I UNDERSTAND! UNDERSTAND! I UNDERSTAND! UNDERSTAND! I UNDERSTAND! UNDERSTAND! THE CONCEPT OF SOUL...

Wait, that's in the sequel. Whoops.

Gameplay-wise, yeah it's a bit rough with level exits not being that distinguish enough till you're up close and facing them, pretty much everyone is out to mess your day up and good luck trying to do the bigger graffiti pieces in one go when everyone is circling them. But damn it, the art style and music and identity this game has is pure rebellion "Rage Against The Machine" delight just makes it super hard to get angry with. Even getting hit by cars and riding on top of them as you recover makes me laugh. It's a game that knows what it is, and that is a fun time riding around on skates and spray painting graffiti while getting the other gangs and forces angry at you.

Bendy gets caught and gets some punishment, unlike the TV episode. That alone shoots this up to 10/10 territory. A part of my wild heart that was having continuous storms angry about Bendy escaping the wrath of every single holy deity to ever be considered for being real has finally cleared up and is seeing the sun for the first time in ages. It's just like seeing Charlie Brown kick the football with Spider-Man's help. Pure magic. I laughed. I cried. I stood up and clapped. An absolutely unforgettable experience.

Alongside me complaining about the camera and movement controls, and just generally not liking the luck aspect of it, I also want to give a shout-out to Steam's 2-hour return policy. I wanted to try more of this game, but because that will require going past 2 hours on this 40-hour-long game to beat and 100-hour game to 100 percent if you're a speedrunner, I had to call it quits after the crypt area and awakening the dead dude. I don't think I'm a DND player; some friends have told me that if I didn't like the game within the first hour or two, then I probably won't like it even later on, but it would be nice to get more than 2 hours to decide.

I definitely do prefer the original JSR gameplay style, but this wasn't bad in the slightest. It's a fun send-up and homage to Jet Set Radio, with plenty of ways to find tricks, secrets, and spray paint. The story was also fairly intriguing and something I wanted to see to the end. Sure there were a couple of crashes here and there, and genuinely I'm not too fond of the combat here, and the bosses were pretty easy for me, but in the end, it's still a fun game. I'll have to give JSRF a try (since this game is more that instead of the arcade gameplay style JSR had), but even as someone who doesn't prefer this JSRF gameplay loop over the JSR gameplay style, it's still a blast.

Someone dared to ask what if we made Cuphead bad and low effort, and forgot just what made it a good game. The game has barely anything going for it. The one thing saving it for a 1/10 is that the art style sometimes changes to match the location. The witch fight has an art style shift that turns the characters into a weird gothic Invader Zim-esque look, the final boss gives the characters a more anime look, and the computer world has the characters covered in glitchy code. That's it. If they focused more on making each level or world have its own unique aesthetic and music, I think that would have done wonders for this game and made it more than just a Cuphead clone. As it is now, it's a terrible, unfairly hard, and frustrating time that could be beaten in 2 hours.