Viewtiful Joe

Viewtiful Joe arrived in 2003 from Capcom's Clover Studio under director Hideki Kamiya as a loving tribute to B-movie action and tokusatsu heroes – an ordinary movie fan named Joe gets pulled into the screen and transformed into a costumed superhero, and the game plays out as a 2D brawler layered with film-style effects: the player can slow time down (Slow), speed the hero up (Mach Speed) or zoom the camera in (Zoom), tools that matter as much for puzzles as for combat.

Viewtiful Joe 2 (2004) expanded the mechanics by letting players switch between Joe and his partner Sylvia, opening up new attack combinations, and is usually ranked alongside the original as the series' peak. The spin-offs Viewtiful Joe: Double Trouble (2005) for Nintendo DS and Viewtiful Joe: Red Hot Rumble (2005), a multiplatform party title with fighting-game elements, showed Capcom's ambition to stretch the brand beyond the core beat-'em-up, though neither matched the acclaim of the main series.

Clover Studio, the team behind the first two games, was one of Capcom's more experimental in-house teams, and after its closure in 2006 several of its members went on to found PlatinumGames, which is why Viewtiful Joe is often cited as one of the games where that team's later style took shape. Visually, the game leaned on bold cel-shading reminiscent of a drawn comic, and its combat rewarded players for stylish combinations of dodges and attacks, keeping it a favorite among action-game fans for years after release.