This game reminds me so much of old school capcom and early clover studios that it brings a tear to my eye. It's got big Viewtiful Joe energy and that's a very good thing.
This is a character action game where the gimmick is that everything, all your attacks are to the rhythm of the soundtrack. Fighting naturally has a rhythm to it so I'm surprised this idea wasn't done sooner. It's pulled off very well. The characters and story are really the stars of the show here as the character animation is incredible and the writing is actually funny.
Now, the combat while very competent, I feel is limited by the rhythm gimmick. It's extremely bog standard "light heavy dodge parry super" stuff we've been seeing since the PS2 days. However, since this game in feel largely seems to be a throwback to those days, it gets a pass, especially since it pulls everything off so well. It's just all stuff we've seen before.
This is a character action game where the gimmick is that everything, all your attacks are to the rhythm of the soundtrack. Fighting naturally has a rhythm to it so I'm surprised this idea wasn't done sooner. It's pulled off very well. The characters and story are really the stars of the show here as the character animation is incredible and the writing is actually funny.
Now, the combat while very competent, I feel is limited by the rhythm gimmick. It's extremely bog standard "light heavy dodge parry super" stuff we've been seeing since the PS2 days. However, since this game in feel largely seems to be a throwback to those days, it gets a pass, especially since it pulls everything off so well. It's just all stuff we've seen before.
FUCK MICROSOFT
microsoft just why :(
Great game just not a huge fan of DMC-like games
The combo attack system doesn't really feel like it meshes well with the fight design, because the fights are often so chaotic that taking the time needed to finish a combo is almost certain to get you hit unless you interrupt doing it to dodge or parry, especially if there are 4+ enemies on the field.
Once you get access to all partner attacks you can just kind of cycle through them all and spam them while bobbing and weaving, which does give a better sense of flow. But it still feels kind of annoying that you're given so many combo attacks even though they don't work as a primary source of action in a fight.
The rhythm system is a nice idea, though, and there are a lot of little touches that make it feel satisfying when you're doing well.
My goodness does this game have an excellent sense of style. I don't know if I've ever played a game so full of intricate visual details that give it such a striking identity.
The writing works when it's funny and there are a ton of great gags. It mostly works when it's trying to be heartfelt, but I still think it felt a bit too cheesy sometimes. The voice acting is utterly perfect.
Once you get access to all partner attacks you can just kind of cycle through them all and spam them while bobbing and weaving, which does give a better sense of flow. But it still feels kind of annoying that you're given so many combo attacks even though they don't work as a primary source of action in a fight.
The rhythm system is a nice idea, though, and there are a lot of little touches that make it feel satisfying when you're doing well.
My goodness does this game have an excellent sense of style. I don't know if I've ever played a game so full of intricate visual details that give it such a striking identity.
The writing works when it's funny and there are a ton of great gags. It mostly works when it's trying to be heartfelt, but I still think it felt a bit too cheesy sometimes. The voice acting is utterly perfect.
WHAT THE FUCK MICROSOFT?? Actually fuck microsoft for that
as someone who wasn't the biggest fan, how do you look at the team that makes this game and shut them down
maaan when i heard nine inch nails i started breakdancing in my living room
gameplay is responsive and punchy, everything u could ask out of a character action game.
there are some issues, difficulty spikes and on later stages the screen gets filled up with so much stuff it might be hard to follow.
goated bosses and goated soundtrack (even on streamer mode)
no sequel :(
gameplay is responsive and punchy, everything u could ask out of a character action game.
there are some issues, difficulty spikes and on later stages the screen gets filled up with so much stuff it might be hard to follow.
goated bosses and goated soundtrack (even on streamer mode)
no sequel :(
Devil May Cry meets Dance Dance Revolution, Tango Gameworks deserved better. My second favourite of 2023.
Imagine having no marketing and or hype and just dropping this absolute banger filled with great music, actually funny humour/characters, stylish combat and a cartoon aesthetic that just puts a smile on your face. No multiplayer, no game content filled off by DLC. Just a solid game with unlockables and high scores from a major studio in 2023.
Everything moves to the music, not least my foot tapping away, a flawless gem.
Imagine having no marketing and or hype and just dropping this absolute banger filled with great music, actually funny humour/characters, stylish combat and a cartoon aesthetic that just puts a smile on your face. No multiplayer, no game content filled off by DLC. Just a solid game with unlockables and high scores from a major studio in 2023.
Everything moves to the music, not least my foot tapping away, a flawless gem.
My long journey to Hi-Fi Rush began when I was 7 years old, during the absolutely sweltering summer of 2003. It was one of those weekends where my family and I were "driving into town", because everything good was in Chattanooga and not where we were living. They took me to the local Circuit City (lol) and on the clearance rack they were "pennying out" (selling for a single penny to remove from the inventory system) a variety of cast-off video game and computer merchandise. One of these cast-offs was a little demo disc known as the Nintendo GameCube Preview Disc. It contained four demos, but my parents would have had a shared aneurysm if they saw me playing Tom Clancy's Splinter Cell, so really, it only had three.
- Sonic Adventure DX, which was what got me to pick it up in the first place after playing the absolute shit out of Sonic Adventure 2: Battle.
- A strange game called Billy Hatcher and the Giant Egg, which I had a close eye on because they were talking about it in Nintendo Power and it was from the Sonic guys.
- And finally...a little game called Viewtiful Joe that absolutely blew my little 2nd grader mind.
I played that demo over, and over, and over, rewinding and fastforwarding and slow-moing with my newly-acquired VFX powers, and my parents, bless them, actually cared about and paid attention to what got me excited and passionate, because being inured to child-raising with a then-in-vogue-but-now-outdated pediatric dogma that children with autism are "stuck in their own little worlds" meant they felt an intense pressure to pay attention and reward any sign of neuron activation.
