Cowboys couldn't afford cannons, station wagons, and *especially* theme songs! That's how you know Zan is actually a super ultra sexy hero. ...Or a tax evader.
"I'm a poor cowboy that needs money for iaijutsu lessons to synergize with my quickdraw gunplay so I can rescue my frontier town from an evil ninja clan." -Samurai Gunman Zan
Attentiion all character action GAMERS Johnny is fighting off the evil ninja clan but he NEEDS you're help to defeat loki and take back his town. To do this he's gonna need a couple a things, A katana, a revolver that can load shotgun shells and rockets, and PLENTY of tempura fried shrimp! All he needs from you is your credic card number the 3 digits on the back and the experation month and year. But you have to be QUICK before the ninja clan take over the whole wild west entirely.
I really really like this game. The NPCs always made me think of God Hand, too, along with the setting, goofy lyrical theme song, main character, and enemy designs. I think these two games share a specific vibe that you won't quite find anywhere else.
Don't be too assured of yourself dude. any game that can have enough correspondences to one another are the ones that can be a very good mix match without overbearing it. (except for soulslike games they are just the insubordinate example of mix match game.)
Thank you for covering this absolute masterpiece of a game. Zan deserves all of the credit he gets. There was nothing else like this in 1999. Good work, Kraft!!!
I remember watched the super best friends do a 30 minute quick look in their mystery box series YEARS ago and its always kinda stuck with me ever since
@@Kraftium Oh, I got it when it came out. To be fair, I was 20 in 1999, and had already been in the military almost two years and was stationed in Japan. Seems like a lifetime ago. Congrats on your channel growth and your personal growth as a content creator. Your editing and scripting continue to improve. Keep up the good work!
I agree with your definition of what a "character action" game is. I saw a comment on a video about TMNT: Shredder's Revenge that somebody said they wanted to see what a modern day beat'em up would be like if developers weren't trying to cater to 90s nostalgia. I told them "that's what character actions games are." I enjoy certain beat'em ups from the 80s and 90s, but I'm glad that the genre evolved into what we have today. Thanks for bringing this game to my attention. I'll definitely give this one a try.
tbf theres also beat em ups that aren't doing that these days too, river city girls and streets of rage 4 very much have their own visual style even if they're technically continuations of older franchiese and theres indie projects like fight n rage that are solely their own thing anyway i'm glad you enjoyed the video
Ever since seeing this game on a “Retro Roulette” stream, it has seriously stuck with me. This was one of those games with massive potential that I feel could have been a mainstay in popular culture if it was just a bit better.
red steel 2 did the samurai cowboy thing on the wii, and it's JUST as forgotten. so far, the only cowboy samurais that have stuck around is 'cowboy bebop' with that one, guy, whatever his name was, and 'guilty gear's johnny.
to anyone reading this: listen to "Hustle Time" from this games soundtrack right now. the first time i played this game, i almost died of laughter because i didnt expect the devil trigger theme to sound ANYTHING like that. actual crime it wasn't played in this video
@@Kraftium 15:25 oh LMAO i had the video pretty quiet so i didnt notice. anyway i didnt really know that anyone had done an analysis of this games combat system so that was a nice surprise
Since I'm still at a point where some of my videos kinda bomb I tend not to put the effort into doing subtitles (tho thats something I should probably change) but out of consideration for people who are only partially deaf (and headphone users/copy write police) I tend to mix my bgm pretty low Glad you enjoyed the video, thanks for watching :D
I wonder what a reboot/remake of this game would look like, If someone was really interested. Anyway man you made a great video and since I saw you had spy a salt on here you think you might do a video about indie character action games. Cause trust me there is a lot of them.
yeah I wanna see a remake too sadly I think the rights are in like limbo, please look foward to my legally distinct rising sam game. glad you enjoyed the video, I definately wanna give some indie CA games a look, not sure as indivdual videos or as 1 big one, soulstice and slayer zero X are 2 examples I wanna talk about. I also was reached out to by the dev of "Heartless and Dreadful : Return by 72 hours" and given a code so I want to cover that in some way too also if you look at wazen's twitter (the creator of assault spy) he's recently teased a new game that looks like its nearly ready to be shown, if its anything like his alpha builds from over a year ago it looks to be a much more indepth version of gravity rush's combat with proper combos
@@Kraftium Oh yeah I know about all those games I followed Them and a bunch of others on Twitter or access is called now. My personal favorites are sort of Symphony and yasuke lost descendant. These games aren't finished and are still in their development Phase but it's always cool that the mechanics and the combos that you'll be able to do in the game. Anyway thanks for the reply and keep up the good work
Thats fine sometimes personal taste just gets in the way I do think later DMCs inparticular can get overwhealming to new players to the series So if you ever want to try again I recommend watching "Devil May Cry 1 Advanced Techniques" (despite the name they're not that hard to do) on youtube (theres actually 2 videos by different people but they go over alot of the same stuff) and giving DMC1 another go. Being a much simpler games compared to the later titles it means its alot more tightly designed
@@Exellocks It weirdly is! The combat is complex and smooth for a PS1 game. Kraft didn't even mention you could reflect shots with your pistol. Highly recommended!!!
I was on the ‘spectacle fighter’ bandwagon until a fan of the genre pointed out that plenty of mechanically shallow games have spectacle via cutscene supers, etc. For now I’ve pretty much settled on using ‘stylish’ as a prefix, so we can account for stylish action/beat ‘em ups, as well as stylish shooters like Vanquish or Ultrakill. It’s not perfect, but it feels less obtuse than, ‘you play as a character who performs actions’ lol
I mean the term "character action" is admittly not a good one for actually decribing what it is (good thing language can be proscriptive) but yeah I've explained why i don't spectacle fighter is much better. The only defence on the name is its an action game where the focus revolves around the level of control you have on your character which does line up with what I said I think is the core of character action games in my video "stylish action" is a pretty fine term but I still find throwing in more phrases that mean the same thing causes more confusion than clarity But you're right, character action is a game dev philosphy that can be applied to shooters like vanquish and ultrakill but also doom eternal imo (not doom 2016 tho which is weird) and platformers like penny's big breakaway (that game literally has a DMC style style ranking during gameplay)
@@Kraftium Yeah the over-saturation of terms is a problem that can affect even _really good_ new suggestions, for sure. Also I forgot to mention in my comment but I loved the ‘canned sentences vs individual words’ framing! Even beyond the Challenge/Mastery goals of character action, it’s a design ethos I’d love to see in _most games!_
I remember rising zan. If 2d games count then I’d argue Panzer bandit was one of the first psuedo character action games. It takes the 2d beat em up formula and adds guilty gear style combos similar to guardian heroes but way more fluid
ooo I've not seen this one before, I'll have to give it a look 2D is kinda weird if it counts, like sengoku 3 has combos and such but it still feels like it was meant to be a beat em up first but the likes of veiwtiful joe, super crush ko and slayer zero X I'd definately count
Later, on the PS2, there was a game called samurai. Western, which it really felt like a sequel to rising zan. Samurai western is a spin off way of the samurai
Awesome. Last time I saw someone talking about this game was X-Play on G4 so many years ago, and that was a drop in the bucket quick review. Thank you for explaining the inspiring madness of Rising Zan! THE SAMURAI GUNMAN! JOHNNY NO MORE! Even if it is a proto character thingy, it looked entertaining. Cheers.
Came for a Zan video, got someone actually giving a proper explanation of what Character Action is. 10/10. This game kicks ass. Just the opening alone lets you know it’s gonna be rad, and while the controls can be a big stiff and unresponsive at times, it generally is super fun. They had the style down that for sure. It’s also interesting how well made of an action game for the time it is, considering most hack n slash games from 1999 weren’t the best (the good ones were basically this and Berserk on Dreamcast) especially since like you point out every other game the developer made was about snowboarding or something similar.
