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[PS2] God Hand

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[PS2] God Hand

Unread postby keelhaul » 08 Apr 2009 02:34

I hope other people with insight share their opinions to aspects of the game they feel I've missed or not elaborated enough. Otherwise, for the most part, I think this is a good draft.

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I have a dream of an incredibly visceral 3D action game where I’m fighting off gangs of battle-hardened adversaries with a complex fighting mechanic and a blissful freedom of movement, doling out judgment to a rock soundtrack of Boris, Lightning Bolt, and Motörhead. Until this game is made, I guess games like Ninja Gaiden, Devil May Cry, and God Hand will have to do, and they do quite well.

God Hand, from the now dissolved Clover Studio, is a 3D action game that doesn’t quite allow the freedom of movement as the previous two games I mentioned, but still very much requires intense concentration and quick reflexes to handle and manipulate the action to your will. This is due to the game allowing just as many enemies to attack, and those enemies are just as merciless, if not more. Yet, even with inhibited movement, you are still given capable ability to avoid and maneuver in bobbing, sidestepping, somersaulting, and 180° turns. Certainly a more intimate affair, having to distribute damage usually as far as your limbs allow and moving within the range of a few yards. As much as I enjoy such a sense of motion from Ninja Gaiden, Devil May Cry, and the like, God Hand is a different beast entirely from those action games, more akin to 2D brawlers of yesteryear (Double Dragon, Streets of Rage), an evolution of such. Its sense of motion is a fierceness contained within the distance of dancing partners, and you had better touch up on your moves. Your dance instructor has no patience for the lame.

Your dance moves? Opposed to the combo memorizing of Devil May Cry and Ninja Gaiden, you use the attacks you’ve mapped. Bread-and-butter attacks are contained in the mapping of the triangle, square and x buttons. Square button attacks activate a list of 4-6 slotted attacks, which are activated subsequently when used in rapid succession. This may be a simpler mechanic compared to those games, but it is far from shallow. Crafting this chain of attacks is up to whatever your heart’s content. Want it fast and you’ll end up with uppercuts and jabs that briskly do decent amounts of damage. Want it powerful and you’ll end up with a slow chain of attacks to your risk. Though it may seem like a button-mashing concept, the true skill lies in your control of how much you press the button. Enemies will block and stop your attacks in their tracks, so you’ll need to use other moves like a guard break. Along with simple attacks and guard breaks, you have juggle moves, launch moves, charge moves, etc., offering you dozens of moves to obtain. And along with these moves are your roulette and god hand abilities. Roulettes being powerful, time-sensitive abilities from a wheel containing all the roulette abilities you’ve amassed and organized. Moves and roulettes are collected from enemies, chests, and the shop. Activating the god hand gives you temporary invincibility, speed, and power once your tension gauge has filled enough from dealing and being dealt damage. How you want to fight is entirely up to you, within the confines of the enemy’s skill of course.

I mention this obvious fact because compared to most action games of similar quality, becoming skillful in God Hand is so satisfying and necessary, since as soon as you start the game in the quintessential, dusty Western town, you’ll realize these enemies are most assuredly not fodder for the fire. Until you learn to fight, you will feel like a scrawny runt at a school run by bullies. Even when you do learn to hold your own and then some, your enemies will always feel like your equal, a definite threat every time you encounter them. They’re aggressive and intelligent, flying from one side of the board to where you are as a human shuriken, only to continue attacking you en masse (not to mention boss fights also come in multiples), even using teamwork. One guy will immediately crouch giving someone from behind a launching pad to flying kick your ass. Pretty cool stuff. In-depth combat mechanics and challenging opponents are what make this game such a pleasure to play. It is a thrilling joy to figure out their moves, getting a feel for their patterns, and adjusting your advances once you learn their ins and outs. What more could you ask for?

So it is no surprise that this is one of those games synonymous with difficulty. This difficulty is measured in two ways: at the onset and dynamically throughout. You have a choice of easy or normal, with hard unlocked after your first completion of normal mode. Once you begin, a meter in the bottom left corner will rise and fall in accordance to the damage you deal and how stylish you are at kicking ass. It fills, the meter levels and you’re granted with more risk and reward. The enemies become smarter and more aggressive and you’ll receive more gold at the end of the stage for the number of enemies you defeat at this difficulty. The difficulty is the badge of honor this game wears proudly to display how well balanced it is. The straightforward nature of God Hand in its lack of stage replays and superfluous stat collection is a blessing. No room for grinding, only for learning to wake the fuck up and get better.

If indeed you do start sucking, you’ll notice it in the long run, for you can only go so far in the game with a modicum of skill. You’re killing all your enemies at Level 1 difficulty? Your rewards will be diminished; thus you won’t be able to buy all the moves, abilities, and upgrades you want; thus having a lowlier character to that of a skillful player who kills at Level Die, the 4th and highest level to gain the most satisfying victories. If you’re unskilled and haven’t acquired the best moves and abilities to add to your arsenal, chances are the skill of the demons will rise to a height shadowing your puny ability. I imagine learning to actually fight then will be a rougher experience, wholly deserved. Also, never are you so spoiled with ability that you breeze through the game. The dynamic difficulty takes care of that. Just as it notices your inability, it notices your advanced ability and ratchets up the skill of your adversaries. Balanced, just the way it ought to be.

The game like all games is not without fault or blemish. The story is nothing of interest. You play Gene, a guy trying to help a girl in distress who gets his arm lopped off for his trouble. The god hand mysteriously replaces it and thus you and the psychotic, controlling girl are on this journey from one camp scene to the next in the vein of Saturday morning cartoon humor which falls largely flat save for a chuckle or two at how cringe inducing it is. The enemies remind me of Halo’s Grunts, embodiments of comic relief. Sorrowfully ugly and unendearing, yet stokes the hunger for violence quite nicely.

