I was curious about some of Clover/Platinum’s games, because Okami is so great and a lot fo people have nice things to say about Viewtiful Joe. I should have gone with the Gamecube one, but I just felt the DS one would be more accessible and cheaper. Turns out it’s not very good, so either it’s too watered down or the fundamentals of the series are not for me.

The first thing is, it’s confusing. I did’t know what I was doing or how I was doing it, both in plot and mechanics. They keep introducing new moves for you to execute using the touchscreen, but they’re universally awful, hard to activate with the tetchy controls and of dubious usefulness except when forced into a puzzle-type situation. I didn’t know any of the characters nor was I properly introduced to them in the game.

It seems to be favouring presentation over substance, with a silly slideshow feature in cutscenes, and a persistent camera UI overlay on the action screen which is pointless. The heavily cel-shaded style doesn’t really work and the graphics end up muddy.

I chose the easy mode because I didn’t want to struggle through combat on top of struggling with the mechanics, and things came together for me more as I went through. I should say it’s a 2D beat-em-up, with upgrades to your fighting moves purchaseable between stages and light puzzle-platforming elements. I found a technique to get through battles and didn’t vary much all the way through, which probably wouldn’t work in hard mode, but I didn’t want to put in the effort to master it. I just wasn’t invested enough. The combat system seems robust enough though.

So there’s a lot of weird design stuff to this game that didn’t gel with me. The touchscreen stuff was implemented pretty incompetently, and the characters, after my initial bafflement, were just kinda bland and cliche. It was a little amusing to fight bosses based on Robocop and Edward Scissorhands. But is it a movie? Or real life in a movie theme park? Or what? There’s a film MacGuffin, or something… I’m glad I played on easy though, it would have been too frustrating otherwise and I did want to keep going. Can’t really recommend it though, it didn’t win me over.