Ey glad you enjoyed the video I really should get into beserk, I think 90% of my experience with it is either through memes or that time I spent 3 hours just reading pages on the wikia cos I wanted to know what the deal with skullknight was
See the stuff that you said that makes a character action game is what makes games so fun & satisfying to me and it's why I cannot stand how popular souls like clones are nowadays. Any game like them lack so much ability to "add style" to your gameplay that it drives me crazy. I skateboarded most my life and so finding things that you can master and add your own style to it is the best. I hope we see more games like it come out soon
I can appricate action games without it but it usually needs to be really arcadey for me to get behind it other wise. I love the souls games but I'm kinda sick of everyone making souls likes, especially when what I loved about souls was the somber vibes and slow pace of exploration in 1 and 2 and not just the combat of 3 that everyone seems to use as the base. I remember getting excited for stella blade until I played the demo and was like "oh there's character action here but no where near the amount I though its like 80% souls"
I remember the first time I played this was in a pack of bootleg PS1 disks that included Guilty Gear and after playing it for a bit I HAD to get a legit copy. And yeah, both opening themes were perfect bookends to this video.
nothing like a collection of boot legs I remember my brother having a bunch of burnt dreamcast games, 4 year old kraft was very fond of "102 Dalmatians: Puppies to the Rescue"
There was nothing else on the PS1 like Rising Zan. For the time, his movements and combos were so smooth and the combat was complex in a way that just wasn't in any other game. This wasn't published by Activision or EA, it didn't have a huge budget or advertising campaign, and yet it's loved and respected all these years later for a reason. We got games like this on the PS2 because of Rising Zan.
Hack and slash is kinda like an adjacent term, like you don't do any hacking or slashing in god hand, sifu or even bayonetta (excluding some weapons). They predominately use fists so theres no hacking or slashing, but they're definately not a beat em up Its like a flavour i guess you got first person shooters and then more spefically you've got boomer shooters you've got third person shooters and then you've got cover shooters its used to describe a specfic vibe within the genre
"Character action" is newer term for me, and I also would call most of these games "hack n' slash". Even though Bayonetta doesn't always use swords, her arms and legs function like swords when swinging, so I would use the same term. Sifu is an interesting case though. In my mind, it's like a beat 'em up with the elaborate combo system of a hack n' slash. And I think since defense is more important than something like DMC, the pace of combat is a lot slower. So I guess "character action" works since it seems like an in-between for me🤷♂️
@@magnum567134 I mean like all subgenre terms its just bettwe defining a specific flavour within a more defined genre, CRPGs like baulders gate and kotor are just RPGs at the end of the day but we use more specfic terms to really home in on the part that appeals to people I love Doom Eternal and the new wolfensteins but but if someone said "oh you like first person shooters you should play call of duty" i'd come away disapointed cos its the specficness of "boomer shooter" that I like not all fps's in general
@@morkgin2459 God Hand Is character action taken to the nth degree and sifu is basically the closest thing we've had to successor And yes they're both beat em ups but they're also character action Yakuza is also a beat em up but shares very little in common with godhand cos it focus more on the adventure and RPG elements like a modern river city game zelda is puzzle adventure metroid prime is an fps and a metroidvania
I thought about checking out this game along with the Way of the Samurai. I remember seeing the intro for Zan on G4/Tech TVs Cinematech. It's cool that the Japanese OP is sung by Hironobu Kageyama the same vocalist for Cha-La Head Cha-La
I love how he can enlarge his katana a little bit closer to Sephiroth's size (wording, I know) The man learned the officer's combat technique of charging into a battle with a revolver & blade in each hand, and despite his range and even bigger ego, he still goes "The katana's reach is too short, time to use bigger katana" _Q: How many people like Johnny (Rising Zan) there are out there in video games?_ _How many Sonic derivatives have you seen in whole your life?_ _Answer: a _*_*lot*_*
Fun Fact: Somebody mentioned that Rising Zan can parry ranged projectiles/bullets with his katana... But I do remember some odd example from Ninja Theory Developers... Disney Infinity 3.0 had Star Wars characters with levels and unlockable skills and moves. The basic characters included in the base for the game was Anakin Skywalker & Ashoka Tano... Moveset designed by Ninja Theory Technically, Anakin played similarly to _DMC 5 Nero_ or _DmC : Devil May Cry_ Donté, for sake of clarity Default move was a block, unlockable moves were, a normal parry, **and a upgraded ranged parry** When "perfectly" timing the block (Ctrl for PC) button with the projectile, Anakin would reflect the projectile back where it came from with increased damage and inflict staggering pushback, giving more breathing space in this stagger dependent combat... You could only use it on ground though...
Rising Zan + Sangoku Musou = Shin Sangoku Musou, for sure. :D Glad this game invented Musou, Warriors Orochi 1&2 with DMC3 as well as pretty much any Sengoku Basara are my top 3 for the genre on PS2 I'm sure more favorite games come to mind, like Genji. But this would be a very long comment, lol
There's a lot of considerations I take into account when trying to judge whether a game is "character action" or not, but one of the biggest factors lies in one question... Can the protagonist do a stinger? It may not decide Character Action on it's own, but paired with all the other factors I look at the stinger as a move pretty definitive of the genre. Not exclusive to it, but certainly a strong indicator in my eyes. Whether or not this is enough to determine your judgement, I leave to you. But I say, Zan certainly can do a stinger, and that definitely puts the game near the territory of Character Action gaming. One footprint of many between on the bridge between 2D Arcade Beatemup and 3d Character Action game as we know them today. I rest my case, comment section.
having a stinger definately increases is level of character actiony-ness, its like the style meter, having one on screen isn't gonna suddenly make your game CA but its another indicator that it is and if done correctly those CA vibes start to increase Its why I use that combos = sentences/words anaolgy because its the only way I can define it without going "it just feels like one yknow"
I mean character action is a specfic flavor of hack and slash, or rather its like ... a design mentality? games like Ys, or Shadow of Mordor or even assassin's creed have you hacking and slashing but I wouldn't say they're anything like DMC However stuff the thing that (atleast to me and many others) see in DMC can be seen in other games like God Hand, Wonderful 101 and Sifu Infact the essence of character action can even be seen in weird genre's you wouldn't expect like in shooters with Ultrakill and Doom Eternal (not in Doom 2016 tho) and even platformers like penny's big breakaway Its about player expression and freedom within the game's systems and its what seperates DMC from the countless ps2 hack and slash games no one really talks about anymore
I mean technically if you wanna go all the way back you've got stuff like blade arts, spriggan and soukaigi, if you look hard enough you can see the gradual curve but I feel like most of those games are only like ... 30-60% there While rising zan is like 80%
pfft I like that, tho I'll stick to musou Personally I see the musou games and its contemporaries as like ... arcadey battlefield management sims but that doesn't role off the tounge nor does it give a clear idea of what the genre is, so I just stick with musou cos thats the legacy name and most people know what it means
you'd probably be able to pull it off but you'd need super simple models or even sprites to make it run good and you'd need to scale it back quite a bit due to a lack of ram not being able to have so many moves available at once (the reason dante only has 2 devil arms and 2 guns in DMC3 is due to ram limitations)
you sure? I'm pretty confident in my memory where yahtzee specfically states he invented the term and I can't find anything from a quick google search of anyone but him createing it
@@GameGod77 He did create quite a few phrases so its understandable "port report" for reviewing the quality of ports/remasters of games specfically is one I'm very fond of
Wait, was the guy who sings the Japanese theme, the guy who does various Dragon Ball music and the 2nd opening to the Saint Seiya 80s anime? The guy's voice's is pretty iconic. Okay, looked in the comments and yeah it is. As for the overarching vid, I'm not sure if I use the term "character action" or "specticle fighter"(I tend to avoid anything Yahtzee has to say on anything since I don't like him at all and wonder why on earth some people take him so seriously). I prefer to call them 3D beat em ups since they are basically the 2D beat em but in 3D, and inspired by fighting game logic. There is different styles of 3D beat em ups and it's a vague definition, but there are styles of 2D beat em ups too yet they are still styled under beat em up. Genre definitions are vague and always will be but I tend to define games but what you will be doing 90% of the time, and with DMC and games like it, you are killing enemies using melee combat. As for the game itself, I heard many years ago that it was a proto DMC1, but I never considered playing it since this was before the time Duckstation was even a thing, and I didn't want to play PS1 games due to how bad epsxe was but now I might play it, heard it was also 3 hours too and I tend to gravitate towards short games. I don't when I'll play it, but your vid has gotten me to look into it sooner now that I got more info outside of that one IGN review from many years ago on HLTB.
