Pretty much every other action video game ever made wants their characters to be as cool as possible and to fight as effortlessly as possible. The first thing God Hand does is make Gene grovel on the floor, and then drops you in the middle of it with a really average skillset. I think where a lot of people go wrong (or went wrong, I guess, it's so much less common now) is they try to play the game as if Gene is Dante from the get-go. The God Hand and Roulette moves give him a lil bit of Dante Juice but they're also limited enough that you have to put at least some thought into when you want to spend them, and they're dialed in enough that they usually won't save you from your bigger mistakes.
The really big fork in people's experiences, I think, is if they figure out Gene's latent specials. He has multiple launchers just naturally in his skillset (in a real old-school fashion, they're given a plain descriptive section in the manual but are mentioned nowhere else), which take a bit of getting used to but once utilised break the game wide open. When I watched Giant Bomb play this game there were moments when they'd accidentally do the axe kick or shoryuken and be all "how the hell did you do that?!" but never investigate it, and they beat the game mostly relying on poorly optimised Square combos and careful play. Nothing wrong with that of course, but there's so much more to God Hand once you start using them. Suddenly you go from these careful fights trying to split people up or focus on one guy to being an absolute launch goblin running around trying to pick fights with 4 people at once because you know you can use at least one of them as a living projectile. You can start digging real deep and looking at stuff like dodge-cancelling (which is essential on Hard mode) or same-hand attacks comboing into each other faster but it's the launchers that really set the stage for some ridiculous nonsense.
Also holy shit the right stick dodge mechanic's so good? Why have other games not copied this? Who cares about controlling the camera action games have never had good ones anyway just give me that sweet, sweet multidirectional dodge again
The really big fork in people's experiences, I think, is if they figure out Gene's latent specials. He has multiple launchers just naturally in his skillset (in a real old-school fashion, they're given a plain descriptive section in the manual but are mentioned nowhere else), which take a bit of getting used to but once utilised break the game wide open. When I watched Giant Bomb play this game there were moments when they'd accidentally do the axe kick or shoryuken and be all "how the hell did you do that?!" but never investigate it, and they beat the game mostly relying on poorly optimised Square combos and careful play. Nothing wrong with that of course, but there's so much more to God Hand once you start using them. Suddenly you go from these careful fights trying to split people up or focus on one guy to being an absolute launch goblin running around trying to pick fights with 4 people at once because you know you can use at least one of them as a living projectile. You can start digging real deep and looking at stuff like dodge-cancelling (which is essential on Hard mode) or same-hand attacks comboing into each other faster but it's the launchers that really set the stage for some ridiculous nonsense.
Also holy shit the right stick dodge mechanic's so good? Why have other games not copied this? Who cares about controlling the camera action games have never had good ones anyway just give me that sweet, sweet multidirectional dodge again