My dad thought it looked promising, because he's always had a fixation on superheroes, and he was online but not extremely online enough to differentiate "superhero" from "tokusatsu", so they preordered it for me.
Maybe I'm overstating it, but what followed on October 7th, 2003, was something of a religious experience. We picked it up from Rhino Video Games (rip, you're excused if you're too young to remember when there were tons of cool video game store chains before GameStop bought them all just for the land value), and I played that game like crazy. Back then I could never get past the absolute brutal boss rush that has you fight every boss you've already fought back to back, ending in a fight with the vicious and cruel boss of bosses Fire Leo, which, if memory serves, sends you all the way back to the beginning of the boss rush if you fail. Pretty far for a 3rd grader though it may be, I didn't quite have what it takes to reach the ending, but that game planted a seed that altered my personality for good. Henshin-a-go-go baby!
A few months later my dad handed me down his GameFAQs.com forum account so I could ask for help being stuck on the opening stage of Sonic Heroes where you play as Team Chaotix. With not a ton to occupy my time, I went on the the online to go "surfing" on this new and exciting ""web"". GameFAQs had this sidebar where they would show game industry news from their sister website, GameSpot. This meant I started paying attention to industry news, and it became apparent to me that Viewtiful Joe didn't just come out of nowhere, it came from a small outfit within Capcom called Clover Studios, that benefited enormously from institutional knowledge imported from other parts of Capcom.
I gobbled up every mention of Clover, they quickly became my favorite of all studios from the moment I even had a concept of developers.
I learned that games were not the subject of immaculate conception but rather an intense process of iteration and cultural feedback, that they existed within a canon.
I learned that Viewtiful Joe was part of a miniature canon of five games for the Gamecube known as the Capcom Five, which was really more like the Capcom Four because one of them, Dead Phoenix, got cancelled before I even heard about it. You know, for a game that never was, its title is so on-the-nose you'd be excused for thinking I just made that up.
I learned that I was supposed to be angry at an evangelical Floridian lawyer named Jack Thompson.
And, most influentially, I learned that Viewtiful Joe was the singular vision of a cooler-than-cool motorcycle-riding custom-Oakleys-wearing 80s John Hughes movie protagonist character of a man named Hideki Kamiya.
The very next year (wow, remember when amazing sequels used to only take a year? what the fuck happened?) I got Viewtiful Joe 2 on release date. I followed every bit of news about Clover Studios, heard about these wild new games they were making called Okami and God Hand, had my little pre-teen heart absolutely shattered by the news that Clover had shut down, and then subsequently kintsugi'd by the news that they had reformed into a new studio fittingly named Seeds. And then Seeds merged with another studio, and became this new studio called PlatinumGames, and that the auteurs behind Viewtiful Joe, Okami and God Hand had went with them, and they signed a contract with Sega to give them a whopping FIVE new games, all of them being next-gen, paralleling the famous Capcom Five.
In 2003 I played Viewtiful Joe. In 2004 I played Viewtiful Joe 2. In 2005 I played Viewtiful Joe Double Trouble for the Nintendo DS (and Phoenix Wright: Ace Attorney! but aside from Shu Takumi's bromance (and possible unrequited love?) for Hideki Kamiya that's not particularly relevant).
In 2008 we were really really poor that year (huh I wonder why) so that Christmas my parents bought me a used PS2 Slim to replace the PS2 that had broke to where it keeps showing that scary red screen, and with it came a newly-released Greatest Hits reprint of Okami, which had me jumping up and down with joy that I had finally found a copy, because it had become low-print-run eBay scalper bait from pretty much the moment it came out. I subsequently do every sidequest and acquire every Stray Bead, leaving absolutely no stone unturned to adequately pay tribute to my idol Hideki Kamiya.
In 2010 I finally find a sunfaded-to-the-point-of-disintegrating copy of God Hand at the local outdoor drive-in theater/swap meet, for the low low price of 5 dollars. I remember it got bad reviews which is why I never played it, that on top of the aforementioned parental-aneurysm-inducing M-rating, but hey, I'm a teenager now, my parents just said they think I'm mature enough for the M-rating, and I end up playing the fuck out of that too. My online Venezuelan pen-pal who ended up introducing me to so, so many games I adored due to South America's vibrant culture of piracy, I mean, he said God Hand was fantastic, and I trust his word, so why not? (we haven't talked in probably a decade but we're friends on Backloggd so a shout-out to you if you're reading this, thank you for everything! thank you for Deadly Premonition! I hope we get to talk again one day, so much has happened!)
God Hand was directed by a man named Shinji Mikami, and word of mouth got around that he was really, really good at designing action games. 4chan-adjacent contrarians exalted it and used the famous IGN 3/10 review as fuel for their paranoid distrust of and superiority complex to game journalists. It became the subject of a meme comic template based on how the game's hidden excellence took everybody who played it by surprise. Tim Rogers then writes a review wherein, among many other extremely colorful metaphors, he compares moments in God Hand to "the feeling of catching a bully's punch, effortlessly uncurling his fist, and snatching out a fifty-dollar-bill". My bullied 15-year-old self nods, agreeing with his assessment.
In 2012, I played Devil May Cry 1 and 3 out of the HD Collection after the sage advice of the net told me to skip 2, and I played Ninja Gaiden Sigma Male, and I played the return of the Mikami and God Hand design ethos, a game called *dramatic title-screen-announcer voice* VANQUISH. I adored Vanquish, and I spent the next 11 years rawdogging estradiol and waiting for, finally, another action game bearing the stamp of Shinji Mikami. Thank you for reading so far into something this personal, you probably get where this is going, yeah? Keep going though.
