God Hand

The difficulty gauge in the corner is the whole argument. Fight cleanly, dodge on time, land your combos, and it ticks upward through three tiers to LEVEL DIE, at which point the thugs stop waiting their turn and start swinging in unison. Take hits and it drops back down. No other brawler of the era tied its own generosity so directly to your performance, and none of them made the reward for mastery feel so much like a threat.

That idea sits inside a game that looks, at a glance, like Capcom clearing out a warehouse. The 2006 release from Clover Studio, directed by Shinji Mikami, hands you Gene, a one-armed drifter carrying a divine limb, and sends him through desert towns and a casino full of gorillas, luchadores and Elvis impersonators. Textures are flat, the framerate wobbles, and the camera hangs low behind Gene's shoulder like it is embarrassed to be there. The soundtrack is bad-on-purpose funk. Almost everything about the presentation reads as a joke at its own expense.

The combat does not. Dodging lives on the right stick, so ducking, weaving and backstepping are analogue and immediate rather than a canned animation you commit to. Your standard combo is assembled by hand from an unlockable list, one move per slot, and a separate wheel of Roulette specials burns charges on a suplex, a leg sweep or a lariat that clears a whole crowd. Learning which enemy tells to punish and which to simply walk away from is the actual content. Enemies telegraph, you read, you answer. It is a fighting game's economy of attention rendered as a street brawl.

Reviews at the time were split hard, and some of the harshest ones were arguing with the wrapping rather than the fighting. The reputation has inverted since, partly because so few games have been willing to be this demanding while cracking jokes about kicking a man in the groin. It is also genuinely stiff early on, and the first hour will convince plenty of players that it is broken rather than strict.

Clover was dissolved shortly after, which gives the whole thing a valedictory air it never asks for. What lingers is not the gorilla in the tuxedo but the moment the gauge locks at maximum, four men close in, and you realise the game has been raising the stakes because you told it to.