Sin&Punishment: Successor of the Earth (N64 via Wii VC)
2004 Nintendo/Treasure

The Short Version: It’s kind of like a 3-D Gunstar Heroes, only Treasure is trying to be DARK this time. If you like shooting virtual bugs and don’t get motion sick, this is your game!

The Long Version: Treasure is one of the most beloved and fapped-to game companies among self-proclaimed hardcore gamers out there, and not entirely without reason. They’ve proven pretty consistently to focus on a normally-impossible balance of style and substance, creating drool-worthy setpiece boss battles that manage to feel epic/cinematic while leaving you in complete control. At the core of most every Treasure game is typically a simple engine, with one or two little gimmicks chucked in there, which aren’t usually absolutely vital to success, but you’d be much, much, better off mastering. (Bangai-O Spirits is a good example for the most part, it throws out all the building blocks and leaves you to solve the puzzles however you feel. PROTIP: Most solutions involve shooting everything.)

Intro paragraphs in gaming articles are about like skin flicks where they burn off the first fifteen minutes asking the girl of the day how she likes the weather, so now that that’s behind us, on to the Sin&Punishment. S&P is a here-to-unreleased in the West N64 game of the rail-shooter style, and finally made available through the Wii Virtual Console to people without the money and resources to import the thing. Or the technical know-how to work an emulator. Your goal in this game is to shoot, shoot, shoot everything that moves until everything goes letterboxy and bad voice-acty. The obligatory gimmick past the 3-D shooting element itself is the main character’s DOLPHIN assault weapon doubling as a machine gun at range and a sword at close range, delivering a crushing blow or repelling projectiles back to their source. If you can’t guess it, bouncing missiles at things will play a big role in the proceedings.

All in all, the game is a lot similar to some of the more dynamic light gun games in the way the camera sweeps around to follow the action, only instead of a first-person view you have a (usually) over the shoulder view of the proceedings. You can dodge left and right or jump while shooting and aiming on analog control, which is for the most part a good scheme, though there were a frustrating number of times that I found myself dead when my character decided to emergency roll while I was trying to gently nudge them along between death lasers. There is a sort of two-player mode available where one player ‘steers’ and the other aims for the character, which would have probably been really nice about then.

So, we have a nice little action scheme set up, now for the hook- this game is charmingly but thoroughly and unmistakably fucked up. The backstory, which I regurgitate for the benefit of you all planning to a

ctually play this and hopefully reduce your confusion involves two rival groups of crazy future people lead by a woman named Achi and a guy named Brad who share their blood with their followers to heal them and also turn them into crazy superpowered pawns. Then there is also your typical anime alien horde of buglike creatures dubbed The Ruffians (shit you not) who were apparently specially bred to feed the ridiculously overpopulated human populous. Instead, they went about fixing the problem more pro-actively by breaking loose and running rampant all over Hokkaido. Might I suggest engineering bigger cows instead of armored insects with razor-sharp claws and mandibles next time?

Things start off innocuously enough with a trio of freedom fighters blowing up faceless goons left and right along with various expensive looking pieces of machinery for dramatic effect. As the first level wears on, however, you end up atop a skyscraper battling first a rhino-bug-like thing (which is easily dispatched by pushing it off the edge with gunfire and well placed sword strikes, then a telekinetic army woman who uses her own men as shields/projectiles, then goes berserk and launches herself at you like a multiple suicide bomber if you don’t time your counter right. Assuming you do, though, one sword swipe is all it takes to kill her, at which point Treasure slips our hero the bad acid. The woman falls off the building, then all of a sudden, buildings collapse and everything sinks into a literal OCEAN OF BLOOD. The sky turns into a swirling vortex to Hell, then both you and the prior boss spontaneously morph into colossal bio-mechanical monstrosities and continue battling knee deep in the BLOOD OCEAN. At one point your enemy even dives into it, sending TIDAL WAVES OF BLOOD and BLOOD WAVES at you.

After all hell breaks loose, and since the hero (though honestly the graphic level of the N64 makes “Saki” look like he’s wearing a big black pleated skirt) is now apparently Betterman, we join his girlfriend as the new playable lead as she fights the evil… Brad and his… cat. If that sounds like an anticlimax after the WORLD ENDS IN STAGE 1, it is a bit, at least until you have a gunblade duel on the bridge of an aircraft carrier, followed by a dizzying sequence where Achi telekinetically levitates a piece of scrap metal you’re standing on all around a fleet of aircraft carriers, which you must systematically destroy with a combination of gun fire and repelled missiles. Then you fight a plane-surfing Brad, who retreats and then challenges you with a god damned orbital cannon satellite, and then… ugh, you get the point. To use a phrase reiterated shamelessly by every summer movie, this game is, in fact, a non-stop roller coaster ride of thrills and explosive action culminating in a one-on-one duel against the planet Earth’s evil twin.

Again, shit you not.

So on the whole, it’s a satisfying game, which is why it’s kind of a shame that it’s of another era and feels incredibly short. It can be beaten in about an hour or two, which is grounds for lynching these days for some reason, though it used to be about standard for action titles before it was necessary for fully-voiced sermons about WHY MUST WE FIGHT EACH OTHER to pad extra hours onto the experience or hiding fourteen trillion doodads in out of the way locations for you to hunt down. Or level grinding, of course. Why I bring that up is that on Virtual Console, they tacked an additional 200 points onto to the usual N64 game cost of 1000 points, which translates to $12. The explanation is the cost of the translation, though the game was already in English except for the menus, and cutscenes still have black bars full of Japanese subtitling at the bottom. So it’s kind of a half assed translation that makes it feel like they’re milking the exclusivity of it literally for another couple bucks. Is it worth it? I’d tend to say so, and even though the graphics are kind of rough everything is moving around too fast for it to really matter. Provided you don’t look directly at the cutscenes where everything comes off as some kind of puppet show run by weird FFIX-looking marionettes.