In 2013, I buy the last game of Platinum's Sega deal, Anarchy Reigns, and I have an excellent, very fun month with this hypermasculine game while its online was still alive, getting my mind off the crippling anxiety of having just came out to my parents. The next month, I play Platinum's Metal Gear Rising, the first game they've made outside their deal with Sega, and like Jack, it rips. In 2015 I finally, finally get to play Bayonetta, because I always heard the PS3 version was bad, so I avoided it until I got a Wii U, and I am reminded of my intense fondness for Hideki Kamiya's trademark embracement of stylish action, camp, and cringe. Meanwhile, the man himself begins blocking basically everybody who speaks English to him on Twitter because most of them are begging for Bayonetta 2 on their preferred system and calling him slurs.
In 2016 I play Furi, a particularly inspired indie game specially crafted for "genetic freaks!" who are "not normal!" such as myself, while living out of a motel, on a Wii U Pro Controller while my dad sleeps in the same room. I finish the game at like 5 AM. The credits give a very special thanks to Shinji Mikami, Hideki Kamiya, Keiji Inafune (lol, I'd put Akira Kitamura if only for Cocoron), Hideo Kojima, Hidetaka Miyazaki, Genyo Takeda (director of Punch-Out), Platinum Games, Grasshopper Manufactures (sic), and Treasure Co, in that exact order, probably close to the order I'd put them in too. Thank you for all the great games and memories! so they wrote.
In 2017, under conditions of more stable housing, I play Nier:Automata from Platinum, and it's great! But this review isn't about how I've been Facebook friends with Yoko Taro since before Drakengard 3 came out. Where are you, Yoko Taro? I miss you.
Also in 2017, Hideki Kamiya's next big effort, Scalebound, is cancelled by Microsoft, making me shake my fist in anger at the Xbox brand and how anything good it produces seems to be in spite of themselves. I make a post online about how they should retrofit it into Drakengard 4.
In 2019 I back The Wonderful 101 Remastered Kickstarter, because somehow I hadn't got around to playing it yet. Surprise surprise, as expected from a Hideki Kamiya joint, it was incredible. In 2020 I buy Vanquish AGAIN, the moment it got released on PS4, and in the midst of intense anxiety over an incoming plague and Bernie Sanders primary results, I finally accomplish the infamous "Tactical Challenge 6", iykyk. Sega has posted a survey for people who bought the Bayonetta/Vanquish collection, I spam every field with "VANQUISH 2 VANQUISH 2 VANQUISH 2". My longing for the return of Shinji Mikami intensifies like a kid on their birthday remembering their dad who stepped out for a pack of smokes and never came back.
It is 2021. I finally play another Capcom Five game from way back when, Mikami and Suda51's Killer7, in 4K widescreen. They never collaborated again, anyone who tells you otherwise is lying. It is everything I was told it was. The m4m craigslist guy was right. I continue to miss Shinji Mikami so fuckin bad
It is late 2022. God Hand is selling on eBay for the high high price of 160 dollars, and people are buying, because it's worth it. I am reading the r/gamingleaksandrumors subreddit, as I am wont to do, even though I don't have a Reddit account. Some guy is posting about Microsoft registering a trademark for a new game called...HI-FI RUSH. They think, via process of elimination, that it could be an unannounced project from Tango Gameworks, Shinji Mikami's studio. They think it might be an action game! I excitedly message my one friend who watches my streams, similarly obsessed with this canon as I am, in the hopes that it could be that fabled second coming of God Hand. Could it be? Do I dare to hope?
It is January 25th, 2023. Microsoft just straight-up drops the game I've been waiting for for most of my life during a presentation I'm not watching, with zero fanfare. I immediately buy it based solely off reflex from my sympathetic nervous system, before my conscious mind can even comprehend what just happened. Despite having been ravenous for this for most of the time I've been a conscious human being, I save it for a rainy day.
It is late 2023. I am on mushrooms. I remember there is a new Shinji Mikami produced action game I still haven't played, and so I boot up Hi-Fi Rush. I quickly realize that by my personal barometer, it is one of the greatest games ever made, and that I would still be feeling this way even if I wasn't on drugs. It means the world to me that this game was allowed to exist, it feels like coming home.
The character action genre is my favorite genre of game, and I’ve always considered it the most pure, joyous, evocative genre of video game, they represent everything uniquely special about the medium while radiating a tangible aura of inspired fun, mechanical depth, flashy setpieces and an effortless sense of “cool” that shaped my personality more than I could ever untangle from myself.
I guess what I'm trying to get at by autobiographizing like this, is that I am glad this game exists at all, and from a young age, younger than I should have been to learn such a life lesson, the shutdown of Clover Studios taught me something really important. Don't be sad because it's over, be happy because it happened. Because it could've been so easy for it not to, you know? Everything about your life and mine only happened because everything landed in the right place, this game only existed because everything landed in the right place, it's so incredibly easy for something to never come together, or get cancelled before we ever even heard about it. With how many minds are warring for supremacy, it's an absolute miracle anything ever gets made at all, let alone a game this good and coherent and visionary. And just like I saw growing up alongside them, watching them rise from the ashes like a (dead?) phoenix with how Clover became Seeds became Platinum became Tango, you can kill a studio but you can't kill their spirit, the influence they have on the family tree of design. Tango will return.
