God Hand
Oct 24, 2006
It's hard to know what to make of Clover Studios' God Hand, much less how to explain it. You can't very well just call it "a fighting game". Calling God Hand "a fighting game" is like calling Monty Python "British": you're technically correct, but you haven't begun to capture the weird, wonderful, unique nature of what you're talking about.
Imagine, if you will, Devil May Cry, minus the Gothy anime angst. Imagine Ninja Gaiden, minus the brutal difficulty. Imagine God of War, minus Sony's polish. Imagine Clover's other wacky fighting game, Viewtiful Joe, but minus the PG kid friendly sensibility. Now you're in God Hand territory. This is a world of midgets, fat Mexicans named Elvis, and gay twins in chaps attacking you with their butts and wiggling crotches. This is a world where kicking a dude in the nuts so his head turns blue is considered gameplay, because God Hand is deft enough to know that this won't work against female enemies. Go ahead and try it. See where it gets you.
Perhaps the closest analog to this weird wonderful unique offering is a little-known title called Samurai Western. It was a fairly conventional fighting game elevated by the sheer giddiness of its strange humor. A Samurai in the Old West, slicing up cowboys and smacking bullets out of the way with his katana while twangy country music plays in the background? Ha ha! But God Hand makes Samurai Western look like the McNeil Lehrer News Hour.
The titular God Hand is actually an entire arm that will light up and smack bad guys the same way Popeye does when he's hopped up on spinach. The whole vibe owes a lot to Tex Avery and the Three Stooges, and fans of movies like Kung Fu Hustle and Shaolin Soccer will feel right at home here. Crazy surfer music plays in the background, as if someone who didn't know any better figured this was the best music for beating up people. Every now and then there's a cutscene that makes little or no sense, but usually involves a buxom woman in a short skirt or a curvy dominatrix demon wearing an impossible costume. And don't ask why the girls have bunny ears or the monkeys are throwing bombs. That would be trying to make sense of it. Don't. Just go with it.
The over-the-top shenanigans might be tedious in a lesser game. But God Hand accompanies its wackiness with solid gameplay. There's a unique customizable fighting system that lets you queue up your own combos, and assign attacks to whichever buttons you like. Some attacks have special attributes, like launching enemies into the air, or charging up the longer you hold down the button. Some are fast but do little damage. Some are kicks, some break blocks, and some even have a taunt animation at the end that leaves you vulnerable. God Hand allows for plenty of experimentation by letting you change your attack load out at any time. And you're constantly getting new attacks, whether they're dropped by defeated enemies or for sale at the store.
There are also "roulette attacks", named after the spinning list you use to call them up. These are like powerful spells, accompanied by some of the best and goofiest animated interactions (the aforementioned kick to the nuts is one of these). You use roulette attacks by spending power orbs that enemies might drop. Finally, there's an adrenaline meter that fires up the God Hand, putting you in blinding speed rage invincibility glowing arm crazy berserker mode. These are the times God Hand turns up to eleven.
There's no camera control to futz with, as you're always looking over your character's shoulder. The right analog stick lets you quick-dodge, which is the closest you'll get to strafing. It can sometimes be a pain to get through a door, but the combat doesn't suffer from the lack of traditional controls. What's more, a radar minimap makes it easy to keep track of who's where.
Using these relatively simple mechanics, God Hand presents a streamlined but flexible and moderately deep combat system. There aren't any blocking, jumping, or complicated combos to memorize. A dynamic difficulty system will level up enemies if you do well, which increases the reward you'll earn at the end of a stage. But if they start getting too hard for you, the level drops back down. It's a simple concession to the fact that not everyone is a fighting game savant who can deal with issues like timing, juggling, counters, and other staples of the genre. Those are all in here, and they're waiting for people who play on those terms. For everyone else, it's still extremely gratifying to just punch the crap out of bad guys at supersonic speeds, grooving along with the bitch slapping, nut kicking, kee-yahing of it all.
God Hand's graphics aren't just low-tech for how current gen they look, but also for the way it sometimes feels pasted together out of gaudy construction paper. There are plenty of times where the camera will swing through a wall and -- oops! -- clearly show you what's on the other side, even if it's just a vast expanse of nothing.
But you won't be getting this game for the advanced graphics engine. Instead, you'll be getting it for the fact that during one early battle, someone sticks a piece of paper on your character's back that says 'Kick my ass'. And it stays there throughout the level. Any game that refuses so steadfastly to take itself seriously, and manages to do so without chucking meaningful gameplay out the window, is something special indeed.