EY nice we got another one glad i could tickle your interest I do like yahtzee but I don't take his words or anyones as gosbel really, tastes always differ quite a bit (ben moore from former easy allies fame maybe) and yeah what I call character action is basically a part of the beat em up/hack and slash, its a term for a very specfic flavour I stuggle to find in places, well sort of with every triple AAA game becoming more and more harmoginised you start seeing it crop up in places in tiny (lost judgement getting air juggles) or medium sized amounts (stella blade's combat being souls like but with longer combos and specials) The reason I use it so much is cos I wanna fined games that give me the same feeling, its why I'm estatic when I find indie games like soulstice, assault spy and super crush KO cos with platinum games pretty much gone now and team ninja making games based off nioh's style the only big boy series still going is technically DMC and its been a while since we got one now
@@Kraftium I just don't particularly find Yahtzee funny and find his cyncism to be more offputting than productive. I don't like using the word "cynical" as an insult but Yahtzee would be someone I would use it towards, I would be fine with this if he just reviewed bad games like AVGN does, not games that at least have some following or fanbase. Fair enough, it's just easier for me to call them beat em ups than these ultra specific terms that just creates more ambiguity. I know a lot of people like to play specific games but for me, I tend to play almost any random game, except maybe RTS. Hell the single player AAA FPS game is dead outside of Doom and CoD but I don't mind since there is just so much random games for me to play. But I'll look into those other games you mentioned.
ey thanks I appricate it one thing mapping the d-pad to the stick does is makes the "mash the buttons" QTE events super easy which'll spare you alot of unnessersary damage since spinning the stick is alot quicker than mashing a Dpad
Every time I see people use the term "character action" instead of "spectacle fighter", as the genre was originally coined, I feel deep sadness inside. 1:45 Dude, the genre's whole thing is about the main character fighting in the most show of way possible. Besides, many action games have characters in them, does that make them character action games?
character action was first, ben yahtzee literally says in one of his reveiws that (paraphrasing here) "I think Character Action is a usless descriptor so I've created a new term to describe it better" (and I've already explained why I don't think its actually useful at all and why trying to "fix" genre names is silly
@@Kraftium FPS games where Doom Clones for years before people decided to name the genre. Character action came from games journalists trying to name the genre while spectacle fighter came from a person analyzing the gameplay and pointing out it's core characteristics. In the end you provided no clear reason for Character action being a better term beyond "I like it more". This is not a hate comment by the way. I'm just an old school gamer (40y) who saw the terms being invented.
Character action is not a "better" term its just what was used first and for nearly a decade before spectacle fighter came along Im not trying to advocate it as a better descriptor but that Spectacle fighter is just as bad which is a problem with all video game genre names Castlevania? Oh well that has monsters and you have to survive until the end. Survival horror Metroid? Well you shoot things and the camera is in a 3rd person perspective. Clearly its a 3rd person shooter Every attempt to "fix" the problem only throws more phases on the flaming pile (its the same problem as the xkcd comic about "competing standards" "Search action" is never going to overwite metroidvania is just gonna mean theres to genre titles that mean the same thing I should honestly make a video on the redundancy of terminology in the gaming industry because this and the state of what people think a remaster, reboot, remake, and reimagining are is also all over the place
@@Kraftium Hey man go for it! Sounds like a good subject for a video. Personally I was in to many heated discussion on what a "real RPG" is it's embarrassing! ;) Heck, back in the day I remember people used to call Gears of War an FPS for some reason (because you shoot stuff?) before the "cover shooter" genre name was coined.
Real RPG? thats crazy, clearly I'm PLAYing the ROLE of mario in this GAME and there for mario 64 is an rpg ;) and yeah things can definately get more and more specfic like shooter -> third person shooter -> cover shooter is definately needed cos like gears of war and idk FF7 dirge of cerberus play nothing alike
"Spectacle Brawler" is absolutely a better name. "Character Action" is absurdly generic to the point of vagary that makes it impossible to distinguish it from other games. Almost all action games also have characters, so "character" does nothing to delineate this from other action games. "Spectacle" at least points toward the flashy combos and elaborate scoring systems that 99% of these games have, and they are mostly just brawlers so, yeah.
all video genre names are stupid, "castlevania is full of horror monsters and you have to suvive until the end? well I gesst thats survival horror! super metroid is a game where you shoot things from a 3rd person perspective? third person shooter makes sense" turning character action into spectacle fighter and then turning that into spectacle brawler like you've done as a course correction has no fixed the awful names, its just made 3 awful names for the same thing theres an xkcd comic about "competing standards" you can find with a quick google search that sums it up perfectly
@@Kraftium Fair point about competing standards. Shame yours is the worst one. At least Yahtzee understands the spectacle part of this, you're just going with the maximally generic option. Next . . . your examples are literally antithetical to your point and chosen nomenclature. You're trying to say that Castlevania and Metroid can be classified under genre titles that they normally aren't by using justifications of content that are maximally generic. But that's EXACTLY the problem with "character action!" It's such a maximally generic phrase that it can encompass literally any game that features: 1) a character and 2) Action . . . literally any verb You've quite literally argued against your own chosen standard there. Additionally you also don't seem to understand the origins of "Character Action" and their roots in Japanese foreign exoticism which when understood should make the term utterly bizarre to native English speakers. To wit: You brought up both Castlevania and Metroid, better known these days in the west for the genre known as "Metroidvanias" as I'm sure you're aware. In Japan, what most westerners call "Metroidvanias" they call "Search Action" games. Except they don't used Japanese hiragana letters or native Japanese terms that mean "Search" or "Action," they use Katagana letters that spell out a Japanese pronunciation of the English terms "Search" and "Action." They are using foreign loan words to create a sense of exoticism in their titling here, perhaps because these games were always more popular in the West and the US than they ever were in Japan . . . I'm not sure (I'm not a Japanese otaku psychologist, so I couldn't explain why this was particularly appealing to Japanese gamers, it's just observable that it was). "Character Action" derives from the same naming conventions as "Search Action" and is used the same way amongst native Japanese speakers - Katagana letters using the English words. The equivalent in English to this kind of naming convention would be if I was really in to German culture and liked strategy games and so called all strategy games "Strategiespiel." It would be me celebrating the "Germanness" or "foreignness" through the name I've chosen, but to a native German speaker, they wouldn't even realize this because those are words already familiar to them. Now, you can do what you want, but to me it'd be utterly bizarre to adopt a foreign term that celebrates the exoticism of my own mother tongue. That'd just be weird to me. I'd want a term made by fellow speakers of my own language that more naturally rolls off my tongue. But that is of course, a matter of aesthetic taste, and there's simply no accounting for taste in any objective sense, unfortunately.
I agree that "character action" is a bad descriptor, but I explained in my video that spectacle fighter doesn't work because 1. fighter implies a fighting game and 2. There are plenty of games that have tons of spectacle but would not be considered part of the same genre (like Musou, and also character action games without much spectacle (ala super crush KO or hell even DMC1 when you compare it to most modern action games) My point is no matter what option we pick, we're just throwing more words into the flaming pile the don't benefit anyone. All genre names in gaming require the context around them some more than others for sure but thats what I mean about "castlevania = survival horror". Survival Horror is actually a very good descriptor of the genre by relative standards but it still requires you to know that the "suvival" part means very specfic things such as resource management My ultimate point in all this is no matter what its just a waste of time and using anything except for the most established terms is silly, its like we still use the phrases "french new wave" or "noir" in film despite the fact that the sytlings are no longer "new" and are also not nessisarily tied to france. But we still use those terms because those were the phrases that the meaning were assigned to, changing it because "the 1950s isn't new anymore so NEW wave doesn't make" would create confusion to no end People seem to have a simular hatred to the term "character action" as they do "metroidvania" and "immersive sim" they seem to think that they're wrong and outdated idk why but it just gets such a visceral reaction out of them or something but at the end of the day language can be proscriptive as well as descriptive and in this case it has to be I know alot of people are using "search action" for metroidvania's since that interview with sakamoto talking about metroid dread brought the term westward but I feel like zelda 1 and metroid 1 could both have the elements of searching and action since they both require you to explore to find new upgrades to boost you're offensive, defensive and traveral abilities. And the idea of changing the name cos the creator in japan says so is silly since we don't call shmups/bullet hell games "shooting" games and we most definately don't call a fairly traditional beat em up like the original senran kagura a *ahem* "Flying Out Enormous Breast Drama Hyper Battle." game because thats what the creator desided it should be.