It is February 29th, 2024. Leap Day, a liminal space that only comes around once a presidential term. I am on mushrooms again. I decide now is the time to finish Hi-Fi Rush. I beat the game a couple minutes after midnight, which disappointed me slightly because I wanted the achievement date to say the 29th. My first playthrough was on Very Hard difficulty of course, because this personal history has made me into quite the tryhard. I sit through the credits as a gesture of respect, of course. How could I not? I waited most of my life for this game, it's the least I could do. The director himself starts serenading me. I look around nervously, wondering if I am hallucinating this or something. I am not. Everything I wrote about in this review comes flooding back. It becomes apparent to me that the world is filled with overwhelming beauty, that it is truly beautiful that people can collaborate and make something with so many moving parts, and that it is beautiful that everything I've experienced and the ways those people like Mikami, Kamiya, and now Johanas contributed to a shared lineage made me who I am, and I feel loved and personally spoken to in a way I've never felt before. Of course, of course I cry my goddamn eyes out.
We somehow made it through
All of this.
Making things is hard,
Things never go as planned.
Too many features, not enough time.
We want the best
But can only do so much
With what we have.
So this is what we made.
We've never been more proud.
A game, a song, a million different pieces working together
Brought to you by all of us.
It may not be what you expected,
Everything
(Everything that you want)
But we did our best
And here it is:
A piece of our heart,
The hard work from all of us.
So please don't complain
And just enjoy.
Because at the end of the day, it's all just a game.
One we spent thousands and thousands of hours
Arguing, building, and polishing.
But hey,
No sweat. 😅
- Sonic Adventure DX, which was what got me to pick it up in the first place after playing the absolute shit out of Sonic Adventure 2: Battle.
- A strange game called Billy Hatcher and the Giant Egg, which I had a close eye on because they were talking about it in Nintendo Power and it was from the Sonic guys.
- And finally...a little game called Viewtiful Joe that absolutely blew my little 2nd grader mind.
I played that demo over, and over, and over, rewinding and fastforwarding and slow-moing with my newly-acquired VFX powers, and my parents, bless them, actually cared about and paid attention to what got me excited and passionate, because being inured to child-raising with a then-in-vogue-but-now-outdated pediatric dogma that children with autism are "stuck in their own little worlds" meant they felt an intense pressure to pay attention and reward any sign of neuron activation.
My dad thought it looked promising, because he's always had a fixation on superheroes, and he was online but not extremely online enough to differentiate "superhero" from "tokusatsu", so they preordered it for me.
Maybe I'm overstating it, but what followed on October 7th, 2003, was something of a religious experience. We picked it up from Rhino Video Games (rip, you're excused if you're too young to remember when there were tons of cool video game store chains before GameStop bought them all just for the land value), and I played that game like crazy. Back then I could never get past the absolute brutal boss rush that has you fight every boss you've already fought back to back, ending in a fight with the vicious and cruel boss of bosses Fire Leo, which, if memory serves, sends you all the way back to the beginning of the boss rush if you fail. Pretty far for a 3rd grader though it may be, I didn't quite have what it takes to reach the ending, but that game planted a seed that altered my personality for good. Henshin-a-go-go baby!
A few months later my dad handed me down his GameFAQs.com forum account so I could ask for help being stuck on the opening stage of Sonic Heroes where you play as Team Chaotix. With not a ton to occupy my time, I went on the the online to go "surfing" on this new and exciting ""web"". GameFAQs had this sidebar where they would show game industry news from their sister website, GameSpot. This meant I started paying attention to industry news, and it became apparent to me that Viewtiful Joe didn't just come out of nowhere, it came from a small outfit within Capcom called Clover Studios, that benefited enormously from institutional knowledge imported from other parts of Capcom.
I gobbled up every mention of Clover, they quickly became my favorite of all studios from the moment I even had a concept of developers.
I learned that games were not the subject of immaculate conception but rather an intense process of iteration and cultural feedback, that they existed within a canon.
I learned that Viewtiful Joe was part of a miniature canon of five games for the Gamecube known as the Capcom Five, which was really more like the Capcom Four because one of them, Dead Phoenix, got cancelled before I even heard about it. You know, for a game that never was, its title is so on-the-nose you'd be excused for thinking I just made that up.
I learned that I was supposed to be angry at an evangelical Floridian lawyer named Jack Thompson.
And, most influentially, I learned that Viewtiful Joe was the singular vision of a cooler-than-cool motorcycle-riding custom-Oakleys-wearing 80s John Hughes movie protagonist character of a man named Hideki Kamiya.
The very next year (wow, remember when amazing sequels used to only take a year? what the fuck happened?) I got Viewtiful Joe 2 on release date. I followed every bit of news about Clover Studios, heard about these wild new games they were making called Okami and God Hand, had my little pre-teen heart absolutely shattered by the news that Clover had shut down, and then subsequently kintsugi'd by the news that they had reformed into a new studio fittingly named Seeds. And then Seeds merged with another studio, and became this new studio called PlatinumGames, and that the auteurs behind Viewtiful Joe, Okami and God Hand had went with them, and they signed a contract with Sega to give them a whopping FIVE new games, all of them being next-gen, paralleling the famous Capcom Five.
In 2003 I played Viewtiful Joe. In 2004 I played Viewtiful Joe 2. In 2005 I played Viewtiful Joe Double Trouble for the Nintendo DS (and Phoenix Wright: Ace Attorney! but aside from Shu Takumi's bromance (and possible unrequited love?) for Hideki Kamiya that's not particularly relevant).
In 2008 we were really really poor that year (huh I wonder why) so that Christmas my parents bought me a used PS2 Slim to replace the PS2 that had broke to where it keeps showing that scary red screen, and with it came a newly-released Greatest Hits reprint of Okami, which had me jumping up and down with joy that I had finally found a copy, because it had become low-print-run eBay scalper bait from pretty much the moment it came out. I subsequently do every sidequest and acquire every Stray Bead, leaving absolutely no stone unturned to adequately pay tribute to my idol Hideki Kamiya.
