When I was fifteen I attended my very first high school dance. I was a teenager approaching my burgeoning manhood and there was a pretty girl on whom I was rather sweet, my companion for the evening. Unfortunately, as things often are to the young teen, I was without a car and my only mode of transportation was through my parents, a rather uncool way of getting from place to place.

"Do you think she's prettier than me?" "Y... no... er... well everyone's different, right?"

Thus, due to the restrictive influence of my parental units, my affection was limited mostly to a few musky, lukewarm beers, followed at the end of the night by enough breath mints to kill a large horse, and some idle groping underneath the stage in my school's theatre. Because of the eerie spectre of parental discipline waiting for me at the end of the night, my dreams of exploring the length and breadth of the female form were duly restricted. I knew that there was a powerful oasis of nudity waiting out there for me, but it was not my lot in life to attain such corporeal pleasures at that time.

Not that second base was all that bad either, though!

Viewtiful Joe 2 (VJ2), which arrives to us just shortly over a year after the breakout title, provides me with a similar quandary. While playing the game I was loosely aware that there was something better out there waiting for me. Unlike my fumbling in the darkened recess of the stagehand's pit, I had already been to the oasis of manhood that Viewtiful Joe 1 represented. Now I felt that I had regressed, like a backwards version of the Tom Hanks feature Big, wherein I was a strapping young buck suddenly thrust into the shoes of a pathetic eight year old, having all the opportunities and experiences of a young adult stripped away from me. Here I was left with the unsavory task of trying to again decipher the Byzantine labyrinth that is the female brassiere, Viewtiful Joe-style.

Viewtiful Joe 2, while fun in its own right, pales in comparison to its predecessor. The game doesn't fall flat on its face as other Capcom properties like Devil May Cry 2 have, but the end experience is generally unimpressive, much too easy, and will leave the nostalgic game player with only the foul taste of change in their mouth.
There are two core problems with Viewtiful Joe 2, both of which stem from unresolved promises and wasted potential. The original game's journey was already a pretty solid reward and on top of that Capcom saw fit to accord the dedicated player a host of unlockables. Viewtiful Joe 1 had three secret characters, each of which could be played further to unlock a Super version of the character. VJ2 shows none of this attention to detail and, despite the most fervent efforts of its fans; no unlockable characters have been brought to light. This is a pretty damning thing in a game that never manages to reach the level of charm and panache that its forerunner did. Also, Capcom played a disappearing act with the promise co-op gameplay, smoke screening many fans that believed it was going to be included up until and beyond the last hours of the game's production. When the game shipped, no co-op was on the platter. Instead the only unlockable to speak of is a rather uninspired series of survival stages where Joe and his new partner Silvia fight off hosts of enemies under (barely) different circumstances.

The mention of Silvia immediately brings up bitter bile in my throat. The girl, as you might remember, was Joe's girlfriend and part of the impetus for his original quest to Heroness. In this game Silvia is given a starring role as a fully playable character that can be tag in and out at the player's leisure. However, in an effort to make her a unique addition Silvia lacks many of the abilities Joe has that make the game so much fun. Silvia sacrifices the mach speed power for an ostensibly worthless one, replay, which seems to have no real purpose except for the completion of puzzles that require it.

There's nothing quite like fighting a fun miniboss (seven times).

The idea of replay is that, while it's running, Silvia will hit three times and do triple damage. Problem is that Silvia is so much weaker than Joe that any hit during replay mode probably only ends up narrowly beating out one of Joe's normal attacks with a significant disruption in gameplay and a huge cost to your character's videogame lifeblood, the VFX meter. Not only this, but at damage Silvia incurs during replay mode will result in a triple hit to her. Silvia also wields a pair of guns that, aside from being weak at the cost of a longer range, can be as pathetically slow as the rest of her meager arsenal. If the majority of Viewtiful Joe players are anything like me they'll spend about five minutes with Silvia before stowing her away in a locker and taking her out only when absolutely necessary.

But Silvia has a much more dastardly premise behind her, one that can't be put away with the Z Button. Her "I'm so sassy!" demeanor infects most of the game's cutscenes and almost completely obliterates what the original built. The pre-boss bantering, which was considered by many to be a highlight of the original game, is frequently interrupted with all too standard TV sitcom drama, where the boyfriend inadvertently makes a crack about his girlfriend's weight or overbearing persona that results in him getting a smack in the head or a disapproving look. Instead of the Viewtiful drama we've come to know and love, half of the cutscenes take on the general candor of a Suddenly Susan episode. Girl power! The sole ray of hope is that Silvia (mostly) stays out the important cutscenes: Joe's face-off with his rival, for example, is one of the few generally funny and inspired moments the game has to offer. It only serves to enhance that bitter taste, the knowledge that if Silvia wasn't there maybe every scene would be as good as those shining gems.

Not only does the game offer a brief spat attractiveness here and there, such as a rather overt reference to the 1980s anime series Super Dimensional Fortress Macross or a really kicking stage theme in level 3 that totally psyches you up to beat down some wooden robots, but we know that these people could've done better because they have. They did it a year ago! Despite a really excellent pair of final bosses that absolutely oozes in style what they lack in difficulty, the only thing that Viewtiful Joe 2 will really accomplish for you is a strong desire to play the original game again, which I did for about three weeks after I beat the sequel. That's three times as many hours I spent on Viewtiful Joe 1, not including my original obsession with it, than I did on its sequel.

The dreary ghost of co-op haunts these cursed pictures.

If Viewtiful Joe 2 was the first game and Viewtiful Joe 1 was the product released only recently then Capcom would be praised for taking a mediocre property and skyrocketing it into sheer bliss, practically overnight no less. As it is Viewtiful Joe 2 is a practically generic platformer that makes no significant efforts to expand on its beginnings and, as such, is a slightly above average game that provides only shadowy glances of days gone by. I felt very little tangible excitement when playing Viewtiful Joe 2 and, like that night with the teenage love of my life, got relatively little action for my trouble. The game is still a heck of a lot better than the other crop of 2D beat ‘em ups out there right now, but that's hardly a winning accolade.