Viewtiful Joe

[JaySevenZero]

Here is where you can leave your thoughts regarding Viewtiful Joe for possible inclusion in the podcast when it's recorded.

[seansthomas]

I don't often become one of those gamers that swear, curse, throw a controller across a room or take a recent purchase to a trade in shop out of spite, but Viewtiful Joe was the game that did that to me.

I had found it pretty hard from the off but the reviews and my love of Okami had caused me to persist. The brawling platforming was colourful, tight and rewarding for the most part. Every frame looked stunning and I'd gradually felt more and more of a total kick ass as the game progressed.

That was, until THAT boss rush section.

Well, I'd just like to publicly extend my middle finger to that tiresome, game ending part of the title right now. What on earth were they thinking?!

Boss rushes are generally a terrible idea at the best of times. You've beaten them all once before, so a return either cheapens the earlier encounter or becomes a dull affair. But this one was grossly unfair and offered no ability to save between them individually from what I recall. I could often beat 3 or 4 of them in a sequence but struggled to make it to the bitter end.

I tried and tried for a fortnight, until the anger, frustration, lack of tears left to cry and sheer sense of futility overwhelmed me. I returned a decade later to give it another go but you can imagine how well that went...

So Viewtiful Joe: I wanted to love you. I put the effort in. Maybe I wasn't good enough for you. Maybe you could have met me halfway. But, ultimately, screw you Joe. It's not me; it's you.

(Played this on PS2 btw in case there were differences to the GC original this may explain)

[Ben77000000]

Having only played a handful of Nintendo 64 games before graduating to the Gamecube as an impressionable 14 year old, my gaming repertoire was somewhat limited upon my first encounter with Viewtiful Joe. Not yet considering myself an adult, I opted for the game's 'kids' difficulty and, before long, its stylised visuals, infectious attitude and thrilling mechanics had utterly won me over. Several playthroughs later, I was content to hold Viewtiful Joe as my all-time favourite video game.

A decade passed with the nostalgia of my first few experiences rendering the game's pole position in my top ten untouchable. As time passed though, I began to notice that Viewtiful Joe had something of a reputation for being profoundly difficult, one which I could hardly reconcile with my memories of it. In my 20s, my curiosity piqued and I decided to give it another go, to see if I had perhaps been something of a Viewtiful Joe prodigy in my teenage years. With adolescence behind me, I opted this time for the Adults difficulty and realised shortly after the appearance of the helicopter that the title's notoriously punishing reputation was well-deserved. Rather than frustration taking hold however, the intricacy of the mechanics had me falling in love with the game all over again, this time the substantial difficulty forcing me to become intimately familiar with the full range of Joe's abilities.

It was somewhere around my 24th attempt at Fire Leo that I had an epiphany. After having punched the fallen rocks at mach speed in order to set Joe aflame so that he could pierce the fiery defense of the otherwise impenetrable seven foot lion that was barreling towards me on all fours, I realised that in the years that had passed since first touching this title, no other game had offered a moment as intense as this. Instances like these have made the third dimension feel utterly superfluous in all action games I've played since, and the game remains my absolute favourite. While Hideki Kamiya has built his career on titles that reward the player for performing with style, I truly feel that he will never again make a game as cool as Viewtiful Joe.

[MCraiG]

Viewtiful Joe stuck out to me because of it's zany-ness, it's a brightly coloured game, often chaotic, difficult if you don't know what you are doing but marvellous to watch in the hands of a skilled player. What surprised me most when years later I developed a more keen interest in video game developers and directors and realised that the same person responsible for Viewtiful Joe also created some of my other all-time favourites: The Resident Evil and Bayonetta series. Hats off to Hideki Kamiya. Man's a bloody genius.

[Alex79]

I first chanced upon Viewtiful Joe whilst browsing a long dead local independent game store not all that long after it was released. They had a copy on the GameCube for £20 and the cover art along with the screen shots on the back sold it to me. I'd not even heard of the game before then. It turned out to be one of the best games on the system. Upon loading it I fell in love immediately with the graphics and the comic book stylings which brought amount memories of Sega's Comix Zone.

The gameplay was huge amounts of fun and the more I played the more depth to the combat was revealed as I upgraded and bought new moves. The speeding up and slowing of time was something I'm not sure I had ever seen before in a game - although I'm sure it wouldn't have been the first. I found myself relying quite heavily on a zoomed in slowed down bicycle kick type move which demolished almost any enemy. The game was so clever though, slowing down the cowboys bullets to kick back to them, the speeding up the hovering fan platforms to reach higher ground, manipulating time to get the bus over the gap - it really was so much fun.

Alas, the game had a few insane difficulty spikes, and I'm not ashamed to say I later restarted the game on 'kids' difficulty which didn't seem particularly easier, you just got more lives!

Although I own the sequel it's a game I've not got around to playing yet, but I did play the first one again fairly recently and was pleased to see it looked as gorgeous as ever. When you have such stylised graphics they never really age. Brief mention goes to the fantastic Nintendo DS Viewtiful Joe game - equally as fun as it's older brothers, and an excellent level based around Resident Evil!

Viewtiful Joe though - if you want a hard as nails brawler with some very clever game mechanics you can't really go wrong with this. Great graphics, fun gameplay and some bone-crunching sound effects. Go play it now!

THREE WORD REVIEW: Henshin Agogo Baby!

[Buzzthebatgirl]

Saw the shout out on TwitterTwitter so I came a running!!