In 2010 I finally find a sunfaded-to-the-point-of-disintegrating copy of God Hand at the local outdoor drive-in theater/swap meet, for the low low price of 5 dollars. I remember it got bad reviews which is why I never played it, that on top of the aforementioned parental-aneurysm-inducing M-rating, but hey, I'm a teenager now, my parents just said they think I'm mature enough for the M-rating, and I end up playing the fuck out of that too. My online Venezuelan pen-pal who ended up introducing me to so, so many games I adored due to South America's vibrant culture of piracy, I mean, he said God Hand was fantastic, and I trust his word, so why not? (we haven't talked in probably a decade but we're friends on Backloggd so a shout-out to you if you're reading this, thank you for everything! thank you for Deadly Premonition! I hope we get to talk again one day, so much has happened!)
God Hand was directed by a man named Shinji Mikami, and word of mouth got around that he was really, really good at designing action games. 4chan-adjacent contrarians exalted it and used the famous IGN 3/10 review as fuel for their paranoid distrust of and superiority complex to game journalists. It became the subject of a meme comic template based on how the game's hidden excellence took everybody who played it by surprise. Tim Rogers then writes a review wherein, among many other extremely colorful metaphors, he compares moments in God Hand to "the feeling of catching a bully's punch, effortlessly uncurling his fist, and snatching out a fifty-dollar-bill". My bullied 15-year-old self nods, agreeing with his assessment.
In 2012, I played Devil May Cry 1 and 3 out of the HD Collection after the sage advice of the net told me to skip 2, and I played Ninja Gaiden Sigma Male, and I played the return of the Mikami and God Hand design ethos, a game called *dramatic title-screen-announcer voice* VANQUISH. I adored Vanquish, and I spent the next 11 years rawdogging estradiol and waiting for, finally, another action game bearing the stamp of Shinji Mikami. Thank you for reading so far into something this personal, you probably get where this is going, yeah? Keep going though.
In 2013, I buy the last game of Platinum's Sega deal, Anarchy Reigns, and I have an excellent, very fun month with this hypermasculine game while its online was still alive, getting my mind off the crippling anxiety of having just came out to my parents. The next month, I play Platinum's Metal Gear Rising, the first game they've made outside their deal with Sega, and like Jack, it rips. In 2015 I finally, finally get to play Bayonetta, because I always heard the PS3 version was bad, so I avoided it until I got a Wii U, and I am reminded of my intense fondness for Hideki Kamiya's trademark embracement of stylish action, camp, and cringe. Meanwhile, the man himself begins blocking basically everybody who speaks English to him on Twitter because most of them are begging for Bayonetta 2 on their preferred system and calling him slurs.
In 2016 I play Furi, a particularly inspired indie game specially crafted for "genetic freaks!" who are "not normal!" such as myself, while living out of a motel, on a Wii U Pro Controller while my dad sleeps in the same room. I finish the game at like 5 AM. The credits give a very special thanks to Shinji Mikami, Hideki Kamiya, Keiji Inafune (lol, I'd put Akira Kitamura if only for Cocoron), Hideo Kojima, Hidetaka Miyazaki, Genyo Takeda (director of Punch-Out), Platinum Games, Grasshopper Manufactures (sic), and Treasure Co, in that exact order, probably close to the order I'd put them in too. Thank you for all the great games and memories! so they wrote.
In 2017, under conditions of more stable housing, I play Nier:Automata from Platinum, and it's great! But this review isn't about how I've been Facebook friends with Yoko Taro since before Drakengard 3 came out. Where are you, Yoko Taro? I miss you.
Also in 2017, Hideki Kamiya's next big effort, Scalebound, is cancelled by Microsoft, making me shake my fist in anger at the Xbox brand and how anything good it produces seems to be in spite of themselves. I make a post online about how they should retrofit it into Drakengard 4.
In 2019 I back The Wonderful 101 Remastered Kickstarter, because somehow I hadn't got around to playing it yet. Surprise surprise, as expected from a Hideki Kamiya joint, it was incredible. In 2020 I buy Vanquish AGAIN, the moment it got released on PS4, and in the midst of intense anxiety over an incoming plague and Bernie Sanders primary results, I finally accomplish the infamous "Tactical Challenge 6", iykyk. Sega has posted a survey for people who bought the Bayonetta/Vanquish collection, I spam every field with "VANQUISH 2 VANQUISH 2 VANQUISH 2". My longing for the return of Shinji Mikami intensifies like a kid on their birthday remembering their dad who stepped out for a pack of smokes and never came back.
It is 2021. I finally play another Capcom Five game from way back when, Mikami and Suda51's Killer7, in 4K widescreen. They never collaborated again, anyone who tells you otherwise is lying. It is everything I was told it was. The m4m craigslist guy was right. I continue to miss Shinji Mikami so fuckin bad
It is late 2022. God Hand is selling on eBay for the high high price of 160 dollars, and people are buying, because it's worth it. I am reading the r/gamingleaksandrumors subreddit, as I am wont to do, even though I don't have a Reddit account. Some guy is posting about Microsoft registering a trademark for a new game called...HI-FI RUSH. They think, via process of elimination, that it could be an unannounced project from Tango Gameworks, Shinji Mikami's studio. They think it might be an action game! I excitedly message my one friend who watches my streams, similarly obsessed with this canon as I am, in the hopes that it could be that fabled second coming of God Hand. Could it be? Do I dare to hope?
It is January 25th, 2023. Microsoft just straight-up drops the game I've been waiting for for most of my life during a presentation I'm not watching, with zero fanfare. I immediately buy it based solely off reflex from my sympathetic nervous system, before my conscious mind can even comprehend what just happened. Despite having been ravenous for this for most of the time I've been a conscious human being, I save it for a rainy day.
