anything from heavenly sword and on is debatable. so if you have an opinion one way or the other post it. also any games I might've missed

Onimusha is debatable but Genma Onimusha absolutely fits the bill. Also pedantic NG fan but I'd put Ninja Gaiden Black and Razor's Edge over NG04 and NG3. Just the more complete experiences.

I don't see why Nier Automata would be a "character action game" but Kingdom Hearts wouldn't. Is Nier Automata not an action RPG?

Nanobreaker maybe?

Why is this genre called "character action" anyways? I never even heard the term until a few years ago despite growing up on the ps2 classics.

@gruel reasons for genma to count and vanilla onimusha to not count? dunno a lot about genma but it mainly makes the combat harder and adds some extra content, correct? I'm def interested in playing it eventually (just occurred to me I can play it on 360, thank god I already have a copy). also any opinions on the other onimusha games? if later ones fit the bill better I would feel happy adding them. also yea, I put the original version of each game just to make it cleaner (same reason I didn't use any of the special editions for dmc3/4/5).

@HylianBran you know what? I agree... I originally had a note about it in the description but then removed it. the main argument that N:A is a CAG is that it looks, swims, and quacks like a CAG thanks to its platinum heritage. it certainly plays more like something like dmc/bayo than say, KH does, but yea that reasoning is flimsy. it's certainly a watered-down version of that style of combat, so yea, I'm gonna remove it unless other people argue for its inclusion. I know a lot of the other CAG lists on here add it, but if I'm gonna exclude KH I better exclude N:A as well. also removing scarlet nexus from the maybe pile for the same reason

@unaderon oh yup, great choice. gonna go ahead and throw it on the maybe pile if anyone else wants to affirm it then I'll put it in the main list. probably a few others are pretty straight-forward and ready to be added as well (such as nightmare before christmas and ghost rider)

@Hot_Anarcocoa literally no clue lol. I looked for a bit and couldn't find the etymology... I think "spectacle action" was coined by yahtzee at one point, but it hasn't stuck quite as well as CAG

I had always assumed it was because the action was centered around the character you played as - but I haven't played that many, so I could be wrong

o swag i actually thought about making something akin to this a while back but more focused on the cuhrayzee side than the character action side. but this is a great list fr. does the no arpgs rule apply to musous? because there's a couple of musou games that are typically associated with this genre i could argue for but i aint tryna turn up where its not relevant lmao

@Archagent yea I guess what I'm trying to get at is that I dunno why it's named "character action" in lieu of something more related to the combat itself or more descriptive of the style. it's difficult I guess because terms like hack 'n slash and beat 'em up get bandied about for some of the same stuff, and then occasionally I see games like yakuza lumped in. like, I love yakuza, and those games are definitely based around kiryu (or whoever's) combat style, but I wouldn't call them character action, y'know?

@SimonDedalus I would be curious to hear if they're like, outside of omega force's oeuvre. but yea in general I would classify musou games separately. I think a big thing is enemy variety, character action games tend to be focused on more variety and more dangerous individual enemies, which I don't think musous are really going for.

god hand's genre is apex brawler

Definitely feels like "character action" has the same terminology problem as "role playing game." Isn't every game a game where you are playing a role? Isn't every action game a game where you're inhabiting a character?

Also as far as Onimusha goes, I played tons of 2 and 3 growing up. I've played a bit of Genma and Dawn of Dreams. They all play very similarly. And just to throw an unsolicited opinion out there, 2 is the best one.

Samurai Western merits inclusion imho

@Pangburn I'd argue in favor of Genma Onimusha and Onimusha 2. Genma adds in a sort of devil trigger, more moves, it generally just makes the gameplay more mechanical and complex, it's in line with the other big boys of the genre i'd say.

Also Nightshade/Kunoichi is the sequel to Shinobi and I think both of those definitely count and aren't fringe cases.

