Gungrave

The most telling thing about Gungrave is how little it asks of you. Grand Macho, the undead gunman Beyond the Grave, walks forward, and everything in his path dies. Two pistols, a stream of enemies, a huge coffin on his back. The design is built to make that feel good, and for a few hours it does.

The game came out in 2002 from Red Entertainment, with Trigun creator Yasuhiro Nightow handling character design and Tsuneo Imahori among the creative names behind it. Its look is the first thing that lands: heavy coats, sunglasses, a noir-tinged gangster mood that sits somewhere between anime and pulp. Its story, about a mobster brought back from the dead to pursue the organization he once served, is told through cutscenes that are more interesting than the stages they connect.

The stages are where the game shows its hand. You hold fire and the pistols track targets automatically, so aiming is mostly about facing the right way and moving. Shooting builds a combo counter, and chaining kills feeds the Demolition Shots, big special attacks that spend a gauge and clear a room. Beyond that there are a few melee swings and the odd use of the coffin, but the toolkit is thin by design. Boss fights break the rhythm with bigger health bars and a little pattern reading, though not much more than that.

The weakness is repetition. Levels are linear corridors and streets filled with the same enemy types, and the game is short enough that it ends before the monotony fully sets in, which may be the only reason it escapes it. It was never a deep game, and it did not hide that. Reviewers at the time tended to praise the style and note the shallowness, and that balance still looks right.

What survives is atmosphere. Few PS2 shooters have such a clear sense of who their hero is, and fewer commit so hard to a single mood. Play it as a short, loud, handsome piece of attitude and it holds together. Ask it for depth and the coffin turns out to be emptier than it looks.