Henshin A No-Go, Baby!

For gamers not "in the know" about this series, Viewtiful Joe is a side-scrolling, beat-em-up game from Capcom, developed by Team Viewtiful/Clover Studios. In it you take the part of Joe, a movie fanatic and all-around cool dude, whose girlfriend gets abducted by the evil organization, Jadow, and taken into "Movieland", a world comprised entirely of movie scenes. In this movie world you are given a V-Watch, which Joe uses to transform into his superhero persona, Viewtiful Joe, by shouting "Henshin a go-go baby!".

Throughout the game you fight various footsoldiers of the Jadow, as well as several bosses, some of them being cultural references. This game's cell-shaded graphics, movie themes, and jammin' soundtrack aided the gameplay, and was generally well recieved.

Viewtiful Joe went on to spur two more Gamecube games: Viewtiful Joe 2 and Viewtiful Joe: Red Hot Rumble, a DS game: Viewtiful Joe: Double Trouble!, and an anime "show-through" of the game. With that many titles, most of which being well-received, what happened to the game? Surely the Wii would have been the next logical step, right?

Well, as we saw with our earlier No Continues article, Capcom has a way with cancelling games.

In 2004, Capcom registered ViewtifulJoe3.com, presumably in an effort to hold the URL for when they made the game. Shortly afterwards though, the website had nothing on it, and is no longer a registered domain.

In 2006, Clover Studios dev Atsushi Inaba expressed interest in making a Viewtiful Joe for the Wii.

In 2007, after none of Clover's titles being outrageous successes, Capcom dissolved the subsidiary, and possibly any hope of a VJ3.

In 2009, Jun Takeuchi, a Capcom producer, said there are no plans to continue the series.

So that's it right? The game series is dead, and aside from the occasional cameo in other games, Joe, Sylvia, and the crew will never appear in their own title again.

Well, maybe not.

Viewtiful Joe creators Kamiya and Inaba recently reprised their creative roles as director and producer of "The Wonderful 101", a game for the WiiU. If you've played Viewtiful Joe, and haven't seen anything about this game, go watch a couple episodes of an LP real quick. Don't worry, the article will still be here when you get back.

You back yet?
Good.

DID YOU SEE THAT??

Ok so, with the team that made the original Viewtiful Joe games all but gone, we get this Cell-shade-ish, pikmin-style, beat-em-up game, with a lead character who not only transforms from an average citizen to a superhero via his mystical jewelry, his transformation sequence is amazingly similar to Joe's! On top of that, he has a letter "W" on his necklace, and jacket, which is naturally the next letter after V, the letter that adorned Joe's forehead! He's even got the cape!

So this game is clearly a spiritual successor to Viewtiful Joe! Just watching a playthrough I can see fairly well how this game lends itself to being a VJ sequel. Slap some film-stylizing on it and you've got yourself a Joe game.

It's unfortunate that Joe himself didn't make an actual comeback, but there is always room for that too. With the WiiU's gamepad layout, it'd be easy for them to incorporate old VFX powers, ones from the DS game, and even make new ones, into the touch-pad/second screen system.

As soon as I have the money I'm buying a WiiU and this Wonderful 101 game. I actually had no idea it even existed until I started doing research for this article. Until then, I guess I'll just have to settle for replaying the old Gamecube games.

But hey, from here, the View is Beautiful.

- Matt