Vital Stats

Genre: Brawler
Players: 1
Online: None

Developer: Clover
Publisher: Capcom
ESRB Rating: T
Release Date: 11/18/2004

Platforms

• Game Cube
• Playstation 2

Viewtiful Joe 2 takes the core tenets of great brawlers and expands upon them, serving as a reminder that 20 years isn’t enough to sap innovation and fun from a genre. While the old school design philosophy might prove unappetizing to casual gamers, genre fans and the hardcore should appreciate the fresh take on brawler mechanics and discovering the internal logic that makes the game tick.

Henshin a go go, baby
In a rare synergy, the narrative and frame for Viewtiful Joe 2 play a meaningful role alongside the gameplay in defining the player’s agency in the world. The main characters, Joe and Silvia, are transported into movie reels where they duke it out with the movie’s villains and can exercise a bit of post-production editorial control.

The game’s story takes place across seven movie reels, each reminiscent of a significant movie meme like Jurassic park or Starship Troopers. While there’s never much more than lip service paid to the inspiring subject matter, there’s a pleasantly frequent change in scenery while you beat robots within an inch of their simulated lives.

Most of the actual narrative takes place between the reels as Joe and Silvia exchange poorly scripted banter with any NPC in arm’s reach, and a narrator offers up some third person limited omniscient clues about the paper-thin story. It sounds stupid, and it is, except everything in the game is so farcical that it’s pretty funny; when Joe battles a T-Rex dressed as mall security, you can let your brain flee the horror, or you can embrace it.

The English localization of the game is either slightly slipshod or a charming send up of the B grade translation efforts from the time when brawlers were a dominant genre. While the safe bet is on cost-efficient laziness, the whole game plays its ridiculous caricature of characters and narrative with a straight face, and it’s tempting to believe that a voice actor was once coached on the battle cry, “You are over!”

Candy Coating Complex Conceits
The story’s real strength, however, is how well it couches complex gameplay concepts in instantly familiar terms. Viewtiful Joe 2 has a startling amount of depth for a brawler. Players can increase the flow of the real time combat system, bring it to a crawl, capture attacks and repeat them for bonus damage, dynamically swap between two sets of attacks, and integrate various combinations of these abilities in the name of puzzle solving and administering beatings. However, instead of a thick manual to explain these abilities, the game couches these mechanics in terms of visual effects (VFX), using fast-forwarding, slow motion, replays, camera zoom, to make immediate intuitive sense of the mechanics.

The VFX system and movie metaphor lets the game leverage movie clichés for puzzle designs. Parts of the game are literally just waiting for a dramatic cue (i.e. a volcano on the verge of erupting), and a dose of slow motion adds just enough tension to push them over the edge. It’s a clever take on puzzle design that relies on manipulating the world’s rules around Joe and Silvia and then acting within those new rules. It’ll twist your brain occasionally if you’re accustomed to how agency works in most modern games, but mostly in a good way.

Unfortunately, the game’s movie-logic is unpredictably applied. For instance, the fast-forward power generates a wind that puts out some, but not all, of the fires in the game, and there’s no ready way to distinguish which are which ahead of time. This inconsistency makes some of the game’s puzzle solving feel like old school adventure gaming–you’re more trying to read the designer’s mind rather than trying to explore a well-defined problem space. On the bright side, Viewtiful Joe 2 also inherits the rewarding character of these kinds of puzzles, and most of the solutions feel clever and internally consistent instead of arbitrary–at least in retrospect.

Busting Heads. For Justice, I mean.
The game’s combat plays like a classic brawler at the beginning. The controls are precise and responsive, and the collision detection for combat doesn’t serve up any cheap hits or misses. The default button mapping on the Gamecube is a little wonky, but it can be edited.

However, as the VFX elements are added, the game gradually ratchets up the difficulty until opponents are lightning fast ninjas that virtually have to be fought in slow motion. The upshot is that using the VFX system is virtually mandatory. Use it and you’ll be successful and look awesome; ignore it for boring and frustrating gameplay.

Fortunately, using VFX just means temporarily draining a continuously replenishing bar. Completely draining the VFX bar results in a few seconds of disabled VFX powers, but VFX is otherwise a virtually unlimited resource. In fact, much of the depth of combat comes from employing just enough of the proper VFX at the right time to keep the bar above the zero point while maximally exploiting its tactical advantages.

Of course, gameplay doesn’t feel like tactical resource management. The experience is more like, “I kick ass in slow motion with a tight close-up.” The awesome thing about Viewtiful Joe 2’s combat system is that the sentiment is true.

Viewty
From a technical standpoint, the graphics in Viewtiful Joe 2 are nothing to write home about. The game is 3 years old next week, and the thick-lined cell shading can only do so much to hide the fact that the game isn’t pushing very many polygons.

Critical caveat: who cares?

The potent comic book/cartoony aesthetic in viewtiful Joe trumps most niggling complaints that could be raised about the graphical technology used to create that aesthetic. In the same way that Pac Man has all the graphical power that it’ll ever need, Viewtiful Joe 2 provides visual panache without ever dropping a single frame from the silky smooth combat. The only place it falters is in some pretty shameless clipping errors during cutscenes–dramatically flapping capes are not supposed to whip through your girlfriend’s head.

The music doesn’t exactly stick to the game’s movie conceit. Most of it sounds like a hard rock or electronic mix of music appropriate to the film’s setting, though the occasional bombastic orchestra could belong in a movie. That said, the music is varied and driving enough to fit a brawler comfortably, and this breech of the conceit is more a concession to the video game medium than a misstep on the part of the composer.

Happy Ending
While Viewtiful Joe 2 could be mistaken for a simple brawler at a glance, much of the gameplay relies on either a deep understanding of the VFX mechanics or familiarity with gaming tropes. The puzzles, combined with the game’s peak difficulty level, demand an unusual amount of patience and thought from a brawler.

These traits may make the game uniquely entertaining and engaging for the hardcore player, but genre fans should be aware that this game mixes up the brawler formula (the only mindless action in this game is squirreled away in unlockables), and casual players may want to look elsewhere for their gaming fix.

What It Costs: $9.99

What It’s Worth:

• To The Hardcore: $30
• To The Genre Fan: $30
• To The Casual: $5