the best Nintendo exclusive ever made, no others can't cook hard like Itagaki did
fucking peak, I simultaneously can and can't believe this game was ravished so critically in its time. Like, did we even play the same game???? I honestly booted this game up as a joke since my Wii U was plugged in for shovel knight, and ended up getting really invested to the point of playing through the whole thing.
The narrative is pretty much a bonafide example of a japanese developer making a western-leaning action plot, and I mean that in only the best ways. There's tons of political jargon and inter-continental relation talk that borders that fine line between advancing the plot in a sensible way while still sounding complicated and serious. The cast of characters all have their own exaggerated morals and views of the world alongside their borderline tangential relationship to our protagonist where things feel personal between them but never really established nor developed any further. There's all the action setpieces you'd expect like puching through a jail full of cartoonishly insane tenants, blasting helicopters singlehandedly in your generic western battlefield, going through a house-of-the-dead-ass hospital filled with zombies, going through the cool japan castle level filled with cyborg ninjas, snowy mountains complete with a crazy vehicle segment, this game has it ALL. Instead of having anything tongue-in-cheek about how absurd that some shirtless dude with a gun and a sword and his crew of generic mechanically-enhanced supersoldiers can make it through all this insanity, the game plays everything dead fucking straight. There's not a hint of irony going on about this overly complex and flashy plot that mostly amounts to the same generic action movie tropes, and I ate up every goddamn second of it and lost my shit at every crazy moment the game threw at me. If you are a fan of like the Metal Gear series, the Ace Combat series, Resident Evils 4-6 in particular, or pretty much any Clover/Platinum game or Suda51 action title, you probably already know exactly what kind of vibe this games going for and will likely hella fuck with it just as much as I did.
If this game was just a goofy stupid setpiecy title that'd be one thing, but the actual gameplay is really fucking solid too! Yeah, the game definitely looks and runs more like an xbox 360 game from 2008 than a AAA Wii U title from 2015 (not really like there's much of a difference between the two in the first place), but honestly I do not give a singular shit about graphics and even found plenty of parts to look really nice regardless. The game is directed by our boy Tomonobu Itagaki, and while that sounds like a pretty red flag for me personally given how much Ninja Gaiden Sigma PTSD I still suffer from, in this game he was able to adapt his Itagaki-isms to a way where it's not total cock and ball torture to push through. In this game you have a gun to shoot things and play like a cover shooter, a sword to combo people in melee combat, and extra moves like grenade throwing and dash sliding for extra options for mobility and offense. I noticed while playing that I was doing everything I could to get from one battle sequence to the other because I found the combat that engaging, which isn't even something I do for some fully-blown character action games. The game and its levels are definitely designed in a way where while you CAN just focus on one over the other and either play the game entirely like Gears of War or like Ninja Gaiden, it's at its peak when you stay on your toes and utilize each weapon equally. I found the most fun in focusing on melee for primarily killing people and using the guns only for particularly long-distance targets that I'd die trying to run to, or to occasionally use in order to thin out crowded rooms a bit before running in like a lunatic with a knife. Hitting and killing people with melee in particular earns you meter which can be spent on activating a super mode that makes you mostly invulnerable while active and gives a heavy melee buff, and you can even activate it during scripted enemy attack sequences which means at any time you can have a panic button if things start going south. The bosses are also really fun and each one serves as a pretty different test of each of your different skills (even if some of the later game bosses get pretty cheap with instant kill attacks). It's basically 3D Ninja Gaiden but with high-speed third person shooting thrown in and not ludicrously difficult. What the fuck isn't there to like about that???
It's a banger fucking video game, shoutouts to Nintendo of all fucking people for actually being the guys to see the worth in something like this enough to publish it. It makes sense why this game reviewed so low because like in 2015 people were more wanting to see what the PS4/Xbone generation had to offer and didn't really have the time or energy to give a late wii U Unreal Engine 3 game much the light of day at all, and I lowkey get that. Nowadays though, where I feel like people are more willing to look past that kind of thing, I think it makes sense why this game has such a devoted cult fanbase. I wish I was able to try out the online mode when it was alive because of what I've heard from secondhand accounts it was apparently fun as FUCK and after playing through the singleplayer I can very much believe it. You goddamn KNOW if some fan servers pop up for this game, I'm there day one. The game is insanely difficult to get nowadays because Nintendo of America apparently lost faith in the title near the end of its development similarly to Disaster Day of Crisis (which honestly this game shares a lot in common with in terms of camp, guess Nintendo of America has horrible taste but at least they released this game here in SOME capacity vs just outright not for that game), and as such combined with the fact that the Wii U eshop is rip in kill, this game is a fuckpile of money to buy physically. I had my chance to get this game physically for 40 bucks back in its time but decided against it because I was a broke-ass high schooler and now its like 10 times that price and I have every US first party Wii U game physically except this and fuckin Mario Tennis Ultra Smash. Considering that it's extremely unlikely this game will ever get a rerelease, I'd def suggest giving this game a go under any means necessary without having to sell your liver. This game deserves to be played by more people that can appreciate what it does instead of being known as "that shitty expensive wii U game".
