I coincidentally happened to play this a few days after playing Sin & Punishment for the first time. These are the same fucking game. Yeah okay, one's a rail shooter and the other is a rhythm game, but let's look past the superficiality of "they look and play completely different". Released within a year of each other, amateurish 90s anime dub included, they're heartfelt, passionate spins on their genres in the most ridiculous ways possible. They're each like 1-2 hours long with a nice arcade tightness, and yet that 2 hours is jam-packed with setting after setting and fight after fight. Uncontainable fever dreams. Oh, and you'll be grooving hard to both.

Seriously, the soundtrack here is incredible. It's all just one band? And yet they genre-hop like nobody's business. Does Eurobeat even normally have guitars? The answer to that question of course being: Fuck you, this is a Gitaroo, they're not even remotely the same thing. The band here, COIL, (no, not the one that did "The Ape of Naples") completely understands that, and it's easy to believe that they've become one with the Gitaroo and are the coil pickups facilitating the fucking lightning beams shooting out of the thing. One of the songs here is literally just... Just. The Radiohead song. That song fucking owns.

Gitaroo Man's ONE flaw is that it has too much confidence in the Dualshock 2. That controller fucking sucks and tilting the stick even just a couple millimetres will ruin any inputs here. After like an hour of struggling on the final boss, I booted up PCSX2 (which has recently had some of its input lag fixed? cool) and beat it first try, no issues, on an actually good controller. I read online a bit and saw people having more success plugging in a Dualshock 1 too. Maybe they should've shipped a plastic Gitaroo.

I gave Sin & Punishment a 4.5 too but honestly it's tentative and shorthand for "I think it's fucking amazing but I don't know exactly how it'll hold up for me on replays". Just know that these are the best kind of game. I wish I had a dog that could turn into a boombox.

Edit: Also Master Mode is ridiculous LMAO it's fun though
Edit 2: Upon further reflection yeah this is one of the best games I've ever played. Also I may have unfairly trashed the Dualshock 2 a good amount, it may have just been my setup or me having to get used to using it for this game specifically

i took my copy to a video game store and they cleaned the disc properly and it worked perfectly after that so lol

gitaroo man is so bizarre and weird but, like, in the absolute best way possible. the story is nonsense but so heartwarming and charming and surreal you kinda have to fall in love with it. mechanically it plays unlike any other rhythm game i've seen, while also using an easily understandable and unique system when it comes to playing in time with the music. and what incredible music it is.

so much of this game is about the art style and presentation, though, and it has one of my favourite overall aesthetics of any game. i don't know what it is about this game's look but it just scratches an itch i never knew i had. all the elements work in tandem with each other to form one of the tightest, most cohesive visions i have ever seen a game put out, and it concludes with one of the greatest endings to a rhythm game perhaps ever put to disc. i cannot wait to give master's play a full shot, and to listen to the soundtrack every day until i die.