@@Kraftium Well, to be fair I've addressed one of your core criticisms with Spectacle Brawler using "Brawler" to address the derivation from Beat 'em Ups element of the genre and differentiate it from the confusion you think "Fighter" brings. It really seems like solving 50% of your issues should be enough to be worthy of consideration at least. But hey man, good on you for at least having an opinion and arguing for it well. And yes, I agree, I think just taking names that developers like to use themselves definitely is a bizarre practice that should be looked at skeptically. If we did that we'd have to call any game with a balancing mechanic and where you walk along uneven surfaces the next "Strand Type Game" after Kojima designated Death Stranding as the first of this illustrious "genre."
@@MidlifeCrisisJoe problem is fighter is already the one yahtzee has introduced into the zeitgeist, brawler would of been better (but still not prefered, atleast imo) Its too late now tho it would only make it even worse Also "Did you know the S in S.T.R.A.N.D. stands for Strand" has gotta be one of my favourite "genius kojumbo" shitposts
@@Kraftium Not very much stylish and simplyfing battle system was in Medievil. Platformer mixed with a lot of zombies to slash and bosses. More like early Action adventure game.
Your right metroid has us shoot things from a 3rd person perspective, we should call those games third person shooters and the prime games fpss Castlevania has lots of creatures from horror movies and you have to get to survive until you beat the boss at the end of each level. Classic example of survival horror What do you mean final fantasy 16 isnt a fighting game? I just fought some goblins in a swamp Every genre name is stupid
I agree we should stop making new names "character action" is not new, it has been around since the 2000s its not replacing hack and slash its catagorising a specfic type Action Game -> Hack and Slash -> Character Action Shooter -> 3rd person shooter -> Cover Shooter
@@Kraftium first I've heard of it. That brings another question, do we really need to get that deep? It's like describing metal music, there's 5 million genres and I have no idea why.
@@ZekeBarzahd yeah it traces back to like a magazine in like 2004? or something Personally I do think it matters not cos I need things to be neat and catagorised but just for a practical recomendation sense. Like when I'm in the mood for something like DMC I can look for "character action" online and find stuff like assault spy or soulstice. Just looking for hack and slash will also throw dynasty warriors games, or stuff shadow of mordor and jedi fallen order at me. Which is not what I'm looking for having a ton of genre names (as long as their not redundant like "spectacle fighter" or "search action" which are just trying to replace in attempt to "fix" the old terms but only creating more confusion) is fine, its not like you have memorize them all. Terms like character action only really apply to the people who care about that specfic flavor anyway
Holo the Wisewolf is not just some cute anime girl, she is my great great ... great grandma, and I ask you to show a little respect >:( that being said I'm glad you enjoyed the video I appricate the compliment :D
![I.N "HALLUCINATION" | [Stray Kids : SKZ-PLAYER]](http://i.ytimg.com/vi/n5B5q1Hwt_U/mqdefault.jpg)
Cowboys couldn't afford cannons, station wagons, and *especially* theme songs!
That's how you know Zan is actually a super ultra sexy hero. ...Or a tax evader.
Only the most super ultra sexy-est heros challenge the IRS hehe
"I'm a poor cowboy that needs money for iaijutsu lessons to synergize with my quickdraw gunplay so I can rescue my frontier town from an evil ninja clan."
-Samurai Gunman Zan
Attentiion all character action GAMERS Johnny is fighting off the evil ninja clan but he NEEDS you're help to defeat loki and take back his town. To do this he's gonna need a couple a things, A katana, a revolver that can load shotgun shells and rockets, and PLENTY of tempura fried shrimp! All he needs from you is your credic card number the 3 digits on the back and the experation month and year. But you have to be QUICK before the ninja clan take over the whole wild west entirely.
A cowboy with a samurai sword goes kinda hard
god ikr
Zan is such a fun game. My heart grows three sizes whenever anyone mentions this gem
Its the games that are a little goofy that touch us most :,)
No joke a Samurai & Cowboy hybrid character is a badass combo .
DAMN RIGHT IT IS
_Travis Touchdown?_
_No More Heroes OST - We are finally cowboys_
_Jetstream Sam?_
I thought I was the only one going to create that.
Now I gotta scrap that comic book idea..
Such a shame, I even thought of a name for it.
@@Rexorazor Do it anyway, nothing is ever gonna be 100% original these days and I think cowboy samurais are an untapped genre
red steel 2 baybee
I really really like this game.
The NPCs always made me think of God Hand, too, along with the setting, goofy lyrical theme song, main character, and enemy designs. I think these two games share a specific vibe that you won't quite find anywhere else.
Don't be too assured of yourself dude. any game that can have enough correspondences to one another are the ones that can be a very good mix match without overbearing it.
(except for soulslike games they are just the insubordinate example of mix match game.)
Thank you for covering this absolute masterpiece of a game. Zan deserves all of the credit he gets. There was nothing else like this in 1999. Good work, Kraft!!!
I remember watched the super best friends do a 30 minute quick look in their mystery box series YEARS ago and its always kinda stuck with me ever since
@@Kraftium Oh, I got it when it came out. To be fair, I was 20 in 1999, and had already been in the military almost two years and was stationed in Japan. Seems like a lifetime ago.
Congrats on your channel growth and your personal growth as a content creator. Your editing and scripting continue to improve. Keep up the good work!
ey I appricate it man, I had alot of fun filming that cringey ass live action bit I look foward to doing more silly stuff lol
I agree with your definition of what a "character action" game is. I saw a comment on a video about TMNT: Shredder's Revenge that somebody said they wanted to see what a modern day beat'em up would be like if developers weren't trying to cater to 90s nostalgia. I told them "that's what character actions games are." I enjoy certain beat'em ups from the 80s and 90s, but I'm glad that the genre evolved into what we have today.
Thanks for bringing this game to my attention. I'll definitely give this one a try.
tbf theres also beat em ups that aren't doing that these days too, river city girls and streets of rage 4 very much have their own visual style even if they're technically continuations of older franchiese
and theres indie projects like fight n rage that are solely their own thing
anyway i'm glad you enjoyed the video
Ever since seeing this game on a “Retro Roulette” stream, it has seriously stuck with me. This was one of those games with massive potential that I feel could have been a mainstay in popular culture if it was just a bit better.
Same pretty much, the super best friends use to have a quicklook series called mystery box which was how i encounted it
red steel 2 did the samurai cowboy thing on the wii, and it's JUST as forgotten. so far, the only cowboy samurais that have stuck around is 'cowboy bebop' with that one, guy, whatever his name was, and 'guilty gear's johnny.
@@ehhorve857 I really need to play red steel
I remember getting so hyped that the wii's technology would let me hold the gun side ways
@@Kraftium oh.
um.
sideways?
I have, TERRIBLE news.
@@ehhorve857 The dudes are Spike (Gun) vs Vicious (Katana). And it gets referenced every now and then.
I'm so glad to see someone talking about this, I love Zan so much.
The zan crowd is coming out the wood work now
We will be heard >:)
Thats hironobu kageyama singing that song. I recognized that voice just a few seconds in.
Oh nice, its always fun recognising a japanese VA (or singer in this case)
I've heard his voice in so many songs it feels iconic.
Yeah! I got that "wait a minute" moment and went on a quick search, just to confirm it.
Man, I've been seeing this game constantly online for the past few years, and ever time I do, I really want to get it!