Oh would also say all three of the mainline No More Heroes titles (esp if we're including KID) should def be on here, as well as maybe Mikami's PN.03 based on footage I've seen, haven't played myself to say for sure.

alright added:
entire mainline onimusha series (with genma in place of the original)
nmh1-3 and killer is dead
strider/nightshade

originally I was sort of eeeeh on adding nmh1/2 because I think they're really toeing the lines in terms of the complexity needed for a character action game, but I'm going to go ahead and give them the edge for 1) because the boss battles perfectly match what I would expect for a CAG and 2) because I think they capture what stylish action is in a way that makes up for some of their mechanical deficiencies (especially in terms of lack of enemy variety and shallow movesets). I also added suda's samurai champloo game to the maybe pile, and while looking at footage of blood+ one night kiss (does have some proto-NMH stuff in it but it's more of an adventure game and overall closer to killer7) I stumbled upon the other blood+ game Sōyoku no Battle Rondo, which I think qualifies enough to end up in the maybe pile (stylish sword action, launchers, varied moveset, QTE special attacks, enemies and bosses that require maneuvering around attacks and don't go down instantly). also added a couple others, and split off lollipop chainsaw into its own entry because I'm not sure if it really qualifies.

@romdocitizen as for samurai western, I was sort of on the fence and then I saw it had a leveling system, so I'd say that puts it into action rpg territory. if any action rpg gets argued onto the list tho I would throw it on the maybe pile. also pn03 I would categorize as a third-person shooter, I feel like a CAG really needs primarily melee elements to qualify. thanks for the suggestions though! I'm glad to see the list growing, and your nmh comments led me to find a couple other games I wouldn't have thought of otherwise

@Pangburn anytime! I'd actually completely forgotten Samurai Western had a level up system at all, I only played partway through and it's been a minute lol.

Based on having played through the first 2-3 areas of Lollipop Chainsaw it def belongs here imho - some superficial similarities to Dead Rising but firmly in the CAG lineage.

Also just out of curiosity, do the presence/absence/implementation of ranking systems play any part in how you classify something as CAG or not? One of the general definitive features of it as a subgenre for me (for the most part) is grading performance by way of giving you low rankings for, in essence, not being cool enough (e.g. damage taken, parries executed, time to completion, etc.). Lots of games from disparate genres incorporate similar metrics but CAG utilize them to encourage a specific kind of role playing that action RPGs don't really do, or not in the same way. NMH1, for ex, gets a lot of juice out fucking around with that thematically and in play in ways that DMC and Bayo play straight - that's a game in conversation with a lot of different things but the way it intentionally pushes the DMC mold askew is part of what makes it CAG canon.

Curious why the Zone of the Enders 2 makes the cut but not the original?

@pangburn

ok im witchu. just for additional context here, which i think is pretty relevant if indulgent on my part lmao, the term 'character action' was at one point synonymous with the terms 'cuhrayzee'/'stylistic action'/'spectacle fighter'/etc. there hasn't really been strict or popular definition of cuhrayzee to my knowledge, but generally it's a subgenre of action game with particularly 'deep combat' and a 'high skill ceiling'. put less nebulously, its an action game with a large movepool, extensive cancel routes (usually in the form of IASA frames that can be canceled into many other actions but most definitely Jumping/Dashing/Blocking), and enemy variety and difficulty that forces the usage of said cancel routes & movepool to progress. games are also accompanied with an aesthetic that places style at a premium, usually not just with VFX and choreography but also with in-game taunting and a ranking system/style meter. but that definition doesn't really capture fully all of what has been traditionally considered character action games/cuhrayzee--since games don't come with a full list of what cancels into what or what has i-frames, it's been the influence of action game and combo mad lab monsters who plumbed the depths of a cuhrayzee game's combat system to find the necessary tech & difficulty that would make the genre criteria. the cool thing about this genre is that it has a heavy communal element--a game like vanquish got to cuhrayzee canon because of a community drive to map out its strategy and routes in spite of passability as just a sleek TPS.

