N-Philes

Viewtiful Joe: Double Trouble

Posted January 25th 2006 by Jordan Mammo.

Rewind to August 2003. Atsushi Inaba is not a happy man. Viewtiful Joe has just recently been released in Japan to great reviews and Capcom has short-shipped their initial supply. The game sold out its roughly 33,000 unit shipment, but in the land where games tend to gather the bulk of their sales in their first two weeks of availability, the news is hardly comforting for Inaba. With Japan out of the way now, he looks for a better reception in the West.

Now fast-forward to just a few months ago. I'm sitting at my computer when I get an instant message from a friend.

"There's a Viewtiful Joe TV show on right now."

"Whoa," I say to him.

"Yeah. It kind of sucks, though."

"That's disappointing."

Let's step back and dissect the details of this gripping dialogue, like this little tidbit: there's a Viewtiful Joe TV show? It looks like the West gave Inaba just the type of reception he wanted. Yet with four Viewtiful Joe games in three years, the first question we need answered is this: is the celluloid superhero wearing out his welcome?

The first hint that the answer is quite possibly a "yes" is the story, which I'll detail here if you can keep up: Double Trouble opens with Captain Blue wrapping up his latest movie. Suddenly, an evil group called the Madow pops up and steals the reel! Joe and his sister run off after the goons with both Captain Blue and Silvia following up behind and filming the entire chase.

For those who have played through Joe's previous outings, this set-up isn't much of a stretch for the franchise. But that's not all, it gets worse; everything culminates into the kind of story that builds itself up for the sole reason of playing a practical joke on the player. Double Trouble's plot amounts to so much nothingness that when the "shocking" twists are revealed in the final act, you feel like smashing your face in with a frying pan. The best advice one can give for those who experience this is to remember that you're playing a Capcom game, which means that the plot is usually really bad, an afterthought, or a lame set-up for a sequel anyway. Or, in this case, all three of those things.

Fortunately, story has never been the big focus of Viewtiful Joe. What kept people involved in the franchise was its energetic and combo-driven combat system and cool VFX powers, which included abilities such as "Slow" (slows down time) and "Mach Speed" (speeds time up). While Slow does make a comeback, Clover Studio has taken advantage of the Nintendo DS' touch-screen capabilities and brought forth some really novel ideas. "Scratch" allows you to drop objects on enemies or budge objects loose, "Split" divides the screen in half and allows you to manipulate the top portion, and "Slide" essentially acts as the "Zoom" option from previous games, letting you bring the top-screen of the DS down and interact with buttons and switches or score more powerful hits.

Of course, while these new abilities sound pretty cool in theory, they don't really shine in the combat or puzzle-solving aspects of Double Trouble. Although the solid basics have been kept, the fast-paced combat system seen in the GameCube versions has been severely watered down. Rarely will you ever see more than two enemies on-screen at once (likely a sacrifice made to keep the game running smoothly on the DS), and if you do it'll be opponents such as those pesky bats that can only be destroyed by Zooming in and tapping them with your finger. VFX Slow no longer carries over to the next set of enemies, meaning raking in high amounts of V-Points (used to buy new moves and abilities) is just about impossible. And finally, the new touch-screen abilities don't bring much new to the table in the combat department outside of a few clever uses in boss fights.

Just playing through the first stage makes it clear that combat isn't the focus either, despite the foundation laid by its predecessors. The real stars of this game are the puzzles. But while Clover certainly creates some interesting obstacles, they completely shoot themselves in the foot when it comes to presenting these challenges to the player. Upon entering a room, the camera instantly zooms and sweeps across the area, showcasing just what you‘re supposed to concentrate on. As if this weren't enough, above each object you're supposed to interact are big words telling you which VFX power you're supposed to use. It's excessive hand-holding to the point of being insulting, or at least unfulfilling. If there's a giant red button in the middle of a room that says "PUSH" right above it, there's really no need for the words "SLIDE" to be hovering overhead. And having the camera zoom in to focus on that button telling players "See, you have to use SLIDE to PUSH this GIANT RED button!" is just... well you can imagine how satisfying it is to solve a puzzle like that.

Compounding these problems are the controls. When Viewtiful Joe was released on the GameCube, you could get to a point where it didn't even feel like you were controlling a game. You thought about what you wanted to do and it just happened somehow; that's how fluid and intuitive everything was. Double Trouble is... not like that. It's the type of game you dread playing on the DS. It juggles the D-Pad, touch-screen, shoulder buttons, and face buttons all at once, and during hectic moments such as boss fights, it's a wild and clunky mess. Sometimes you'll be jumping around dodging objects when the boss stops for a few seconds and the words "Slide" appear near a weak point. So you bust out the stylus because using your finger on the touch-screen is unresponsive and you try to use Slide but instead you accidentally activate Split and then you back out of that attack so that you can activate Slide correctly only by now it's too late so the boss starts moving again and kicking your ass. It's at this point when you might stop and say "Screw this #@!%" and just clobber the boss with regular Slow attacks until it dies.

All of these things lead me to wonder what's behind this title. Double Trouble is the type of game that flat-out belittles its audience. Either that or it hopes its audience is too young to really notice or care. A bit strange, since the original Viewtiful Joe catered towards action fans and hardcore gamers; Atsushi Inaba even said it was exclusive to GameCube because he believed that platform was geared towards those types of gamers. This game is different, though, what with its diluted combat, wonky controls, and puzzles that require no more than a pulse to solve. Even the story is crude. Clearly, then, this game wasn't targeted at the hardcore player.

This leads us into our second question: Just who is Double Trouble aiming for? And for the answer to that, we have to remember this small piece of information:

There's a Viewtiful Joe TV show now.

Slight Pulse - Kind of the "straight to video" sequel of the Viewtiful Joe series.

What Viewtiful Joe: Double Trouble does right are the basics of the franchise. The solid combat foundations are still there, and the game remains surprisingly faithful to the style and music of its predecessors. However, it falters by not executing its innovations well enough, which is unfortunate because they are cool, and by not having enough faith in its audience. Some reviews have stated that only the most devoted of Joe's fans need apply; I'd actually say just the opposite. Double Trouble seems intended for a wider, younger, dumber audience, but even they may be turned off by its cumbersome control scheme.

Posted in: Reviews

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