I was surprised that while I was working on it I saw youtube recommended some random indie vtuber had played it and I was like "HELL YEAH"
Damn - this really took me back. Nice work!
ey, glad you enjoyed it
to anyone reading this: listen to "Hustle Time" from this games soundtrack right now. the first time i played this game, i almost died of laughter because i didnt expect the devil trigger theme to sound ANYTHING like that. actual crime it wasn't played in this video
I did play it in the background towards the back end of the video
@@Kraftium 15:25 oh LMAO i had the video pretty quiet so i didnt notice. anyway i didnt really know that anyone had done an analysis of this games combat system so that was a nice surprise
Since I'm still at a point where some of my videos kinda bomb I tend not to put the effort into doing subtitles (tho thats something I should probably change)
but out of consideration for people who are only partially deaf (and headphone users/copy write police) I tend to mix my bgm pretty low
Glad you enjoyed the video, thanks for watching :D
I wonder what a reboot/remake of this game would look like, If someone was really interested. Anyway man you made a great video and since I saw you had spy a salt on here you think you might do a video about indie character action games. Cause trust me there is a lot of them.
yeah I wanna see a remake too sadly I think the rights are in like limbo, please look foward to my legally distinct rising sam game.
glad you enjoyed the video, I definately wanna give some indie CA games a look, not sure as indivdual videos or as 1 big one, soulstice and slayer zero X are 2 examples I wanna talk about. I also was reached out to by the dev of "Heartless and Dreadful : Return by 72 hours" and given a code so I want to cover that in some way too
also if you look at wazen's twitter (the creator of assault spy) he's recently teased a new game that looks like its nearly ready to be shown, if its anything like his alpha builds from over a year ago it looks to be a much more indepth version of gravity rush's combat with proper combos
@@Kraftium Oh yeah I know about all those games I followed Them and a bunch of others on Twitter or access is called now. My personal favorites are sort of Symphony and yasuke lost descendant. These games aren't finished and are still in their development Phase but it's always cool that the mechanics and the combos that you'll be able to do in the game. Anyway thanks for the reply and keep up the good work
@@Kraftium Have you played Proxy Blade Zero? I think it was made by one guy. It's kind of a stripped down indie version of Metal Gear Rising.
@@TheSuckoShow I have not but its now on the wish list
Loved this game so much, along with the awesome Viewtiful Joe, while never being a DMC fan for some reason.
Thats fine sometimes personal taste just gets in the way
I do think later DMCs inparticular can get overwhealming to new players to the series
So if you ever want to try again I recommend watching "Devil May Cry 1 Advanced Techniques" (despite the name they're not that hard to do) on youtube (theres actually 2 videos by different people but they go over alot of the same stuff) and giving DMC1 another go. Being a much simpler games compared to the later titles it means its alot more tightly designed
The tonal and settings similarities to God Hand could’ve fooled me into thinking Rising Zan was the prequel!
Finally, you’re covering a good game
The best even ;)
Wait holy shit this looks peak
The PS1 had SOUL
@@Exellocks It weirdly is! The combat is complex and smooth for a PS1 game. Kraft didn't even mention you could reflect shots with your pistol. Highly recommended!!!
It is!
I have a weird undying hatred of people who use swords as helicopters.
homie's been victim to a yoshimitsu main and you can tell
*woosh woosh woosh*
*Yoshimitsu laughter*
No eyes no ears no nose no mouth no mind no body no shape no shape
Sword go brrrrrr
Always nice seeing people talk about this game.
I was on the ‘spectacle fighter’ bandwagon until a fan of the genre pointed out that plenty of mechanically shallow games have spectacle via cutscene supers, etc.
For now I’ve pretty much settled on using ‘stylish’ as a prefix, so we can account for stylish action/beat ‘em ups, as well as stylish shooters like Vanquish or Ultrakill. It’s not perfect, but it feels less obtuse than, ‘you play as a character who performs actions’ lol
I mean the term "character action" is admittly not a good one for actually decribing what it is (good thing language can be proscriptive) but yeah I've explained why i don't spectacle fighter is much better. The only defence on the name is its an action game where the focus revolves around the level of control you have on your character which does line up with what I said I think is the core of character action games in my video
"stylish action" is a pretty fine term but I still find throwing in more phrases that mean the same thing causes more confusion than clarity
But you're right, character action is a game dev philosphy that can be applied to shooters like vanquish and ultrakill but also doom eternal imo (not doom 2016 tho which is weird) and platformers like penny's big breakaway (that game literally has a DMC style style ranking during gameplay)
@@Kraftium Yeah the over-saturation of terms is a problem that can affect even _really good_ new suggestions, for sure.
Also I forgot to mention in my comment but I loved the ‘canned sentences vs individual words’ framing! Even beyond the Challenge/Mastery goals of character action, it’s a design ethos I’d love to see in _most games!_
I remember rising zan. If 2d games count then I’d argue Panzer bandit was one of the first psuedo character action games. It takes the 2d beat em up formula and adds guilty gear style combos similar to guardian heroes but way more fluid
ooo I've not seen this one before, I'll have to give it a look
2D is kinda weird if it counts, like sengoku 3 has combos and such but it still feels like it was meant to be a beat em up first
but the likes of veiwtiful joe, super crush ko and slayer zero X I'd definately count
Later, on the PS2, there was a game called samurai. Western, which it really felt like a sequel to rising zan. Samurai western is a spin off way of the samurai
oh I didn't realise it was a way of the samurai spin off thats neat
I need devs to stop copying Dark Souls and start copying Devil May Cry.
Time travel to 6th generation of games
You will find lot of them
Yeah the amount we're getting these days are few and far between, still soulstice and assault spy exist so we get the occassional game
@@Kraftium assault spy is still 6 years old, even older than DMCV so I doubt it is among "these days". I think HiFi Rush would be more recent.
nah
@@morkgin2459considering that was the best generation, I don’t think it’s a coincidence.
Awesome.
Last time I saw someone talking about this game was X-Play on G4 so many years ago, and that was a drop in the bucket quick review.
Thank you for explaining the inspiring madness of Rising Zan!
THE SAMURAI GUNMAN!
JOHNNY NO MORE!
Even if it is a proto character thingy, it looked entertaining.
Cheers.
That G4 coverage is probably the only major singal boost this game has ever gotten
@@Kraftium Mmmhm!
Thanks for your review!
This is literally everything I grew up with. Western, samuari and zero fucks given with tons of fun.
You are a man of principles, i shall subscribe.
ey thanks hombre I appricate it
Came for a Zan video, got someone actually giving a proper explanation of what Character Action is. 10/10.
This game kicks ass. Just the opening alone lets you know it’s gonna be rad, and while the controls can be a big stiff and unresponsive at times, it generally is super fun. They had the style down that for sure. It’s also interesting how well made of an action game for the time it is, considering most hack n slash games from 1999 weren’t the best (the good ones were basically this and Berserk on Dreamcast) especially since like you point out every other game the developer made was about snowboarding or something similar.
Ey glad you enjoyed the video
I really should get into beserk, I think 90% of my experience with it is either through memes or that time I spent 3 hours just reading pages on the wikia cos I wanted to know what the deal with skullknight was
See the stuff that you said that makes a character action game is what makes games so fun & satisfying to me and it's why I cannot stand how popular souls like clones are nowadays. Any game like them lack so much ability to "add style" to your gameplay that it drives me crazy. I skateboarded most my life and so finding things that you can master and add your own style to it is the best. I hope we see more games like it come out soon
I can appricate action games without it but it usually needs to be really arcadey for me to get behind it other wise.
I love the souls games but I'm kinda sick of everyone making souls likes, especially when what I loved about souls was the somber vibes and slow pace of exploration in 1 and 2 and not just the combat of 3 that everyone seems to use as the base. I remember getting excited for stella blade until I played the demo and was like "oh there's character action here but no where near the amount I though its like 80% souls"
ayy thank you for bringing this game to my attention :) Looks lit!
just doing my job ;)
I remember the first time I played this was in a pack of bootleg PS1 disks that included Guilty Gear and after playing it for a bit I HAD to get a legit copy. And yeah, both opening themes were perfect bookends to this video.
nothing like a collection of boot legs
I remember my brother having a bunch of burnt dreamcast games, 4 year old kraft was very fond of "102 Dalmatians: Puppies to the Rescue"
Do y'all know of some other character action on the PS1? Rising Zan was good af and I'm craving the old 3D aesthetics
There was nothing else on the PS1 like Rising Zan. For the time, his movements and combos were so smooth and the combat was complex in a way that just wasn't in any other game. This wasn't published by Activision or EA, it didn't have a huge budget or advertising campaign, and yet it's loved and respected all these years later for a reason. We got games like this on the PS2 because of Rising Zan.