but, correct me if im wrong, i think what you're drawing here in this list is distinct from the cuhrayzee/character action/stylish action genre as historically considered--what you seem to be focused on is character action games as it appears without attaching it to this cuhrayzee genre history that it usually is. which is another layer of genre semantic drift, but i think its necessary because this list captures ALOT more interesting games than the history does, or at least the history that's been recorded by the purists. not just the ps2 action games who share the clear DMC lineage but don't have the cancels&difficulty of some of the cuhrayzee canon but also stuff that has been (necessarily?) cut out of cuhrayzee consideration like Suda51 games, GOW, Madworld, etc. stuff that has its own niche and influence but hasn't been included in the uptick of genre delineation amongst discourse yet. and there's ofc some crossover i think between the genre you're painting and the cuhrayzee history, e.g. the presence of performance grades like romdocitizen is getting at

unfortunately alot of the source of what i'm saying is like narrative from my memories + oral history, there used to be a cuhrayzee wiki that really got into the genre definition and criteria but it kept getting vandalized by 4channers (or so the wiki admin's story goes) and got taken down lol. you can still poke around a little bit through the wayback machine: here's a page that's easily accessible that breaks down the genre definition and here's the homepage that lists out what games were considered cuhrayzee as of 2015. there's also a cuhrayzee discord out there but its p much inactive iirc. discord isn't really a historical platform like wikia so its not really useful here regardless.

anyway. sorry i had a lot of thoughts about it because all the history of cuhrayzee games has been scrubbed off the net at this point due to aforementioned link rot + discord silo'ing but it means a lot to me. i do have some inclusions for this list but have taken up enough comment space already so lemme be silent 😶😶😶

@SimonDedalus ooh good call on Anarchy Reigns in the pastebin, kicking myself for not thinking of that that too lol. I played it both solo and online now and then during the brief period when anyone was actually doing that - barely scratched the surface of it but it could def qualify.

@romdocitizen yup it was def a trench game back in the day lol digging through the cuhrayzee wiki actually reminded me it exists, seems like a good fit here & a cool game in general, i still kick myself for not tapping into it when it still had a niche.

@SimonDedalus ah yea so now we're getting somewhere... I've never heard of the cuhrayzee distinction but yea now that I'm looking through I can see where some of the choices for other lists I've read come from. let me try to lay out a some of my basic rules for what I'm trying to get at with this list from what I've read on the wiki you linked and my own thoughts:

- game needs to have a focus on melee combat. pretty obvious. I think there also needs to be a requirement for varied combat options, but perhaps not to the extent that cuhrayzee is asking for. I'm mainly talking about a distinction between light and heavy attacks, some combo pathways, launchers or aerial attacks, and perhaps an auxillary projectile component. I think an important distinction between this and cuhrayzee is that the latter presumes the games are actually good lol; they would have to be for people to invest significant amounts of time into them. I think there are bad CAGs, and that's sort of fine. I'm gonna be honest, I don't think the combat in god of war for instance is very good, but there is some attempted depth in the combat mechanics and there are other elements down the line that push it into CAG territory for me. mashing X for the combat falls more into hack 'n slash territory for me (GoW is sorta like that tbf but it's more bad design and less lack of options).

- the game should have enemy variety. this is huge and something I would definitely draw from cuhrayzee. enemy variety forces differences in approaches to various encounters, and that's something I would specify as a major element of CAGs.

- weapon/option variety. different characters with different playstyles, various weapons with different properties, etc.

- prominent boss fights. having unique boss encounters with their own mechanics is essential to the experience. obv not all examples are going to be good, and some may be gimmicky, but it's something I expect at least.

- action-adventure elements. this is where I differ from cuhrayzee I think. when you play devil may cry 3 or ninja gaiden black, you're not just fighting dudes the whole time, y'know? there's a focus on item retrieval, lock-and-key progression, simple puzzles, that kind of thing. I think a big part of this is that the game should be setpiece focused. at a hardcore level the combat takes precedence, but at a casual level or first time through there should be more than just endless combat hallways.

- stylish visuals/presentation/etc. that's something pulled from cuhrayzee for sure. not all games are going to be stylish to the same scale, but a particularly stylish presentation can shore up other weak points.

