Welcome to The Top Shelf, a weekly feature wherein I sort through my extensive PS2 collection for the diamonds in the rough. My goal here is to narrow down a library of 185 games to a svelte 44: the number of spaces on my bookshelf set aside for my PS2 collection. That means a whole lot of vetting and a whole lot of science that needs to be done - and here in the second round, that means narrowing our laser focus to one game per week (at least). Be sure to check out the Case File Repository for more details and a full list of games/links!
Extra Note: We've entered Shelftember! In this much-vaunted month, we will be processing one of the second round entries every day. I'll be spending one hour apiece with each game - inspired by DanielKempster's backlog-clearing series "An Hour With..." - and determining its fate from there.
This was going to be a difficult nut to crack. I'm not just talking about the notorious difficulty of Clover Studio's God Hand which - like a certain other Japanese phenomenon - is more about rewarding patience and learning from mistakes than it is explicitly out to make you suffer. More that, God Hand and I have never really seen eye to eye. I like its gameplay, I love its dumb humor, I'm into the whole supernatural western angle; it's just that I've never been able to summon the patience to get through it. And, after starting it for what is perhaps the third time, I realise how criminal that might have been.
God Hand is the brainchild of Shinji Mikami, the creative lead of the first Resident Evil game and producer of its sequels, as well as designer/director for underrated games like Goof Troop, P.N.03, and Vanquish (and the maybe rated-more-than-fairly-enough The Evil Within), and his protégé Hiroki Kato, who directed Code Veronica on Mikami's behalf but later left the games industry to become a farmer of all things after assisting Mikami on God Hand and Vanquish. Clover Studio, of course, is the legendary short-lived Capcom-affiliated company that managed to produce the Viewtiful Joe games and Okami in its brief time. God Hand sits in the nexus of these two enormous forces for good in the Japanese game industry, which is partly why it remained a sore spot that I couldn't get into it. It features Gene, wielder of the titular limb, and his partner Olivia as they roll into a Wild West town (or at least one heavily inspired by Westerns) filled with demons. As the God Hand is the most effective weapon against them, Gene takes it upon himself to rescue the innocent townspeople from various flamboyant villains, taking the fight to the Four Devas: a quartet of powerful foes attempting to resurrect their Demon King, Angra. Gene mostly does this by punching enemies, kicking them in the balls, throwing explosive barrels at them, stomping on their prone forms over and over or relying on the temporary boost that comes with an unleashed God Hand for an expedient ass-whuppin'. It's a 3D brawler, in so many words, and sits somewhere between Final Fight and a character action game in the Devil May Cry or Bayonetta vein. Between stages, the player can also pick up new techniques and bind them to the face buttons as well as new "roulette" skills that give you a finite amount of powerful attacks you can fall back on when the chips are down, or you can simply spend that cash on restoring Gene's health for a fresh start on the battles to come.
I quietly side-stepped (I learned how to do that in this game, incidentally! It super helps!) the whole Souls comparison thing before because that's the sort of observation that gets you mocked on a Twitter bot account, but I'm realising how prevalent my experience with that series is to this particular attempt to understand God Hand's appeal. The last time I took a swing at God Hand it was shortly before I made the switch to the PlayStation 3 sometime around 2009, after I'd embarked on a mini-version of what I'm doing here: playing through a stack of PS2 games I'd never got around to, or had always meant to complete, before I moved onto the bigger and brighter affairs awaiting on Sony's new console. God Hand was one of those games, and as always I bounced off it tout de suite because I'm a wuss who can't seem to get through one demon fight without a spectacular demise, even on Easy difficulty. Naturally, one of the first games I played for PS3 was Demon's Souls - along with a few other exclusive JRPGs that had been piling up on the system, the horrific reputation of Demon's Souls was a large part of why I wanted to move up a generation - and with it came important lessons such as the virtue of patience even in a real-time action game, never being reckless and biting off more than you chew when there are more cowardly and sensible options available, and taking the time to study every technique and opportunity at your disposal in case you need them, from guard-breakers to evasive dodges to enemy knock-backs to scanning the environment for any objects or hazards that can do your work for you.
I honestly expected this edition of The Top Shelf to go down like Metal Arms: I'd play a game everyone seems to love, and then shrug my shoulders after giving it the old college try with no luck and no desire to continue, ready to accept the rationalization that we don't always agree with the vox populi and don't always have to. Instead, even though the game quickly brutalized me once again, I feel like I'm a little more prepared for what it demands of the player. I would say its jokey attitude and frantic guitar music, while very much core to what God Hand is all about, can also mislead newcomers: it's not a game that you shouldn't take seriously, because it'll will just punish you over and over if you throw yourself into fights like the giddy, enthusiastic idiot Gene is. Treat it like a veteran fighter game partner who's ready to have fun, even if that fun initially comes at your expense with a chain of embarrassing failures. It ultimately wants you to have a good time as well, but only after you get on its level; it has no desire to pull any of its punches even for your sake.
Result: Progresses to the Final Round.
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