I'm not sick of God Hand yet so for my third play through I decided to do a Kick Me Sign run—a challenge run in which you can never activate your tension meter, and you can never use your special roulette abilities. It's called a "kick me sign" run because in one of the early stages you get a kick me sign slapped on your back, and it drops off when you use those special abilities—I was surprised to learn that the sign is persistent throughout levels if you don't use your abilities. In fact you are rewarded with unlockable music tracks after completing it, though the game never explicitly mentions this run as far as I know, which is an interesting bit of design in itself. You're never technically locked away from using the special attacks either, so there's a level of self control to it. You can even activate the roulette ability to slow down time and make your character face an enemy, and then back out of the menu without selecting a special ability. I learned the hard way to be extra careful about this—if you accidentally hit the special attack and then let yourself get killed so you can start the level over, you'll actually have to go back to whatever your latest save was to get the sign back on your back.

My experience for the KMS run was surprisingly close to my prior play throughs. It's simple enough to live without "Unleashed Mode," which turns Gene invincible and lets you wail away at an enemy while your Tension Meter ticks down; in lieu of that, you're just forced to put more time and damage into enemies, and to be more careful and consistent about dodging. In other words, you're forced to play better. I felt the most pain without that ability fighting the enemies that were really good at dodging you—Tiger Joe, Devil Hand—since the Unleashed Mode gives you a bit of a breather and a level of essentially guaranteed damage. I also missed this mode when fighting the demons, since they tend to run away from you and it can be very annoying to chase them down.

The inability to use roulette moves are a different story, and really highlighted the gaps in Gene's toolbox. For one thing, there's no gap closing technique, no projectile, no easy crowd control move—without these in your back pocket, it can make certain encounters pretty annoying and hard to deal with at the higher difficulty levels. I eventually learned to rely on juggling enemies and separating them to keep things under control. I still don't have a great solution to when the game sends a whip wielder plus a couple of "leader" characters at you (the tall enemies that have some kind of gimmick—axe wielders, knife throwers, etc.). The whip wielder tends to hide behind these leader types, so your best bet is to do some hit and run attacks, but since they're cloistered together it's just as likely Gene will tackle the wrong enemy, and that's a tedious, fraught way to play already. I wish there was a larger variety of crowd control techniques too—there's the round house kick and the quicker, weaker round kick move, but your best move is to juggle enemies and launch them, which takes a lot of patience and skill to pull off when you're being attacked by multiple enemies.

I had a lot of fun with this challenge run but would be lying if I didn't say I found myself frustrated with certain limitations, but this is the first time, after two complete playthroughs, that I have felt that way about God Hand. I wouldn't recommend this challenge run necessarily unless you're like me and are trying to squeeze as much juice out of the game as possible. The in-game reward doesn't feel worth it, and the game feels designed to be played with the special abilities. But I might not completely feel that way once I finish the game on hard mode...

I'm still not sick of God Hand after finishing the run. After my third playthrough, I just wish I was better at God Hand. This time I managed to stay between second and third difficulty for most of the game, with dips into the fourth difficulty mode, but I felt really challenged in third difficulty already...