Why does the proximity movement of this games combat feel like Dark Cloud2.
It does kinda, doesnt it?
so THIS is where red steel 1 was hiding.
Never heard of "Character action", I always call 'em "Hack and slash".
Hack and slash is kinda like an adjacent term, like you don't do any hacking or slashing in god hand, sifu or even bayonetta (excluding some weapons). They predominately use fists so theres no hacking or slashing, but they're definately not a beat em up
Its like a flavour i guess you got first person shooters and then more spefically you've got boomer shooters
you've got third person shooters and then you've got cover shooters
its used to describe a specfic vibe within the genre
"Character action" is newer term for me, and I also would call most of these games "hack n' slash". Even though Bayonetta doesn't always use swords, her arms and legs function like swords when swinging, so I would use the same term.
Sifu is an interesting case though. In my mind, it's like a beat 'em up with the elaborate combo system of a hack n' slash. And I think since defense is more important than something like DMC, the pace of combat is a lot slower. So I guess "character action" works since it seems like an in-between for me🤷♂️
@@magnum567134 I mean like all subgenre terms its just bettwe defining a specific flavour within a more defined genre, CRPGs like baulders gate and kotor are just RPGs at the end of the day but we use more specfic terms to really home in on the part that appeals to people
I love Doom Eternal and the new wolfensteins but but if someone said "oh you like first person shooters you should play call of duty" i'd come away disapointed cos its the specficness of "boomer shooter" that I like not all fps's in general
@@KraftiumGodhand and Sifu are literally modern 3D beat em ups
@@morkgin2459 God Hand Is character action taken to the nth degree and sifu is basically the closest thing we've had to successor
And yes they're both beat em ups but they're also character action
Yakuza is also a beat em up but shares very little in common with godhand cos it focus more on the adventure and RPG elements like a modern river city game
zelda is puzzle adventure
metroid prime is an fps and a metroidvania
I thought about checking out this game along with the Way of the Samurai. I remember seeing the intro for Zan on G4/Tech TVs Cinematech. It's cool that the Japanese OP is sung by Hironobu Kageyama the same vocalist for Cha-La Head Cha-La
SPARKING
3:40 if Arc Systemworks made a wild west game
Imagine hereing this at the start of every round lol
@@Kraftium I would never skip an single intro then 🤣
I love how he can enlarge his katana a little bit closer to Sephiroth's size (wording, I know)
The man learned the officer's combat technique of charging into a battle with a revolver & blade in each hand, and despite his range and even bigger ego, he still goes "The katana's reach is too short, time to use bigger katana"
_Q: How many people like Johnny (Rising Zan) there are out there in video games?_
_How many Sonic derivatives have you seen in whole your life?_
_Answer: a _*_*lot*_*
Fun Fact: Somebody mentioned that Rising Zan can parry ranged projectiles/bullets with his katana...
But I do remember some odd example from Ninja Theory Developers...
Disney Infinity 3.0 had Star Wars characters with levels and unlockable skills and moves.
The basic characters included in the base for the game was Anakin Skywalker & Ashoka Tano... Moveset designed by Ninja Theory
Technically, Anakin played similarly to _DMC 5 Nero_ or _DmC : Devil May Cry_ Donté, for sake of clarity
Default move was a block, unlockable moves were, a normal parry, **and a upgraded ranged parry**
When "perfectly" timing the block (Ctrl for PC) button with the projectile, Anakin would reflect the projectile back where it came from with increased damage and inflict staggering pushback, giving more breathing space in this stagger dependent combat...
You could only use it on ground though...
Rising Zan crawled so DMC and God hand could walk...
and so DMC3 could run?
*shows a screenshot of GamingBrit's Character Action Game video, sees one of the moments includes Sonic Heroes*
big the cat about to do a dance macabre combo on e102 with his power rod
Thank you for blessing us with this game you Super Ultra Sexy Hero.
Are shucks and here i thought i was just a regular secy hero
I purchased this game at fry's electronics for fourteen ninety nine and I loved it
dats a good deal
Ducks don't talk, they quack.
Meet more ducks
@@Kraftium I prefer swans.
It's the SUPER ULTRA SEXY HERO.
ZAN!
JOHNNY NO MORE
Rising Zan + Sangoku Musou = Shin Sangoku Musou, for sure. :D
Glad this game invented Musou, Warriors Orochi 1&2 with DMC3 as well as pretty much any Sengoku Basara are my top 3 for the genre on PS2
I'm sure more favorite games come to mind, like Genji. But this would be a very long comment, lol
wasn't vampire hunter D on ps1. it was the same. onimusha as well
Oh right i forgot about that game, ill have to check it out.
Game design by Kobayashi Masaya of Smash Bros. fame. Also the creator of Cool Boarders when he was just out of university.
Oh wow I didn't know they had such a pedigree
so what you're saying is Zan for smash?
There's a lot of considerations I take into account when trying to judge whether a game is "character action" or not, but one of the biggest factors lies in one question...
Can the protagonist do a stinger? It may not decide Character Action on it's own, but paired with all the other factors I look at the stinger as a move pretty definitive of the genre. Not exclusive to it, but certainly a strong indicator in my eyes. Whether or not this is enough to determine your judgement, I leave to you. But I say, Zan certainly can do a stinger, and that definitely puts the game near the territory of Character Action gaming. One footprint of many between on the bridge between 2D Arcade Beatemup and 3d Character Action game as we know them today.
I rest my case, comment section.
having a stinger definately increases is level of character actiony-ness, its like the style meter, having one on screen isn't gonna suddenly make your game CA but its another indicator that it is and if done correctly those CA vibes start to increase
Its why I use that combos = sentences/words anaolgy because its the only way I can define it without going "it just feels like one yknow"
wwy are you steeling scorpion tales
Its weird hearing games like this and dmc being called "character action games". Growing up, I always heard them being called hack & slash games...
I mean character action is a specfic flavor of hack and slash, or rather its like ... a design mentality? games like Ys, or Shadow of Mordor or even assassin's creed have you hacking and slashing but I wouldn't say they're anything like DMC
However stuff the thing that (atleast to me and many others) see in DMC can be seen in other games like God Hand, Wonderful 101 and Sifu
Infact the essence of character action can even be seen in weird genre's you wouldn't expect like in shooters with Ultrakill and Doom Eternal (not in Doom 2016 tho) and even platformers like penny's big breakaway
Its about player expression and freedom within the game's systems and its what seperates DMC from the countless ps2 hack and slash games no one really talks about anymore
You’ve convinced me
GET IN
Eh. I think Deathtrap Dungeon and Nightmare Creatures could both count and both predate this game.
I mean technically if you wanna go all the way back you've got stuff like blade arts, spriggan and soukaigi, if you look hard enough you can see the gradual curve but I feel like most of those games are only like ... 30-60% there
While rising zan is like 80%
Legacy of Kain Soul Reaver
Is it just me, or is this No More Heroes, before No More Heroes was a thing ? This game looks so cool
They are both incredibly chuuni
"Character action" this "character action" that
To me it's all Hack & Slash.
need to find this game somewhere, my ps1 still works
I've not checked recently but due to no demand I remember it being quite cheap to aquire
1:37 what game is this one? Help me anyone
Super crush KO
@@Kraftium awesome. Thank you so much
Great vid btw
@@Kill_Binho np other good indie character action games id rec are assault spy and soulstice
Personally i call dynasty warrior style games ARMY SLASHERS
pfft I like that, tho I'll stick to musou
Personally I see the musou games and its contemporaries as like ... arcadey battlefield management sims
but that doesn't role off the tounge nor does it give a clear idea of what the genre is, so I just stick with musou cos thats the legacy name and most people know what it means
The ps1 wasn't strong enough to support a stylish action game, but Zan sure had the heart.
