graft a cynical "I'm putting together a team" "The legendary Pinocchio will return" "Everything is going according to plan Mr. President" stinger ending onto a fucking Souls game, I rolled my eyes so far into my head they looped back around, if that doesn't make you crack a smile I don't know what to tell you
And the game ending on a Crash Bandicoot 1, Sen's Fortress channeling megacastle that conveys its scale to you visually by showing you every place you had been before, while showing you in real-time the entire journey up from the beach to the very peak, you can tell they really paid attention to complaints about From's game design by making sure to end the game on a strong note, and they wait until then throw Malenichiro at you, and then two more 2-phase bosses after that
This can feel like a soulless game at times, sure, but like Pinocchio himself, the game is ensouled by the uniqueness of its soullessness, the way it animates itself in imitation of life captivating if nothing else
The writing is actually very similar to the overly-verbose nonsense time travel version of Dark Souls II that we never got, before Shadow Tower Abyss director and later Elden Ring co-director Yui Tanimura was dragged in to clean up his original co-director Tomohiro Shibuya's mess, and you could argue "they cut that approach because it didn't work", but it's nice to see for myself why it wouldn't have worked, you know?
It wouldn't work for Souls, too off-model, but it works for this game because despite all the Bloodborne memes this game is very much its own thing and synthesizes From's work into a cohesive whole where Sekiro's parrying mechanic and Bloodborne's rallying mechanic achieve a magnificent symbiosis alongside its weird, French-inspired, forgotten mid-80s OVA energy
This game is like an overproduced April Fool's joke made real and I wouldn't have it any other way, feels like a 4.25 basically
Some may (and do) balk at the way this game carries itself with such unearned pomp, with such cringe swagger, but as a connoisseur of unhinged media I couldn't get enough of what this game was laying down and was marathoning it for days, barely tearing myself away to eat, which is not a reaction I've had in a while
70% of this game is made up of FromSoftware, much like how 70% of Hideo Kojima's body is made up of movies they both commit the necessary social transgression of creating transformative art, but let me tell you, the 30% of this game that doesn't come from From is so wonderfully and delightfully made stranger by incorporating it into the Souls framework
Characters overexplain and exposit in ways atypical of their work, they make their motivations clear, clearly tell you where to go to help them, largely make their quests unfuckupable, and to top it all off the menu design feels like a direct reply to internet brainwormed accessibility discourse that pops up every single time From releases a new game, doing things like pointedly marking when a destination has a character that needs helping
But lest this make you think they decided to go easy on you with this one, I love the way this game innovates on From's pantheon of spectacle bosses, with Leechmonger as a modern two-phase spectacle boss and Nier Automata carnival colliding with Raiden Metal Gear being some personal favorites, when parrying a massive string of freakishly moving attacks from the second phase known as Puppet-Devouring Green Monster, it dawned on me that with the way this creature is moving and lunging at you, this game would terrify children and you absolutely should not play it around them, and when it comes to design in this context it feels like an accomplishment
Level designs aesthetically cool as hell too aside from a couple that feel like padding, the Opera House scared the shit out of me, it almost feels like they developed the game in the order you progress through the areas because it feels like there's a consistent increase in quality as you go, alpha footage from 2021 being exclusively of early areas presented largely unaltered would seem to support this
They take a bold step of making the actual process of playing the game as frictionless as possible, the edges that Dark Souls III sanded off are further sanded down, shortcuts are way up, the elevator goes back on death without pulling the lever, less side paths, key items are within a stone's throw of their locks, everything is in service of relieving the mental strain of navigation and decision-making in favor of reusing the now-freed tension headroom for ramming the boss patterns straight up your ass, parry like your life depends on it because it does
There's something immensely satisfying about the way From's games cast you in the role of archaeologist piecing together 10% of a forgotten history, but there's also something satisfying about the way this game gives you 100% of recent history, you get told everything you want to know
And perfect optimization too! 4K120 and not a hint of a frame drop throughout the entire game
Despite those accessibility changes (which I must stress I don't think are better so to speak, moreso that they make the game feel tonally different in a way that befits it), my instinct is to say this game is for sickos who played all the """Soulsborkiring""" games prior though, and if that's you and you weren't feeling this game I question if we were playing the same game, and maybe we were! You might've been burnt out, but also patch 1.3 apparently improved the game design pretty substantially with clearer windup animations among other changes
I can't overstate how incredibly funny it is to graft a cynical "I'm putting together a team" "The legendary Pinocchio will return" "Everything is going according to plan Mr. President" stinger ending onto a fucking Souls game, I rolled my eyes so far into my head they looped back around, if that doesn't make you crack a smile I don't know what to tell you
And the game ending on a Crash Bandicoot 1, Sen's Fortress channeling megacastle that conveys its scale to you visually by showing you every place you had been before, while showing you in real-time the entire journey up from the beach to the very peak, you can tell they really paid attention to complaints about From's game design by making sure to end the game on a strong note, and they wait until then throw Malenichiro at you, and then two more 2-phase bosses after that
This can feel like a soulless game at times, sure, but like Pinocchio himself, the game is ensouled by the uniqueness of its soullessness, the way it animates itself in imitation of life captivating if nothing else
The writing is actually very similar to the overly-verbose nonsense time travel version of Dark Souls II that we never got, before Shadow Tower Abyss director and later Elden Ring co-director Yui Tanimura was dragged in to clean up his original co-director Tomohiro Shibuya's mess, and you could argue "they cut that approach because it didn't work", but it's nice to see for myself why it wouldn't have worked, you know?
It wouldn't work for Souls, too off-model, but it works for this game because despite all the Bloodborne memes this game is very much its own thing and synthesizes From's work into a cohesive whole where Sekiro's parrying mechanic and Bloodborne's rallying mechanic achieve a magnificent symbiosis alongside its weird, French-inspired, forgotten mid-80s OVA energy
This game is like an overproduced April Fool's joke made real and I wouldn't have it any other way, feels like a 4.25 basically
2001
"Any prize for Backloggd reviewers?"
Note: no prize for Backloggd reviewers.
Note: no prize for Backloggd reviewers.
Up yours Tosa Loyalists....we'll see who cancels who!