It is late 2023. I am on mushrooms. I remember there is a new Shinji Mikami produced action game I still haven't played, and so I boot up Hi-Fi Rush. I quickly realize that by my personal barometer, it is one of the greatest games ever made, and that I would still be feeling this way even if I wasn't on drugs. It means the world to me that this game was allowed to exist, it feels like coming home.
The character action genre is my favorite genre of game, and I’ve always considered it the most pure, joyous, evocative genre of video game, they represent everything uniquely special about the medium while radiating a tangible aura of inspired fun, mechanical depth, flashy setpieces and an effortless sense of “cool” that shaped my personality more than I could ever untangle from myself.
I guess what I'm trying to get at by autobiographizing like this, is that I am glad this game exists at all, and from a young age, younger than I should have been to learn such a life lesson, the shutdown of Clover Studios taught me something really important. Don't be sad because it's over, be happy because it happened. Because it could've been so easy for it not to, you know? Everything about your life and mine only happened because everything landed in the right place, this game only existed because everything landed in the right place, it's so incredibly easy for something to never come together, or get cancelled before we ever even heard about it. With how many minds are warring for supremacy, it's an absolute miracle anything ever gets made at all, let alone a game this good and coherent and visionary. And just like I saw growing up alongside them, watching them rise from the ashes like a (dead?) phoenix with how Clover became Seeds became Platinum became Tango, you can kill a studio but you can't kill their spirit, the influence they have on the family tree of design. Tango will return.
It is February 29th, 2024. Leap Day, a liminal space that only comes around once a presidential term. I am on mushrooms again. I decide now is the time to finish Hi-Fi Rush. I beat the game a couple minutes after midnight, which disappointed me slightly because I wanted the achievement date to say the 29th. My first playthrough was on Very Hard difficulty of course, because this personal history has made me into quite the tryhard. I sit through the credits as a gesture of respect, of course. How could I not? I waited most of my life for this game, it's the least I could do. The director himself starts serenading me. I look around nervously, wondering if I am hallucinating this or something. I am not. Everything I wrote about in this review comes flooding back. It becomes apparent to me that the world is filled with overwhelming beauty, that it is truly beautiful that people can collaborate and make something with so many moving parts, and that it is beautiful that everything I've experienced and the ways those people like Mikami, Kamiya, and now Johanas contributed to a shared lineage made me who I am, and I feel loved and personally spoken to in a way I've never felt before. Of course, of course I cry my goddamn eyes out.
We somehow made it through
All of this.
Making things is hard,
Things never go as planned.
Too many features, not enough time.
We want the best
But can only do so much
With what we have.
So this is what we made.
We've never been more proud.
A game, a song, a million different pieces working together
Brought to you by all of us.
It may not be what you expected,
Everything
(Everything that you want)
But we did our best
And here it is:
A piece of our heart,
The hard work from all of us.
So please don't complain
And just enjoy.
Because at the end of the day, it's all just a game.
One we spent thousands and thousands of hours
Arguing, building, and polishing.
But hey,
No sweat. 😅
Apparently having a beloved studio with extremely talented employees isn't enough. Apparently having an award winning game isn't enough. Having a succesful game isn't enough. Fuck microsoft, fuck phil spencer, fuck sarah bond, fuck matt booty, fuck the gaming industry for letting talent like this die.
To former Tango Gameworks employees, thank you for incredible contributions to the gaming industry with The Evil Within, Ghostwire Tokyo, and Hifi Rush.
To former Tango Gameworks employees, thank you for incredible contributions to the gaming industry with The Evil Within, Ghostwire Tokyo, and Hifi Rush.
So fun and creative, R.I.P. Tango Gameworks
Good combat, but Reddit Reddit Reddit Reddit.
Friends, loved ones, we gather here today to remember our good friend Hi-Fi Rush
The cliche saying "life comes at you fast" is apt to describe Hi-Fi Rush. It simultaneously announced and released at the end of what I would generously describe as a very mid Xbox game presentation in January 2023 to the delight of half-asleep gamers watching everywhere.
Hi-Fi Rush is rhythm-based character action game that had unique gameplay. It was forgiving to casual audiences so as to acclimate them to rhythm aspects of the game, but had aspects about it that made it the most hardcore character action game out there if you wanted it to be. If you wanted the highest ranking. If you wanted Chai to be holding a real guitar, you had to earn that shit in blood.
The game embraced a fun cast of characters. Embraced a saturday morning cartoon setting and story. It made Xenogears references when half-jokingly describing running out of budget for the last act of the game. It had licensed music from bands like Nine Inch Nails. Hi-Fi Rush was truly a hi-fi rush that made thousands of people think the game was tailor-made for them. Simply by being more in line with what people actually like. It was nice to see as such cases of personality and life being that it was rare to see such on a major publisher level.
Hi-Fi Rush was pushed out into the world to be loved, and to help boost a rapidly dying gaming platform, but actually mostly that first thing...
But mostly that second thing, actually.
The cancer of corporate consolidation and power, a time when optimal financialization is the only language those unrightfully holding the reigns of the industry speak. That is what killed a moderately successful game studio. Lack of passion or enthusiasm didn't kill Hi-Fi Rush. A financial officer running numbers and determining a sequel would make X amount of dollars less than a Call of Duty skin killed Hi-Fi Rush.
So as we lay them down to rest, we celebrate Hi-Fi Rush as it reminded gamers of a time when all games both big and small were released to be enjoyed unconditionally; with the upfront price tag of exceptional games were the beginning, middle and end of what was asked to own it.
