Two years ago Viewtiful Joe hit the Gamecube like a sack of bricks. Joe was something of a reawakening for modern games, bringing back the long forgotten beat-em-up genre and showing that sidescrollers refused to be relegated to the annals of history. More than that, though, VJ was a terrifically challenging and fun game. Highly stylized in not just visuals, but also in control style, Joe made his players believe they were really defeating movie-sized villains and exploiting Joe's awe-inspiring VFX powers.

Capcom, being Capcom, made a sequel the next year with new locales and some new features. While it certainly suffered from some inevitable sequel factor pitfalls, it was still a solid production, remaining true to the parts of the Viewtiful Joe formula that worked. This year, the main event - Viewtiful Joe Double Trouble - made a terrible mistake in forgetting that.

VJDT begins cinematically with a mystery girl (who we later learn is Jasmine, Joe's little sister) being threatened by Hulk Davidson, returning big green rhinoceros from the original game. Captain Blue jumps in to save her just in time, but while he's not looking Hulk hurls a truck at them. It looks almost over, until Joe steps in... and ruins the film, and Jasmine's hopes of a big acting break. Blue and Jasmine were right in the middle of filming the next box-office blockbuster, Captain Blue 2005. Silvia (Joe's girlfriend from the previous games) arrives, and wonders what's going on, when Blue points out the cameras - but where have they gone? And what are those goons doing running away with Blue's film canister? Jasmine rushes after them to try and get it back, and Joe engages in hot pursuit.

As the story develops, Joe learns that an evil "Queen" is trying to steal the hero-ness from several popular movie heroes, including a Robo-Cop knockoff, a female Edward Scissorhands, and Captain Blue himself, along with a couple of other parody characters. However, the plot knows enough to not get in the way of the game. Joe's rival Alastor shows up out of nowhere for a duel, and the game's ending is completely trivial, but it makes the production come together and that's all that matters.

In-game cutscenes are displayed with still art or moving action and dialog boxes on the top screen. Though button presses progress the dialog, each cutscene is made up of several movie-like cuts, which must be progressed by manually sliding a ... slide, from the bottom screen upward. Some cutscenes, like the introductory one for instance, can consist of several dozen of these slides. While this is within the realm of getting used to, it is an ominous harbinger of the control issues that are to come.

In Double Trouble, Joe has lost some of his classic powers, but gained several new ones to round out his repertoire. Slow, of course, is indispensable, and operates just as it always has: hold the L button to slow the action on-screen and make dodging attacks and deflecting projectiles a snap. Mach Speed is gone, and somewhat taking its place is Scratch. Tap the R button, and Joe jumps up and poses - now scratch the bottom screen, and objects will fall on enemies or objects that you touch. It is used in a few puzzle situations, but as an offensive move it is usually fruitless.

Another new ability is Split, the power of splitting the screen in two. Move the stylus horizontally across the bottom screen to separate it in two halves, and slide the top one back and forth to change the alignment of things. This power is used in many puzzles, such as dropping falling objects on certain places, pouring water on fires, or putting an obstacle inbetween Joe and incoming fire. Unfortunately, the technique of splitting a vertical wall in two to jump through it becomes the game's most overused trick, and at the end of the game it becomes as standard a move as jumping.

Joe's Zoom-In is back, but not exactly how you remember it. By sliding the bottom screen vertically, "switching" it with the top, the Slide power provides a close-up view of Joe's immediate surroundings. This view is in fact so close that it's useless against most enemies. However, the final new ability, Touch, can only be used while Slide is in effect. Touch allows you to simply touch things on the bottom screen to affect them, like buttons, dials, levers, and some enemies that can only be defeated by touching them. Or at least, that's what the game says; the item shop allows Joe to purchase a "VFO" weapon, a boomerang-like flying disc that shoots lasers, which can also defeat Touch-only foes.

The new powers are cool and fun to use, and introduce some interesting new puzzles. Unfortunately, what Clover forgot is that the average human has no more than two hands. The degree of precision necessary on the bottom screen to accurately execute touch-screen powers is unfortunately high, meaning using your stubby fingers is almost out of the question. Even if you have the stylus in hand as you hold the DS like a traditional controller, switching between the face buttons and the stylus control is not as instantaneous as the game requests in combat situations. Most of the game's bosses have a part of their movement pattern in which they are vulnerable to Touch, but the opening is extremely slim and there simply isn't enough time to stop and fiddle with the touch screen. In fact, attempting to do so usually leaves Joe vulnerable to the next attack, and so a lesson learned early on is to not bother attempting to use Slide or Touch in boss situations. Even Split can sometimes take too long.

This half-baked new power system would be great if the existing combat rules had remained unchanged; unfortunately, some of the most vital components of Joe's martial artistry are gone. In the original two games, dodging an enemy's attack put him in a daze and made him extra susceptible to a Slow attack. This is still true (in fact, dodging an enemy in Double Trouble also makes him extra vulnerable to Scratch), but the balance has shifted dramatically. Where in VJ1 and 2 a single slow-mo punch or kick meant the end of a dazed low-level grunt, in Double Trouble it takes at least two Slowed blows; in fact, there is barely a difference between the number of hits an enemy takes while dazed and while not dazed.

Additionally, while in the original titles hitting a dazed enemy in slow-mo would put other on-screen enemies in a more vulnerable state, nearby enemies are unaffected by this in VJDT. In effect, the Double Trouble combat system has removed the benefit of dodging enemy attacks, and more often than not you are better off just beating the tar out of enemies as soon as you approach them. While this makes for an interesting pace, it is not the timing-oriented and stylistic combat system that made Joe's previous exploits so challenging; it is a simple-minded button mashing adventure.

For a fairly early DS game, Double Trouble looks graphically polished. Yes, there are jaggies and edges, but the scene comes together looking pretty solid and the Viewtiful Joe graphical style is at least recognizable, if not fully fleshed out. The game's soundtrack is quite good, and though the quality is clearly not as good as its console predecessors, it's still pleasing to the ear. There is, however, a distracting quirk in how the game handles music between scenes: even if the scene you're entering has the same background music as the scene you've just left, the music has to start all over again. Double Trouble's sound effects appear to be ripped directly from the originals, and while it doesn't have the cajones for full voice acting like VJ1 and 2, there are a handful of small voice clips rounding out a few of the main characters.

Like the previous games, Viewtiful Joe has replay value in the form of higher difficulty levels, in addition to the default ones (Kids for easy mode, and Adults for normal). Sadly, it looks as if there are no unlockable playable characters this time around, so there's really no reward for playing the higher difficulty levels except for the accomplishment itself. The game's length is respectable, not quite as long as the other VJs but fairly long for a handheld action game. For the sake of portability, Double Trouble incorporates a combination of an autosave mechanism after every scene (each chapter consists of several scenes) and manual saves, which miraculously manages to cure the saving-into-a-hole disease present in most games on the market: if your autosave puts you at a boss battle with low health and no upgrades, you can return to a manual save and beef up for the battle.

Double Trouble brings some cool new ideas to the table, but tows control awkwardness along with them. It has also forsaken some of the key aspects of the Viewtiful Joe combat system that made the previous games, for lack of a better word, Viewtiful. Plus, without unlockable characters, there is a distinct lack of replay motivation. While Double Trouble is a good game, and shows some promise for the future of the franchise, it's just not as fun to play as the originals.

Progress: Complete

Rating: Good