Viewtiful Joe is one of those games I’d originally seen and went - “looks okay but meh not for me”. Oh boy was I wrong! Almost 4 years after falling into the rabbit hole that is Viewtiful Joe, I co-run ViewtifulDAClub and keep the Joe love a-running! However I’m getting head of myself (as usual), so I should start at the beginning.

I kept bumping into it at several points along the years, but nothing clicked until I’d played a demo of Project P-100 (as it was known on the title screen, it since became known as The Wonderful 101) on Wii U at a Gaming Con around 2012. Playing that game made me hungry to see more of that odd art and gameplay style.

Queue me picking up a copy of Viewtiful Joe 2 for Gamecube at a random London Con, trying it for a bit, getting hopeless lost in it’s mechanics and popping it back onto my Gamecube games rack to gather dust.

Time past and The Wonderful 101 came out and upon completion I was HUNGRY for more fast pasted Platinum Games action. Bayonetta 2 wasn’t out at the time (and playing the demo at Cons weirdly made me motion sick), so I went back to Viewtiful Joe 2.

Suddenly everything made sense. Those puzzles that baffled me, the moves and combos that previously had me questioning the controls - suddenly it all made sense. It was like a light had gone on in a dark room. I played it, played it and played it some more, I just couldn’t get enough of it. Had no idea what was going on, but that didn’t matter, I was having a LOT of fun. Well except for The 36 Chambers side quest - hate those, they can go to hell.

It wasn’t until later - much later, did I even come across a copy of the first Viewtiful Joe game. I’d watched through the Anime when it was on Crunchyroll for a time, played Viewtiful Joe Red Hot Rumble, played around with the DS game Viewtiful Joe Double Trouble but had yet to play the first game. Yeah I tend to do things in a weird order happens all the time with me. I thought I was going to be in for a fun ride like with the other games…boy was I wrong.

THAT helicopter made me restart the first stage at least four times and if there’s anything that rubs me up the wrong way, it’s forcing me to do something over and over again. Rage inducing, controller throwing and swearing were all things that came from my first play-through of the first game. It was a self-inflicted Adults mode play (so not recommended to anyone on their first play) but damn it’s hard. The stages are hard, health is scarce, enemies just want to kill you everywhere and those bosses don’t hold back any punches. Just when I thought I had the game sussed that two word road block appeared - Fire Leo.

Six months it took me to finally down that fiery hot headed devil dog. SIX MONTHS ON ONE STAGE. Okay in my defence it’s a full on Boss Rush, then Fire Leo, but still SIX MONTHS. At one point I left my Wii (I was playing the Gamecube version) running overnight so I could take on Fire Leo fresh in the morning, but that tactic didn’t work. I had friends come around and take turns on the Boss Rush only for the team to get destroyed by Another Joe (the boss before Fire Leo) again and again. Beating Fire Leo is a miracle at first - heck getting to him is a challenge in itself. However that feeling of beating him - forget getting married, having children, buying your house - beating Fire Leo is a life achievement. You WILL want to post that one of Facebook.

This is the first SINGLE player game I’ve come across with such war stories attached to it. Everyone has a story with Fire Leo and or the Helicopters or even Verdies (green flying enemies with jetpacks and bombs). Personally I hate Gelbies (and the variations of) as they can and will throw stuff at you off screen. The game is hard as nails and it blooming well knows it too. However that’s what makes it feel so good to play. When you beat that Boss/stage you really do FEEL like a hero, you ARE the hero, you are the BEST, you are INVINCIBLE.

Rage inducing moments and all.

[Michiel K]

Fantastic post, Buzzthebatgirl (and others)! I'm curious, did you play on the Kids or Adults difficulty level? I suspect the latter, going by your description and I couldn't imagine going through all that in my 1st playthrough!

[Buzzthebatgirl]

Fantastic post, Buzzthebatgirl (and others)! I'm curious, did you play on the Kids or Adults difficulty level? I suspect the latter, going by your description and I couldn't imagine going through all that in my 1st playthrough!

I played Adults difficultly on my first playthroughs because my gaming pride was at stake and of course pride comes before a fall XD

The only time I've ever played Kids was when I wanted to play through Alastor's story for fun and when my niece wanted to play. No way was I subjecting my niece to the torture of Adults mode as her first exposure to the game.

Twitch Steamer Tminator64 (or Tman64 for short) speedruns the game. IIRC his Kids mode run best is about 32 minutes :0

[Michiel K]

:O

I really needed that 1st run on Kids, just to get familiar with the mechanics. No shame in my game.

[KSubzero1000]

Viewtiful Joe is a bit of a mark of shame within my gaming repertoire, because despite loving mechanically deep and demanding action games and holding Clover / Platinum in such high regard, I found the game to be an incredibly frustrating experience that I just couldn't force myself to finish. I enjoyed the style, the combat and the mechanics themselves a lot. But the encounter design felt really cheap and after banging my head against a wall during the giant rocket tunnel section and dying over and over again to what felt like thoroughly unfair deaths, I did something I've rarely ever done before or since: I gave up halfway through. Perhaps it simply wasn't for me.

Some of these posts are making me reconsider, though! This seems like a game I'd really want to love, on paper at least.

[raisinbman]

I don’t have much to contribute here, and I never made it very far in these, but boy do I love Joe. His ending in TVC encapsulates his entire character – he’s sad he can’t hang out with the super sentai crew anymore! Someday, I hope to go back to the various games, seems like I really missed the boat here with this and TVC.