Sadly, those days are snuffed out. You must now rent and subscribe to begin to be pumped with complicit, tedious gameplay trends that feel more diluted with every repackaging. Will we die with capitalism? Probably. Shit crazy out here, b.
Whether or not you cherished the life of Tango, or it's products like Evil Within or Hi-Fi Rush, you must understand that gaming on consoles is dead. Dead until the console platform holders release their own Steam Deck and it's probably going to be lame as fuck compared to a Steam Deck if your name is not Nintendo, but whatever.
Rest in peace, Hi-Fi Rush.
The cliche saying "life comes at you fast" is apt to describe Hi-Fi Rush. It simultaneously announced and released at the end of what I would generously describe as a very mid Xbox game presentation in January 2023 to the delight of half-asleep gamers watching everywhere.
Hi-Fi Rush is rhythm-based character action game that had unique gameplay. It was forgiving to casual audiences so as to acclimate them to rhythm aspects of the game, but had aspects about it that made it the most hardcore character action game out there if you wanted it to be. If you wanted the highest ranking. If you wanted Chai to be holding a real guitar, you had to earn that shit in blood.
The game embraced a fun cast of characters. Embraced a saturday morning cartoon setting and story. It made Xenogears references when half-jokingly describing running out of budget for the last act of the game. It had licensed music from bands like Nine Inch Nails. Hi-Fi Rush was truly a hi-fi rush that made thousands of people think the game was tailor-made for them. Simply by being more in line with what people actually like. It was nice to see as such cases of personality and life being that it was rare to see such on a major publisher level.
Hi-Fi Rush was pushed out into the world to be loved, and to help boost a rapidly dying gaming platform, but actually mostly that first thing...
But mostly that second thing, actually.
The cancer of corporate consolidation and power, a time when optimal financialization is the only language those unrightfully holding the reigns of the industry speak. That is what killed a moderately successful game studio. Lack of passion or enthusiasm didn't kill Hi-Fi Rush. A financial officer running numbers and determining a sequel would make X amount of dollars less than a Call of Duty skin killed Hi-Fi Rush.
So as we lay them down to rest, we celebrate Hi-Fi Rush as it reminded gamers of a time when all games both big and small were released to be enjoyed unconditionally; with the upfront price tag of exceptional games were the beginning, middle and end of what was asked to own it.
Sadly, those days are snuffed out. You must now rent and subscribe to begin to be pumped with complicit, tedious gameplay trends that feel more diluted with every repackaging. Will we die with capitalism? Probably. Shit crazy out here, b.
Whether or not you cherished the life of Tango, or it's products like Evil Within or Hi-Fi Rush, you must understand that gaming on consoles is dead. Dead until the console platform holders release their own Steam Deck and it's probably going to be lame as fuck compared to a Steam Deck if your name is not Nintendo, but whatever.
Rest in peace, Hi-Fi Rush.
music good, rip tango :(
fuck you matt booty
Also known as: Shinji Mikami played a early 2010's racing game with licensed music once. But aside from that joke, it's a wonderful little game in terms of aesthetic and vibe, and more then anything else, it feels earnest, and not at all ironic. Combined with good gameplay that has you landing hits to the gameplay, and it's no wonder how people wonder what could have been with Tango's closure.
soul
When I first started Hi-Fi Rush a few weeks ago, I anticipated I'd be prefacing this review by saying that I am terrible at this game. I rarely ever got above a B rank, and died often. Yet, my skill (or lack thereof) never impacted how much I absolutely adored every second I spent with this game. I wanted to write about how that was one of this game's biggest strengths, how even when the battles get challenging, the game never stopped being fun.
But in light of recent events, I realize there are more important things that should be said instead.
This was always a 10/10 game for me, one of those things that you can't believe exist even though you're experiencing it. I could write paragraphs about how the soundtrack is pure perfection, or how the style of the game feels like you're watching a Saturday morning cartoon, or how the cast of characters feel like your own friend group which you have been hanging out with for years and years. But for all it's strengths, the one that stands out after all of what has happened recently, is the passion and love so evident in every little part of this game. This much is obvious from the minute the game starts and stays true until the end of the credits, when John Johanas, the director of the game, sings Making Things Is Hard, a song about the love and hard work that went into making Hi-Fi Rush.
In the game, friendship and teamwork are enough to take down the company which has lost it way and only creates products to make money. In real life, Microsoft, a company worth 3+ trillion dollars, shuts down Tango Gameworks for delivering exactly what they asked for (and then some). It's nothing short of tragic. Microsoft seems to think AAA slop like Starfield sells over smaller games like Hi-Fi Rush, and yet only one of those two 2023 Xbox releases is still being talked about in 2024. I'm sure there's a lesson in there somewhere (something about how no singular game will ever make enough to get them out of the 70 billion dollar hole they've dug themselves into etc etc), but sadly not one that will ever get through the thick skulls of Phil Spencer et al.
I feel lucky I got to play this game at all. To me, and many others, it'll always be a classic we keep coming back to. To everyone at Tango who poured their heart and soul into this game, thank you for sharing this wonderful experience with us. You guys were always the real rockstars.
But in light of recent events, I realize there are more important things that should be said instead.
This was always a 10/10 game for me, one of those things that you can't believe exist even though you're experiencing it. I could write paragraphs about how the soundtrack is pure perfection, or how the style of the game feels like you're watching a Saturday morning cartoon, or how the cast of characters feel like your own friend group which you have been hanging out with for years and years. But for all it's strengths, the one that stands out after all of what has happened recently, is the passion and love so evident in every little part of this game. This much is obvious from the minute the game starts and stays true until the end of the credits, when John Johanas, the director of the game, sings Making Things Is Hard, a song about the love and hard work that went into making Hi-Fi Rush.
