Wanted: Dead - Fever Dream Gaiden

Spoilers galore
The closest that i can get to play that one club scene from John Wick.
Introduction - 00:00
Synopsis - 00:10
The Story (or the lack of it) - 01:46
The Action - 05:10
Conclusion - 11:35
#WantedDead #Soleil #NinjaGaiden

[@RiderWithTheScarf]

Well, that's a surprise; both the game covered and the games you mentioned feeling like it. What a bizarre game and so out of nowhere. And not surprised you put Binary Domain and WET when talking about this game because it really feels like the team wanted to make Devil's Third but with Binary Domain's partner mechanics while you have a more synergetic gun-melee combat like in WET compared to Devil's Third more heavy emphasis on COD and GoW mechanics. The thing is that I can see the strings of what this game tried to be but every other game it tried to take inspiration from just blows it out of the water in many different ways. Not to mention, the marketing for it was strange and under the radar. The less said about how Soleil's titles, the better, because it's mind boggling how the same studio that gave you Valkyrie Elysium, Samurai Jack and Shinobi Strikers managed to shit this out. Especially since it's the same guys as Samurai Jack.
First things first : the game is incomplete; very incomplete, like "entire chapters, mechanics and stages missing" incomplete. This whole game feels like it wanted to tell a giant interconnecting story about a seemingly unrelated group of cyborg people that are also war criminals for commiting terrorist acts against the pro-synthetics groups and now they have to act as a riot police force. Ok, cool premise, then it tries to swerve like in Astral Chain but instead of the whole "police has good and bad people" thing and trying to follow the Zetman manga's storyline(not surprising since the mangaka of Zetman worked on Astral Chain) Wanted: Dead instead wants to swerve you with the Binary Domain of "people are synths in reality" but do the opposite : this game wants to tell you that synths never existed and instead all the synths are instead victims of human trafficking of sick people or cyborgs and the reason they are passed as "synthetic" humans, is to hide the fact that Hong Kong is the center of the greatest trafficking and slave ring in this Cyberpunk "present" of 2023-2024(can't remember exactly when). And the synths that have "awoken" are trying to tell Hannah and the others that they are also victims and why they were cyborgs in the first place.
But that is so hidden in the tons of :
1.)Extra material
2.)Flashbacks
3.)Lore hidden in various collectible Police / Psychiatric / Jail reports
4.)Some of the anime shorts published in 110 Industries' channel featuring some of the characters
and worse :
5.)Hidden in the form of other games that the devs asume you have played in order to know what they were inspired by; case in point, the game features plotpoints from Devil's Third, Binary Domain, Metal Gear Rising and remixes these plot points
And it's a giant clusterfuck that no sane person would figure it out. Not to mention it seems like the story cutscenes we got were the finished cutscenes in time for the release because the whiplash that happens is probably due to one or even two and three entire cutscenes missing for context to explain, why for example, Hannah was even angry and how they ended up going to the karaoke bar later that day.
And that's the story, the gameplay is worse because I'm sure part of the original design had you controlling the partners with the four D-pad arrows on gamepads or something close to that, you hade more unlockable moves for your partners and the exclusive partners probably had their own stats and passive and abilities if you took them with you during a stage; another is the unlockable melee weapons. During the first stage, Stone breaks the exhibition glass of a cool katana and appropriates it but you never see that katana again. I suspect the original game had you "collect" katanas that way and each one had different stats, reach, range and abilities to match the gun customization, which is bugged as all fuck.
Then come the guns; the basic handgun is a mixture between the Bloodborne parry system and the Sengoku Basara staple equipment of Oda Nobunaga, to the point where the "intersperce gunshots to mix with melee" combo system is taken from that game and half-assed for Wanted: Dead instead. Something tells me they intended it to be more complex, to one-up the crazyness of Itagaki's Devil's Third melee system by expanding it with the sacrifice of different melee weapon types in mind. The gun stats not doing jack shit is criminal and a very rotten way for the player to engage with them in the first place and I suspect the code is straight up unfinished with the values and something tells me that every time the drone from Gunsmith arrived, it doubled as a hawk checkpoint from Ninja Gaiden AND as a merchant to buy ammo for your pick-up guns or swap them once you unlock them, to make the sections fit the player's style more.
The finisher moves being automatic, the way this half-assed delimbing system works and the pace of a battle is taken from Devil's Third except it's as if some values got fucked from the transition from Unreal 3 assets to whatever engine this game uses and now Hannah, the cyborg super terrorist with super-stimulants is worse and more sluggish than a blind, half-naked russian human with no enhancements, who kept in shape just by playing drums 9 hours a day. The way the supermode also chains finishers and OHKOs also seems to be half-finished as well because it seems like they wanted to iterate on the Ninja Gaiden Ultimate Techniques but didn't have time.
Then you have the anime cutscenes : the publisher hired TWO different anime studios to do the story and promo material scenes and their quality is wildly incosistent as are the character designs for a lot of characters which just tells me that the publisher, dev and the studios not only had wildly different ideas for the project but the lead of the project only had rough drafts for the story and characters and send them to three different vectors who had no communication with each other, resulting in the cutscenes depicting the mute mexican guy as a chatty white guy instead, while Doc looks 20 years younger and Hannah looks like a bubble anime girl; the waitress is about the same though and Gunsmith looks like a quick sketch of anime-fied Joonsten but that's probably one can google how she looks and the waitress was probably the only design finished because the lead was horny about cyberpunk single-mother waitresses that moonlight as geishas(see the promo anime in 110's yutube page, the waitress is the main focus). And I suspect this kind of "directiorial-managerial" style was so that the publisher could spend the least amount of money on the game and have it ready for the memetic release date they chose because "Haha, I'll be your Valentine's gift" which is stupid; gimmick dates never helped any media release.
As for Joonsten, she's been poking around the games industry, she starred in the Berserk/Claymore adjacent game, Soulstice last year and now she seems to expand her brand with singing and video game acting and design. I haven't seen her work as a designer due to Vengeance is Mine not being out yet but her singing is pretty good, she can do some good song covers of disco songs.

[@AkashicMemory]

I knew i was forgetting something. It was so weird to get a new katana and then... nothing out of that. I was going to make a joke about Itagaki being Suda Alter with their both similar yet very different flavor of punk and style, but turns out even this video is unfinished, which i guess is appropriate.
I would love to explore the ninja gaiden series more in-depth, but the master collection having the ""wrong"" versions and the originals being on xbox makes it a bit difficult at the moment.

[@RiderWithTheScarf]

@@AkashicMemory "It's like poetry, it rhymes" ~Luke Georg on Space Battles
Itagaki is weird, that's for sure but the closest he's to a another creator is Nagoshi, either him or Kamiya. Suda is more similar to SWERY if anything, despite their catalogues, IMO.
Eh, it's ok, you still have the correct version of Ninja Gaiden 3 in the collection🤣 It is what it is, Microsoft being assholes and not releasing the two games on Steam is on them at this point. I'm still good with Sigma 2 though and non-Black OG Ninja Gaiden. The Unlaboured Flawlessness was great.