Godhand Totally Deserved That 3.0

Every so often I have to pursue a topic that is of consequence to no one but me basically. If every essay here was me doing sad prognostifications about the state of the industry this place would be miserable rather than merely tedious. So I'll pull up a common punching bag for people ragging on game reviews. In 2006 Capcom's departed Clover Studios released an oddball Beat-em-up called Godhand to extremely mixed reviews. The game's die hard fans have successfully memeified the low scores given to it among the hardcore gamer crowd to the point where it's a byword for referencing a game that critics simply didn't "get". I'm here to make the case, as a huge fan of action games of this type, that there wasn't much to get and the game's just not very well put together.

So what is Godhand? Basically it's a 3D Brawler for the PS2. It's kind of hard to describe its actual play if you aren't familiar with what that looks like but suffice to say, you run around 3D environments and punch things. The big gameplay gimmick here was that you could use a few dozen moves to define your basic combo. So the majority of your basic moves happen by hitting the square button repeatedly, but you have a menu where you can redefine what moves that does and in what sequence. There's tons of them and they unlock over the course of the game, lot of variety here. If you've ever played a Kingdom Hearts game it kind of works like the system for adding additional hits to your combo in those games but more freeform. These moves can be anything from slaps to missile drop kicks, there's some pretty wild variations you can come up with and it's definitely the strongest element of the core game mechanics. The rest of the mechanics merit mention but I'll save those for when I'm discussing why I don't care for the game... you can probably guess why.

That's probably not the core thing most people remember about the game though, the most remembered thing is that it was filled with a pervasive amount of slapstick absurdism. Capital W Wacky nonsense like gorillas in luchador masks and little person sentai teams. It definitely made the game a certain sort of memorable. It was particularly doing this in a time when this kind of style was falling out of favor to much of the "core" gamer audience. The 00s was a period where many aesthetics seen as distinctly Japanese were considered passe so a game that wore that sort of thing on its sleeve was legitimately nice to see as things rapidly moved to a very "American" aesthetic in the following era, self-serious and muted.

These are reasons to like this game, they are neat I just... think the actual package is insular and ultimately doesn't come together. To start I want to preface my complaints by pointing out that director Shinji Mikami was avowed that this was a game for the hardcore player, this was never meant to appeal to a huge group of people and divisive review scores reflect that. That said as likely part of the target audience I don't think it's actually a very well put together action game and the charm wears thin. Both of these need more explanation though so I'll start on the gameplay end.

So I've highlighted the part of the combat I think is interesting and works okay, the rest though? I have no idea what people see in it. Okay to start with the game uses an over the shoulder camera, this had recently been mainstreamed in games at the time by Resident Evil 4, it instantly revolutionized how third person shooters functioned and made the genre more competitive with first person shooters as a dominant force in the market. I'm sure the desire to experiment with it was strong. The problem is the camera just doesn't work as well for melee focused combat. In a shooter the camera zooming in over the protagonist's shoulder allows the player to sort of use their body framing to help adjust their aim. You get a condensed view of the action which is fine because you're far enough away that what's directly in the 270 degrees you aren't seeing is something you had time to notice and get out of the way of. Godhand doesn't really afford the player that luxury, most moves have a range of about a foot in front of your face so you have to be in a crowd of enemies, the up close camera that favors one specific side causes a lot of getting blindsided by offscreen attacks. The method meant to allow players split second reactions is mapping the dodge function to the right analog stick, this was a not unpopular scheme at the time but it really isn't enough given the speed the game runs at. You're gonna just tank hits until you develop a sense of how the AI works to counteract the limited situational awareness. While building combos is fun the actual combat gets kinda repetitive in the moment and the game's low budget betrays itself with often pretty dull and samey level designs. Put simply, you have to play more of Godhand than Godhand feels like it has interesting content.

Papering over that though is supposed to be the game's charm and like... I get it, but there's a lot here that either felt uncomfortable then, feels uncomfortable now, or just doesn't land for me personally. For uncomfortable then there's the traditional sexism that crowds around the general edges of many video games, it's not a great deal worse here than was typical of the time (given God of War 1's popularity at the time it can't really get close) but it's there. For the uncomfortable (for me) now I should lay out, the short person sentai team is definitely not called that. Near as I can tell the term for the group is considered a slur. The "mad (m-word) five" as the game calls them showcase a very 00s fascination with short people for comedy. Not that that ever seems to have gone away but it seemed like it had a greater intensity in that period, or perhaps it's just the age I was at at the time or even just what media I pay attention to now. Suffice to say even if they didn't at the very least brush on being offensive they're kinda emblematic of a lot of the game's humor. They're a wacky collision of two unrelated concepts, absurdism with no broader point, they show up, provide an extremely bad boss fight (the camera really isn't great at helping you track characters significantly shorter than the protagonist) and just sorta leave. Now I know the game was always meant to be a silly farce but the sense of comedic pacing just isn't very good. To compare to the director's prior work, Resident Evil 4 got more intentional laughs out of me, and that's a horror game, but Leon's bad one-liners in that game have a comedic pacing that Godhand's constant doubling down on absurdism lacks. It is hard to be unexpected when absurdity is the only mode you work in, great absurdist jokes need contrast, jokes need to undercut an expectation and while stacking new absurdities can do that this game's comedy and tone aren't deft enough to make that work.

That's kinda it really, I could go on about other things about the game, but I feel like these are the fundamentals it wants to sell itself on and since I don't feel like those work I've kind of already made the strongest case I can. The reaction to negative reviews for this game from major outlets still taints discussion of it, but many of those reviews were written in the fair context that the game just isn't very good at its core design goals. Free to disagree but I'd say the infamous IGN 3.0 was a reasonable reaction to this game.