In the game, friendship and teamwork are enough to take down the company which has lost it way and only creates products to make money. In real life, Microsoft, a company worth 3+ trillion dollars, shuts down Tango Gameworks for delivering exactly what they asked for (and then some). It's nothing short of tragic. Microsoft seems to think AAA slop like Starfield sells over smaller games like Hi-Fi Rush, and yet only one of those two 2023 Xbox releases is still being talked about in 2024. I'm sure there's a lesson in there somewhere (something about how no singular game will ever make enough to get them out of the 70 billion dollar hole they've dug themselves into etc etc), but sadly not one that will ever get through the thick skulls of Phil Spencer et al.
I feel lucky I got to play this game at all. To me, and many others, it'll always be a classic we keep coming back to. To everyone at Tango who poured their heart and soul into this game, thank you for sharing this wonderful experience with us. You guys were always the real rockstars.
Le jeu met un peu de temps à démarrer et à m'intéresser pleinement sur ces deux trois premiers chapitres mais ensuite ça déroule vraiment bien. Une ou deux phases assez précises de jeu que je kiffe un poil moins, principalement pendant la partie plateforme. Malgré tout, le gameplay est vraiment aux petits oignons lors des phases de combat avec ce mélange de jeu de rythme/beat'em all très efficace et me suis pas mal surpris à vraiment jouer en rythme au bout d'un moment. C'est visuellement coloré avec plein de petits détails sur l'animation des visages que je trouve chouette (808 c'est mon totem), des personnages avec une bonne synergie auquels on s'attache grâce à une bonne écriture simple et efficace. Même si la musique est un poil trop "le roooooock" pour moi, j'ai quand même pris pas mal de plaisir à l'écouter sur certains niveaux et évidemment encore plus quand ça balance du NIN ou The Prodigy.
Petit carton rouge pour avoir foutu du contenu sur un NG+, un peu relou quand tu t'amuses à te balader pour te retrouver devant une porte qui te dit "lol nope".
Clairement un jeu qui aurait mérité une suite, j'aurais sauté dessus direct contrairement au premier que j'ai tardé à faire mais bon, on connait la suite NIQUE TOI PHIL SPENCER & CO.
Petit carton rouge pour avoir foutu du contenu sur un NG+, un peu relou quand tu t'amuses à te balader pour te retrouver devant une porte qui te dit "lol nope".
Clairement un jeu qui aurait mérité une suite, j'aurais sauté dessus direct contrairement au premier que j'ai tardé à faire mais bon, on connait la suite NIQUE TOI PHIL SPENCER & CO.
this was my 2023 goty
fuck microsoft
fuck microsoft
Absolute slam dunk instant classic. It's completely unjustifiable that microsoft is shutting down Tango after they made this.
loved that game
Peak fiction and the fact that Tango Gameworks is dissolved is a tragedy.
Extremely disappointing that Bethesda shutdown Tango. They did not deserve to be shut down Hi-Fi rush is my first rhythm game and I absolutely loved it,Tango clearly put a lot of love making the game like how everything is synchronized to music its a amazing detail. Hope Bethesda reconsiders the shutdown
Fuck Microsoft
A game that surprised me with how solid it was.
i coincidentally played this the same week that tango gets closed, as well as buying the evil within to replay it, shitty story but good game overall, rest in peace tango
RIP Tango Gameworks.
Hi-Fi Rush стала для меня лучшей игрой 2023 года. Видимо, игра не окупилась. Xbox вообще охуенно поступила. Накупила кучу студий, а контролировать их забыла. Redfall почему-то нахуй не заморозили и решили выпустить, Hi-fi rush, судя по всему, рекламировать вообще не нужно было. На очереди, скорее всего, Ninja Theory. Бедняги уже лет 5 делают одиночную игру на 6 часов, которая в первый же день выходит в геймпасс. Маркетинг нулевой, бля, игра будет охуенной, получит пару наград на TGA за охуенную актерскую игру, но провалится к хуям. Потом студию закроют, и все мы будем плакать.
Hi-Fi Rush - игра, которая открыла для меня геймпасс. Ради этого сервиса я готов мириться с уебанским лончером для ПК, который местами хуже говноутилиты от Эпиков. А теперь оказывается, что я плачу деньги за подписку, чтоб мои любимые студии умирали. Охуенно, спасибо. Видимо, я виноват, что не купил 20 копий HFR, вот я гандон же а бля выюадывжбд АДЫВЖБ пжбдв апрджбарж
Hi-Fi Rush стала для меня лучшей игрой 2023 года. Видимо, игра не окупилась. Xbox вообще охуенно поступила. Накупила кучу студий, а контролировать их забыла. Redfall почему-то нахуй не заморозили и решили выпустить, Hi-fi rush, судя по всему, рекламировать вообще не нужно было. На очереди, скорее всего, Ninja Theory. Бедняги уже лет 5 делают одиночную игру на 6 часов, которая в первый же день выходит в геймпасс. Маркетинг нулевой, бля, игра будет охуенной, получит пару наград на TGA за охуенную актерскую игру, но провалится к хуям. Потом студию закроют, и все мы будем плакать.
Hi-Fi Rush - игра, которая открыла для меня геймпасс. Ради этого сервиса я готов мириться с уебанским лончером для ПК, который местами хуже говноутилиты от Эпиков. А теперь оказывается, что я плачу деньги за подписку, чтоб мои любимые студии умирали. Охуенно, спасибо. Видимо, я виноват, что не купил 20 копий HFR, вот я гандон же а бля выюадывжбд АДЫВЖБ пжбдв апрджбарж
FUCK YOU SPENCER, BOOTY, SARAH, MICROSOFT, CORPOS AND THE MODERN GAME INDUSTRY