- mission structure/ranking system/metatextual feedback. the game should be "game-y" to some extent lol. it should provide you feedback on your performance outside the bounds of the world itself, usually through some way to dividing up objectives between separate chapters or missions.

now I don't think every game on the list needs to have every single one of these elements, or that they all need to have equal levels of each. I think there are some games that will favor separate parts (such as onimusha having heavy action-adventure elements but not having the deepest or most stylish combat, or something like no more heroes generally favoring stylish gameplay over enemy variety for the first two entries). and I think that's where I differ from cuhrayzee: I'm really just looking at games that draw from devil may cry in some way shape or form. I want dmc-likes lol. obviously that means something different for games since 2010 where the old RE-style adventure elements have been deprecated, but in return I think we have a wider array of action styles to choose from now. cuhrayzee seems more like a design philosophy if that makes sense, since it bridges games in other genres like vanquish or other perspectives like viewtiful joe. this isn't out of disrespect to those games, but I just don't consider them in the same mechanical view as I do games in the above list, even though they obviously share design elements between them.

also the stuff in the maybe pile (anything with a note on it) is all stuff I'm unsure of myself. I want the list to be expansive and have a mix of known and obscure titles, but at the same time I also wanted to delineate between titles that most people can agree on and titles that may be more controversial. anything in there I don't consider part of the "main" list, but if people were to underwrite any of those choices I would be happy to shift them to the main list, if that makes sense.

anyway the wiki you linked and the pastebin have given me a lot of good ideas on games to add, I'm gonna work through watching gameplay videos for some of these when I get a chance later tonight or tomorrow. thanks for all of this information!! I think it's really handy for getting a handle on what the list is trying to get across and comparing it to other schools of thought if that makes sense.

@romdocitizen yea I laid it out in the last comment but I think rankings or "metatextual feedback" in general is a useful trait in a CAG. combo counter, stylish meter, per-stage rankings, general prominent scoring etc. I think NMH does something interesting with how it doesn't necessarily do any of these but instead has a slots system that fits in with the game's aestheticization of random abject violence. I definitely don't think it's the deepest entry in the genre but I do agree that its timbre is certainly drawing from the more prominent entries on this list both in a slightly mocking way but also very earnestly (something that would become more apparent in the later games).

@Hot_Anarcocoa basically I think ZoE1 is overall slower, less stylish, has less enemy variety, fewer notable boss encounters, etc. I think it could maybe slot in as a proto-CAG, but the second one is so much closer to being a setpiece-driven highly stylistic action game with a wide variety of subweapons and attack options (not as deep as dmc or ngb obviously) and a greater focus on bosses with unique arenas and characteristics.

@pangburn yea yea that's a great outline of the elements at play, good ground for the genre criteria here. and yup like you're picking up cuhrayzee is more of a combat design grouping than a game grouping per se, which allows for games in very distinct lanes of 2D/3D or melee/shooter to be bridged together. "DMC-lites" is an apt term esp. with the increasingly popular view of DMC1 and what innovations it brought to the action-adventure table. for the longest time in order to be considered "DMC-lite" you had to be in the capcom diaspora or be aping what DMC4 did, which is p limiting. but def churn through those inclusions, i'll probably throw some more your way over the months, i run into random CAGs and proto-CAGs when i'm digging sometimes lol. also i should play a lot more of games in this lane because a decent chunk of these are really cool and having more intimate knowledge of this genre is needed.

the Family Guy video game for ps2

small update: added bayo 3, hi-fi rush, and transformers devastation (the latter I was convinced about thanks to GoufyGoggs' review). took furi out of the list; I played it last year and it's not really reminiscent of many of the other games on this list given how much it focuses on twin-stick shooter combat and how its melee is very limited without much ability for expression. added some stuff to the maybe section as well: legend of korra / tmnt mutants in manhattan (previously I had transformers standing in for all of these),. yaiba ngz, wanted dead, samurai jack battle through time, and marlow briggs

I'd somewhat argue for Kirby and the Forgotten Land (boss battles and 'witch time' style dodging mostly) to be included, but great list otherwise!