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dkirschner's Viewtiful Joe 2 (PS2)
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| [June 13, 2011 06:13:33 AM]
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Pretty much finished this yesterday. I played the first Viewtiful Joe some years ago and this one was exactly like I remember the other one being, except you have two characters (Joe and his girlfriend, Sylvia) to swap between. I almost exclusively used Joe except when I needed Sylvia for a puzzle or for enemies I needed to keep range from.
Viewtiful Joe started off really fun, then just got kinda tedious. I started the game on Adult setting, as opposed to Kids. Apparently this isn't Easy/Normal or even Normal/Hard, but Hard/WTF are you thinking. After playing through almost 2 levels and finding the last boss of level 2 impossible on WTF are you thinking mode, I started the game over on Kids. In Kids mode you have about double the HP, and I'm not sure if bosses/enemies have less health/hit softer. But double HP really helps!
The gimmick of Viewtiful Joe is that you can play with time. Your moves include: Slow Speed, Zoom In, Mach Speed (Joe only), and Triple Take (repeats an action 3 times; Sylvia only). Use these in combination with punches and kicks, and basically take out wave after wave after wave of increasingly annoying enemies. Boss fights are fun, punishing for sure, but forces you to adapt, which I like, although sadly I couldn't hack it at the end, got tired of trying and whatnot, and just YouTubed the last boss after I tried him a few times.
The one thing I really liked about Viewtiful Joe 2 were the puzzles. I don't remember many puzzles in the first game, but this one had a lot, and you had to think and use your powers to solve them. Many also involved some tricky platforming, which I liked less than the thinking, but again, forced me to learn and perform, and I can't say it wasn't rewarding. A couple didn't make any sense, and there's no way I would have guessed the solution without a walkthrough, but most I could figure out after a while.
Level 6 was particularly stupid. In it, you have to re-fight every prior boss. Why? I dunno. I already killed those bosses. I don't want to fight them again. Viewtiful Joe also recycled mini-bosses like nobody's business. Another thing that sucks about this game is the voice quality. They were going for some sort of stereotypical cinema announcer type voice effect for everything, but it sounded like they recorded in a box with echo effects on. I couldn't understand hardly anything the bosses said. That made the story seem more pointless than it was (evil villain steals some Oscars; go find them all). That's why I ended up being frustrated and just skipping the effort of the final boss. I didn't care at all by then, and had gotten tired of Mach Speed + Zoom In + Kick/Punch over and over.
VJ2 could have done a much better job incorporating both Joe and Sylvia into the gameplay, especially by giving them more unique powers. The only difference between them that I could tell was Joe can use Mach Speed and resist fire vs Sylvia can do Triple Takes and resist electricity. And Sylvia shoots a lazer gun. A couple early puzzles hinted at the potential here for character-swapping. For example, at one point there were 3 torches that needed to be lit. You light torches by taking Joe into Mach Speed, and he gets on fire when he attacks real fast. So attack the torch and light it. Then since there's 3 of them, the first goes out when you hit the second one. The solution then is to get Joe, light him on fire, switch to Sylvia (she stays lit on fire), then Triple Take kick the torches, lighting all 3 simultaneously. It was smart. There were a few like that in the early levels, but none later.
I also found a fun glitch that let me get infinite Viewtifuls (points to spend on upgrading abilities), so I exploited that and upgraded everything by level 4 or 5 (of 7). That's Viewtiful Joe. It's fast, it's fun for a while until it gets repetitive, but there's not a lot for me to care about there.
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dkirschner's Viewtiful Joe 2 (PS2)
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Current Status: Finished playing
GameLog started on: Thursday 9 June, 2011
GameLog closed on: Sunday 12 June, 2011 |
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