God Hand is a defensive beat-'em-up. That's not to say you can't run up and attack enemies whenever you want (you can try), but the game's bread-and-butter is juggling and launching enemies into other enemies and you need counter-hits and whiff-punishes to do this. An enemy that's just whiffed an attack can't dodge/block anything you do during the cool-down, so that's a good time to get in a juggle-move. Anything landed as a counter-hit (when you land an attack during an enemy's attack during gaps in their combos or before the hits land) will carry its full launch-properties and max juggle-height over. You'll want to launch enemies too because you're not surviving crowd-fights otherwise. Your last option is guard-breaks, which are unreactable at the peak of the game's dynamic-difficulty. You'll have to fish for them instead, which is completely unviable outside of 1 on 1 fights. It's a game that rewards patience and understanding, and it asks you to pay close attention to learn its systems on your own and expects you to go to the lab with the training-dummy. In a word, the game is 'inaccessible'.

The game is also by no means perfect. It's plagued by myriad cheesy-strategies. There's nothing stopping you from cancelling High Side Kicks as you lure enemies over 1 by 1, nothing stopping you from using Roulette moves to skip entire encounters, nothing stopping you from abusing Chain Yanker and Yes Man Kablaam to be fully stocked on tension to be invincible as often as possible, but you'll only be souring the experience by doing so.

I'm giving it a 5/5 because I am absolutely the target-audience, but also because I feel like even with its resurgence in popularity among a small niche from recent exposure it is still not appreciated in full for what it is. It will not cater to those who like the freedom of expression of Devil May Cry and the scattered sub-genres spawned from that release, but it is one of the premiere action titles ever made.