The appearance of the game is also equally poor: bland lackeys, gaudy bosses, drab and soulless environments, etc. Sparing enemy placement, level design isn’t spectacular. Sinking sands to button-mash yourself out of and moving platforms to time jumps for are as far as they reach, though the settings themselves allow for the fantastic fights to end in outrageous cinematic fashion. Being able to drunken style kick a guy into the post of a porch and watch the roof fall down on him is immensely gratifying.

As far as the fights, the game has an auto-lock function so your attacks land solely on the enemy of your choice, though when fighting two or more enemies at once, this function sometimes has trouble judging which character to direct you to. As a result you may sometimes spin towards a character you aren’t facing, breaking the momentum of the fight. In all the dozens of hours of playing this game, I’ve only encountered this problem no more than a handful of times, so it possibly isn’t as horrible as it sounds. Auto- anything sounds atrocious, outside of any context.

One final disparaging aspect: the team at Clover must have felt weak in the face of such engaging difficulty they had created, for they offer the player the option to play unimaginative casino games to earn gold. These mini-games are entirely unnecessary for I cannot imagine anyone playing this game and worrying about gold, since they would first have to worry about existing anywhere else other than the main menu screen. They already provide you with a fighting ring in which you practice moves on a programmable bot, experiment to discover a better chain with moves of your collection and of ones you have yet to buy, and enter matches for gold. You learn AND you earn money to get those moves you used in training. This is more than enough. Also, let me tell you this, if you continue to concern yourself with earning gold so to increase your health bar as a means to reach the other side of the screen INSTEAD of perfecting your violent repertoire, you are in for a prolonged agony in your futile existence. Last warning.

Shinji Mikami and Atsushi Inaba have moved on from Clover Studio and Capcom, having created Platinum Games. I had hope that Madworld would be the fruit of God Hand’s labor, though it seems to be a shallow experience, yet another victim of the Wii’s mantra for ease and accessibility in silly, gratuitous arm movements. Though Mikami and Hideki Kamiya seem to be taking what they learned from Devil May Cry to new territory in Platinum’s Bayonetta, it looks like I’ll have to wait for others inspired by fantastic fight scenes, passionate rock music, and overall general manliness to bring my fantasy further to fruition. God Hand was a wonderful experience on the way to that.
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keelhaul
 
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Unread postby icycalm » 10 Apr 2009 17:41

It is an okay review -- not bad if this is your first try. And it does a good job of describing the game, without getting too boring (though it does get boring in places). But it contains many awkward phrasings, some tedious repetitions, and quite a bit of vagueness, at least in the beginning.

Examples of awkward phrasing:

keelhaul wrote:but still very much requires intense concentration and quick reflexes to handle and manipulate the action to your will.


keelhaul wrote:Certainly a more intimate affair, having to distribute damage usually as far as your limbs allow and moving within the range of a few yards.


And hideous phrasing:

keelhaul wrote:Sinking sands to button-mash yourself out of and moving platforms to time jumps for are as far as they reach, though the settings themselves allow for the fantastic fights to end in outrageous cinematic fashion.


Vagueness:

keelhaul wrote:Its sense of motion is a fierceness contained within the distance of dancing partners, and you had better touch up on your moves. Your dance instructor has no patience for the lame.


Lollerific comment:

Your dance moves? Opposed to the combo memorizing of Devil May Cry and Ninja Gaiden


"Combo memorizing"? Have you even played these games?

More vagueness and useless generalizing:

keelhaul wrote:God Hand is a different beast entirely from those action games


Different in what way?

keelhaul wrote:more akin to 2D brawlers of yesteryear (Double Dragon, Streets of Rage), an evolution of such.


More akin in what way? This is a GameSpot-worthy comment.

And P.S., this is a very common mistake:

keelhaul wrote:I have a dream of an incredibly visceral 3D action game


By 'visceral' I take it you mean 'violent'. Here is what visceral means:

visceral |ˈvis(ə)rəl|
adjective
of or relating to the viscera : the visceral nervous system.
• relating to deep inward feelings rather than to the intellect : the voters' visceral fear of change.



So, overall, I'd say it's a decent stab at a review -- above average certainly. But you need to cut down on the fat, make sure that every criticism is backed up by explanation (IMMEDIATE explanation -- not explanation that will come after three paragraphs, or that the reader is supposed to work out for himself after having read the entire review), and work a LOT more on your phrasing, sentence composition and such.

You also picked a tough game to review. This is a very important game, and when I read a review of such a game I am really looking for a great deal of insight... You did a decent job, but in this case there is a great deal of room for improvement. If you were simply reviewing a DMC or God of War sequel my demands insight-wise would have been much lower.
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icycalm
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Unread postby keelhaul » 10 Apr 2009 20:55

Thanks, I appreciate you took the time to read and critique it. I'll certainly revise this review with your comments in mind.

Regarding the 'combo memorizing,' it wasn't the best choice of words. I wanted to compare the techniques of DMC/NG to God Hand's lack of such a list. In those other games, each weapon has techniques activated by actions fixed to certain buttons, whereas in GH you are given no such list of techniques and your attack buttons are completely mappable.

Also, I'll try to be clearer about the comparison of movement. As Dante and Ryu, you're able to run and jump with such great immediacy that you're capable of spanning a good distance around the enemy. Gene is not as capable of maneuvering with such speed nor can he even jump. His speed is instead found in the small dodges operated by the right analog stick.

And yeah, this is my first review. I also recently noticed LaserGun wrote his own GH review. I'll be reading that and comparing it to mine when I get a chance.
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