I broke a controller doing those dumb finnishers.
you'd probably be able to pull it off but you'd need super simple models or even sprites to make it run good
and you'd need to scale it back quite a bit due to a lack of ram not being able to have so many moves available at once (the reason dante only has 2 devil arms and 2 guns in DMC3 is due to ram limitations)
Except for Takamasho, being localized as "Low Kai" for some reason. And some English voice lines in the Japanese are just cut in the English version.
It wasn't Yahtzee who first coined the term spectacle fighter, it was TotalBiscuit (RIP).
you sure? I'm pretty confident in my memory where yahtzee specfically states he invented the term and I can't find anything from a quick google search of anyone but him createing it
@@Kraftium I'll be damned, had a Google myself and I think you're right. Guess I just remember first hearing the term from watching TB.
@@GameGod77 He did create quite a few phrases so its understandable
"port report" for reviewing the quality of ports/remasters of games specfically is one I'm very fond of
This game's theme song is way better than this game deserves.
I love this goofy goober of a game. It is worth a playthrough if you can find it.
Wait, was the guy who sings the Japanese theme, the guy who does various Dragon Ball music and the 2nd opening to the Saint Seiya 80s anime? The guy's voice's is pretty iconic. Okay, looked in the comments and yeah it is.
As for the overarching vid, I'm not sure if I use the term "character action" or "specticle fighter"(I tend to avoid anything Yahtzee has to say on anything since I don't like him at all and wonder why on earth some people take him so seriously). I prefer to call them 3D beat em ups since they are basically the 2D beat em but in 3D, and inspired by fighting game logic. There is different styles of 3D beat em ups and it's a vague definition, but there are styles of 2D beat em ups too yet they are still styled under beat em up. Genre definitions are vague and always will be but I tend to define games but what you will be doing 90% of the time, and with DMC and games like it, you are killing enemies using melee combat.
As for the game itself, I heard many years ago that it was a proto DMC1, but I never considered playing it since this was before the time Duckstation was even a thing, and I didn't want to play PS1 games due to how bad epsxe was but now I might play it, heard it was also 3 hours too and I tend to gravitate towards short games. I don't when I'll play it, but your vid has gotten me to look into it sooner now that I got more info outside of that one IGN review from many years ago on HLTB.
EY nice we got another one glad i could tickle your interest
I do like yahtzee but I don't take his words or anyones as gosbel really, tastes always differ quite a bit (ben moore from former easy allies fame maybe)
and yeah what I call character action is basically a part of the beat em up/hack and slash, its a term for a very specfic flavour I stuggle to find in places, well sort of with every triple AAA game becoming more and more harmoginised you start seeing it crop up in places in tiny (lost judgement getting air juggles) or medium sized amounts (stella blade's combat being souls like but with longer combos and specials)
The reason I use it so much is cos I wanna fined games that give me the same feeling, its why I'm estatic when I find indie games like soulstice, assault spy and super crush KO cos with platinum games pretty much gone now and team ninja making games based off nioh's style the only big boy series still going is technically DMC and its been a while since we got one now
@@Kraftium
I just don't particularly find Yahtzee funny and find his cyncism to be more offputting than productive. I don't like using the word "cynical" as an insult but Yahtzee would be someone I would use it towards, I would be fine with this if he just reviewed bad games like AVGN does, not games that at least have some following or fanbase.
Fair enough, it's just easier for me to call them beat em ups than these ultra specific terms that just creates more ambiguity.
I know a lot of people like to play specific games but for me, I tend to play almost any random game, except maybe RTS. Hell the single player AAA FPS game is dead outside of Doom and CoD but I don't mind since there is just so much random games for me to play. But I'll look into those other games you mentioned.
lamao ZAN hoovers like yoshimitsu XD
helicopter swords are always the best
Make a video about Sword of the Berserk next
2:17 is that Pat? 🥹
I can still hear woolies howling and hyena laugh
Zaibatsu 4 life 😢
What's the name of the game at 2:00
God Hand
GOD HAND
@@Kraftium don't act like you don't like the ball buster
what is the game on 1:37?
Super Crush KO
@@Kraftium thank you
@@15rafabor np, 2 other good indie character action games id rec are assault spy and soulstice
2:17 😮 @PatStaresAt 😅 Nice...
Great Video Thank You.
I can still hear woolie's howls and hyena laugh
OMG SAMURAI WESTERN IS SUCH AN AMAZING GAME. TRY IT
I saw that on combat overviews channel when i discovered it, ill have to give it a look
I posit Character Actions games should be rechristened as: "Panache-em-ups" 😂
you're a menace
its literally action game spin off of yoshimitsu of tekken before death by degrees of nina
Does the game have dual analog?
Unfortunately not, you have to recenter the lock on by holding down the lock on
I remapped the D-pad to the left stick tho and it felt "ok"
@@Kraftium that’s what I considered doing too, it seems to be the best fix. Still a fun review for a fun looking game though. I like your video
ey thanks I appricate it
one thing mapping the d-pad to the stick does is makes the "mash the buttons" QTE events super easy which'll spare you alot of unnessersary damage since spinning the stick is alot quicker than mashing a Dpad
Needs a remaster with quality of life improvements.
I love the jab at the TheGamingBritShow. I personally don't agree with the guy either.
its not really a jab, like I disagree with him but I get the argument he's trying to make
Every time I see people use the term "character action" instead of "spectacle fighter", as the genre was originally coined, I feel deep sadness inside.
1:45 Dude, the genre's whole thing is about the main character fighting in the most show of way possible. Besides, many action games have characters in them, does that make them character action games?
character action was first, ben yahtzee literally says in one of his reveiws that (paraphrasing here) "I think Character Action is a usless descriptor so I've created a new term to describe it better"
(and I've already explained why I don't think its actually useful at all and why trying to "fix" genre names is silly
@@Kraftium FPS games where Doom Clones for years before people decided to name the genre. Character action came from games journalists trying to name the genre while spectacle fighter came from a person analyzing the gameplay and pointing out it's core characteristics.
In the end you provided no clear reason for Character action being a better term beyond "I like it more". This is not a hate comment by the way. I'm just an old school gamer (40y) who saw the terms being invented.
Character action is not a "better" term its just what was used first and for nearly a decade before spectacle fighter came along
Im not trying to advocate it as a better descriptor but that Spectacle fighter is just as bad which is a problem with all video game genre names
Castlevania? Oh well that has monsters and you have to survive until the end. Survival horror
Metroid? Well you shoot things and the camera is in a 3rd person perspective. Clearly its a 3rd person shooter
Every attempt to "fix" the problem only throws more phases on the flaming pile (its the same problem as the xkcd comic about "competing standards"
"Search action" is never going to overwite metroidvania is just gonna mean theres to genre titles that mean the same thing
I should honestly make a video on the redundancy of terminology in the gaming industry because this and the state of what people think a remaster, reboot, remake, and reimagining are is also all over the place
@@Kraftium Hey man go for it! Sounds like a good subject for a video. Personally I was in to many heated discussion on what a "real RPG" is it's embarrassing! ;)
Heck, back in the day I remember people used to call Gears of War an FPS for some reason (because you shoot stuff?) before the "cover shooter" genre name was coined.
Real RPG? thats crazy, clearly I'm PLAYing the ROLE of mario in this GAME and there for mario 64 is an rpg ;)
and yeah things can definately get more and more specfic
like shooter -> third person shooter -> cover shooter is definately needed cos like gears of war and idk FF7 dirge of cerberus play nothing alike
Personal ninjas do not belong in a Western, it's like putting a comanicke in the inverse
ok but what about the 2000s internet debate of pirates vs ninja's? do they belong together
@@Kraftium yes there are similarities between pirates and ninjas , just not with cowboys
3:06
Yea a hack n slash
"Spectacle Brawler" is absolutely a better name. "Character Action" is absurdly generic to the point of vagary that makes it impossible to distinguish it from other games. Almost all action games also have characters, so "character" does nothing to delineate this from other action games. "Spectacle" at least points toward the flashy combos and elaborate scoring systems that 99% of these games have, and they are mostly just brawlers so, yeah.
all video genre names are stupid, "castlevania is full of horror monsters and you have to suvive until the end? well I gesst thats survival horror! super metroid is a game where you shoot things from a 3rd person perspective? third person shooter makes sense"
turning character action into spectacle fighter and then turning that into spectacle brawler like you've done as a course correction has no fixed the awful names, its just made 3 awful names for the same thing
theres an xkcd comic about "competing standards" you can find with a quick google search that sums it up perfectly
@@Kraftium Fair point about competing standards. Shame yours is the worst one. At least Yahtzee understands the spectacle part of this, you're just going with the maximally generic option.