The narrative is pretty much a bonafide example of a japanese developer making a western-leaning action plot, and I mean that in only the best ways. There's tons of political jargon and inter-continental relation talk that borders that fine line between advancing the plot in a sensible way while still sounding complicated and serious. The cast of characters all have their own exaggerated morals and views of the world alongside their borderline tangential relationship to our protagonist where things feel personal between them but never really established nor developed any further. There's all the action setpieces you'd expect like puching through a jail full of cartoonishly insane tenants, blasting helicopters singlehandedly in your generic western battlefield, going through a house-of-the-dead-ass hospital filled with zombies, going through the cool japan castle level filled with cyborg ninjas, snowy mountains complete with a crazy vehicle segment, this game has it ALL. Instead of having anything tongue-in-cheek about how absurd that some shirtless dude with a gun and a sword and his crew of generic mechanically-enhanced supersoldiers can make it through all this insanity, the game plays everything dead fucking straight. There's not a hint of irony going on about this overly complex and flashy plot that mostly amounts to the same generic action movie tropes, and I ate up every goddamn second of it and lost my shit at every crazy moment the game threw at me. If you are a fan of like the Metal Gear series, the Ace Combat series, Resident Evils 4-6 in particular, or pretty much any Clover/Platinum game or Suda51 action title, you probably already know exactly what kind of vibe this games going for and will likely hella fuck with it just as much as I did.
If this game was just a goofy stupid setpiecy title that'd be one thing, but the actual gameplay is really fucking solid too! Yeah, the game definitely looks and runs more like an xbox 360 game from 2008 than a AAA Wii U title from 2015 (not really like there's much of a difference between the two in the first place), but honestly I do not give a singular shit about graphics and even found plenty of parts to look really nice regardless. The game is directed by our boy Tomonobu Itagaki, and while that sounds like a pretty red flag for me personally given how much Ninja Gaiden Sigma PTSD I still suffer from, in this game he was able to adapt his Itagaki-isms to a way where it's not total cock and ball torture to push through. In this game you have a gun to shoot things and play like a cover shooter, a sword to combo people in melee combat, and extra moves like grenade throwing and dash sliding for extra options for mobility and offense. I noticed while playing that I was doing everything I could to get from one battle sequence to the other because I found the combat that engaging, which isn't even something I do for some fully-blown character action games. The game and its levels are definitely designed in a way where while you CAN just focus on one over the other and either play the game entirely like Gears of War or like Ninja Gaiden, it's at its peak when you stay on your toes and utilize each weapon equally. I found the most fun in focusing on melee for primarily killing people and using the guns only for particularly long-distance targets that I'd die trying to run to, or to occasionally use in order to thin out crowded rooms a bit before running in like a lunatic with a knife. Hitting and killing people with melee in particular earns you meter which can be spent on activating a super mode that makes you mostly invulnerable while active and gives a heavy melee buff, and you can even activate it during scripted enemy attack sequences which means at any time you can have a panic button if things start going south. The bosses are also really fun and each one serves as a pretty different test of each of your different skills (even if some of the later game bosses get pretty cheap with instant kill attacks). It's basically 3D Ninja Gaiden but with high-speed third person shooting thrown in and not ludicrously difficult. What the fuck isn't there to like about that???
It's a banger fucking video game, shoutouts to Nintendo of all fucking people for actually being the guys to see the worth in something like this enough to publish it. It makes sense why this game reviewed so low because like in 2015 people were more wanting to see what the PS4/Xbone generation had to offer and didn't really have the time or energy to give a late wii U Unreal Engine 3 game much the light of day at all, and I lowkey get that. Nowadays though, where I feel like people are more willing to look past that kind of thing, I think it makes sense why this game has such a devoted cult fanbase. I wish I was able to try out the online mode when it was alive because of what I've heard from secondhand accounts it was apparently fun as FUCK and after playing through the singleplayer I can very much believe it. You goddamn KNOW if some fan servers pop up for this game, I'm there day one. The game is insanely difficult to get nowadays because Nintendo of America apparently lost faith in the title near the end of its development similarly to Disaster Day of Crisis (which honestly this game shares a lot in common with in terms of camp, guess Nintendo of America has horrible taste but at least they released this game here in SOME capacity vs just outright not for that game), and as such combined with the fact that the Wii U eshop is rip in kill, this game is a fuckpile of money to buy physically. I had my chance to get this game physically for 40 bucks back in its time but decided against it because I was a broke-ass high schooler and now its like 10 times that price and I have every US first party Wii U game physically except this and fuckin Mario Tennis Ultra Smash. Considering that it's extremely unlikely this game will ever get a rerelease, I'd def suggest giving this game a go under any means necessary without having to sell your liver. This game deserves to be played by more people that can appreciate what it does instead of being known as "that shitty expensive wii U game".