Next . . . your examples are literally antithetical to your point and chosen nomenclature. You're trying to say that Castlevania and Metroid can be classified under genre titles that they normally aren't by using justifications of content that are maximally generic.
But that's EXACTLY the problem with "character action!" It's such a maximally generic phrase that it can encompass literally any game that features:
1) a character
and
2) Action . . . literally any verb
You've quite literally argued against your own chosen standard there.
Additionally you also don't seem to understand the origins of "Character Action" and their roots in Japanese foreign exoticism which when understood should make the term utterly bizarre to native English speakers. To wit:
You brought up both Castlevania and Metroid, better known these days in the west for the genre known as "Metroidvanias" as I'm sure you're aware.
In Japan, what most westerners call "Metroidvanias" they call "Search Action" games. Except they don't used Japanese hiragana letters or native Japanese terms that mean "Search" or "Action," they use Katagana letters that spell out a Japanese pronunciation of the English terms "Search" and "Action." They are using foreign loan words to create a sense of exoticism in their titling here, perhaps because these games were always more popular in the West and the US than they ever were in Japan . . . I'm not sure (I'm not a Japanese otaku psychologist, so I couldn't explain why this was particularly appealing to Japanese gamers, it's just observable that it was).
"Character Action" derives from the same naming conventions as "Search Action" and is used the same way amongst native Japanese speakers - Katagana letters using the English words. The equivalent in English to this kind of naming convention would be if I was really in to German culture and liked strategy games and so called all strategy games "Strategiespiel." It would be me celebrating the "Germanness" or "foreignness" through the name I've chosen, but to a native German speaker, they wouldn't even realize this because those are words already familiar to them.
Now, you can do what you want, but to me it'd be utterly bizarre to adopt a foreign term that celebrates the exoticism of my own mother tongue. That'd just be weird to me. I'd want a term made by fellow speakers of my own language that more naturally rolls off my tongue. But that is of course, a matter of aesthetic taste, and there's simply no accounting for taste in any objective sense, unfortunately.
I agree that "character action" is a bad descriptor, but I explained in my video that spectacle fighter doesn't work because 1. fighter implies a fighting game and 2. There are plenty of games that have tons of spectacle but would not be considered part of the same genre (like Musou, and also character action games without much spectacle (ala super crush KO or hell even DMC1 when you compare it to most modern action games)
My point is no matter what option we pick, we're just throwing more words into the flaming pile the don't benefit anyone. All genre names in gaming require the context around them some more than others for sure but thats what I mean about "castlevania = survival horror". Survival Horror is actually a very good descriptor of the genre by relative standards but it still requires you to know that the "suvival" part means very specfic things such as resource management
My ultimate point in all this is no matter what its just a waste of time and using anything except for the most established terms is silly, its like we still use the phrases "french new wave" or "noir" in film despite the fact that the sytlings are no longer "new" and are also not nessisarily tied to france. But we still use those terms because those were the phrases that the meaning were assigned to, changing it because "the 1950s isn't new anymore so NEW wave doesn't make" would create confusion to no end
People seem to have a simular hatred to the term "character action" as they do "metroidvania" and "immersive sim" they seem to think that they're wrong and outdated idk why but it just gets such a visceral reaction out of them or something but at the end of the day language can be proscriptive as well as descriptive and in this case it has to be
I know alot of people are using "search action" for metroidvania's since that interview with sakamoto talking about metroid dread brought the term westward but I feel like zelda 1 and metroid 1 could both have the elements of searching and action since they both require you to explore to find new upgrades to boost you're offensive, defensive and traveral abilities. And the idea of changing the name cos the creator in japan says so is silly since we don't call shmups/bullet hell games "shooting" games and we most definately don't call a fairly traditional beat em up like the original senran kagura a *ahem* "Flying Out Enormous Breast Drama Hyper Battle." game because thats what the creator desided it should be.
@@Kraftium Well, to be fair I've addressed one of your core criticisms with Spectacle Brawler using "Brawler" to address the derivation from Beat 'em Ups element of the genre and differentiate it from the confusion you think "Fighter" brings. It really seems like solving 50% of your issues should be enough to be worthy of consideration at least.
But hey man, good on you for at least having an opinion and arguing for it well. And yes, I agree, I think just taking names that developers like to use themselves definitely is a bizarre practice that should be looked at skeptically. If we did that we'd have to call any game with a balancing mechanic and where you walk along uneven surfaces the next "Strand Type Game" after Kojima designated Death Stranding as the first of this illustrious "genre."
@@MidlifeCrisisJoe problem is fighter is already the one yahtzee has introduced into the zeitgeist, brawler would of been better (but still not prefered, atleast imo)
Its too late now tho it would only make it even worse
Also "Did you know the S in S.T.R.A.N.D. stands for Strand" has gotta be one of my favourite "genius kojumbo" shitposts
Onimmusha is still better than this XD Less flexible than DMC1(pre-rendered BG) but have very similar gameplay.
funnily enough 1 of the big things that influenced DMC1 was a glitch in onimusha's early development that let you juggle enemies
@@Kraftium Not very much stylish and simplyfing battle system was in Medievil. Platformer mixed with a lot of zombies to slash and bosses. More like early Action adventure game.
"Character action game" is a really REALLY stupid name for a genre, like "metroidvania"
"Spectical Brawler" is way better
Your right metroid has us shoot things from a 3rd person perspective, we should call those games third person shooters and the prime games fpss
Castlevania has lots of creatures from horror movies and you have to get to survive until you beat the boss at the end of each level. Classic example of survival horror
What do you mean final fantasy 16 isnt a fighting game? I just fought some goblins in a swamp
Every genre name is stupid
Stop making new names. You have a couple options. Hack n slash, action rpg, or action game.
I agree we should stop making new names
"character action" is not new, it has been around since the 2000s its not replacing hack and slash its catagorising a specfic type
Action Game -> Hack and Slash -> Character Action
Shooter -> 3rd person shooter -> Cover Shooter
@@Kraftium first I've heard of it. That brings another question, do we really need to get that deep? It's like describing metal music, there's 5 million genres and I have no idea why.
@@Kraftium I say that not to say you're wrong btw. Just a first for me.
@@ZekeBarzahd yeah it traces back to like a magazine in like 2004? or something
Personally I do think it matters not cos I need things to be neat and catagorised but just for a practical recomendation sense. Like when I'm in the mood for something like DMC I can look for "character action" online and find stuff like assault spy or soulstice.
Just looking for hack and slash will also throw dynasty warriors games, or stuff shadow of mordor and jedi fallen order at me.
Which is not what I'm looking for
having a ton of genre names (as long as their not redundant like "spectacle fighter" or "search action" which are just trying to replace in attempt to "fix" the old terms but only creating more confusion) is fine, its not like you have memorize them all.
Terms like character action only really apply to the people who care about that specfic flavor anyway
@@Kraftiumthat makes sense
Lose the fucking cute anime girl as a persona/pop/avatar whatever it’s SOOOOOOOOOO whack
Analysis is good thanks for the vid m8
Holo the Wisewolf is not just some cute anime girl, she is my great great ... great grandma, and I ask you to show a little respect >:(
that being said I'm glad you enjoyed the video I appricate the compliment :D
4 minutes of a 19 minute video to talk about the actual topic, Jesus Christ
we like to yap ;)
ermm, no juggling? 0/10 clickbait trash ass game
Im sorry for my sins
Please accept my apology recs of assault spy and sengoku 3
@@Kraftium I'll consider your offerings once I get out of my classic God of War phase
@@totalhydration5240 ghost of sparda do be pretty bussin'
This blud never touch god hand ps2
Everyone talking about _Cowboys with Katanas,_ but no-one's talking about how historically, _Samurais with Revolvers_ were a thing. 🗡️🤠🔫🥷
Very yakuza ishin coded