I can't believe the N64 can actually
run this. And at an impressive silky smooth 30 FPS with frequent dips to only 15, at that (Dolphin says 22, but it sure fucking feels like 15)! Ocarina of Time, eat your heart out.
Sin and Punishment is a rail shooter (or more technically, a Cabal shooter) by Treasure where you control a character and crosshair on screen simultaneously on a 2D plane, and it being a Treasure game, it is jam-packed with boss fights, constant intensity, crazy setpieces and an equally as crazy nonsense plot. The base gameplay consists of hitting as many targets as possible with your gun, which also doubles as a sword for anything which dares enter your personal space. Your character can strafe, jump, and double-jump over the many obstacles the game throws at you. You also get a roll move with invincibility frames which lets you roll through hazards, which you'll definitely need. Your gunsword can also reflect back projectiles at wherever you're aiming, which deals tons of damage and is key to your survival. It's sort of a cult N64 hit, and a rather obscure one because it was originally only released in Japan in 2000, by the time the N64 was losing its market share in the West. However, it was made available for play in the West after getting released for the Virtual Console, which includes localized menu text as well. I haven't played many N64 games, though this is certainly some of the best shit I've played.
The game itself feels like a compilation movie of a 90's anime action OVA by GAINAX (the main character designer, Yasushi Suzuki, even worked as an animator on Neon Genesis Evangelion). Nobody really seems to acknowledge the madness of the current situation, and superweapons and super transformations are suddenly pulled out of the ass. The plot doesn't really bother with explaining at first what is actually going on, and immediately jumps into action. There's some weird love triangle going on between the big bad called just Brad (www) and some monsters? Somehow telepaths are involved like it's the most normal thing in the world? So within minutes we're fighting giant crabs, ninjas, and airships on foot, and it only gets crazier from there. Some high-school girl starts teleporting the grunts you fought earlier and throws them at you
en masse (the grunt screams in this game are great, it constantly goes UaaAAAARUaaAAAARGHUaaAAUaaAaUaaAAAA), after which Tokyo suddenly gets flooded by a tsunami of blood and you both transform into Evangelions for no discernible reason and fight eachother. The second act of the game gets even more nuts, where you take control of the other female character with a gunsword after she dramatically undresses herself, have a sword duel with Brad, and then have your mage psychically lift up a piece of debris to fly around while you proceed to decimate the entire enemy fleet and its fighter squadrons with just your handgun mid-air in one of the most dynamic setpieces I've ever seen in a videogame, punctuated by having a duel with Brad himself who stands atop his own customized fighter aircraft and then finishing off a giant aerial mobile fortress by taking it apart piece by piece. All while jammin' prog fusion jazz or whatever plays in the background. It's
cuhrazy.
Because of the ensuing famine after overpopulation, scientists started breeding new clones of animals in Hokkaido to deal with the food shortages. But then these animals mutated into something called Ruffians, and proceeded to wreck most of Japan. Some US-backed group called the Armed Volunteers aims to free Japan of the Ruffian threat under the leadership of this guy called Brad, but violently oppresses the remaining citizens of Japan as a result. You play as some androgynous bloke named Saki, the leader of the Savior Group, a bunch of rebels who seek to free Japan of both the Ruffians and Armed Volunteers. Alongside you are Airan, an action girl who works as a mechanic but is also as equally as skilled with a gun, and a mysterious psychic waif called Achi, whose blood she passed out to others to heal their ails and give them strange powers. Most of the Saviors are wiped out by the Armed Volunteers, and only you three remain.
Though all the models are very low-polygon in order to maintain a constant framerate, the character designs stand out enough to lend the game a proper style, so it looks actually rather nice if you ignore parts of the body models clipping through others (models in S&P don't have joints, just to maintain framerate even more), though I guess this wasn't as visible on a CRT. What's very impressive is the camera work, and how well the 3D graphics are utilized to make each setpiece stand out and feel dynamic in a way 2D graphics simply can't. For stage 2-2 you will be fighting battleships from a flying piece of debris, and some battleships you will approach from the side, for some you will be skidding right over the water as other gunboats pass by you in melee range, some ships you will face off upside-down (what is gravity anymore?), and against some ships you will make a head-first eagle dive from above as you zip past a barrage of bullets and incoming fighter planes. It reminds me why I love 3D arcade games in particular, by restricting your freedom of movement they can conjure up these crazy-ass setpieces in a way other types of games simply can't outside of completely taking away control from the player.
Though this game was released only in Japan, the only voice acting available is English, with Japanese subtitles. The voice acting is very
amateur hour to put it bluntly, what with everyone being voiced by no-name actors. Though combined with the inherently nuts nature of the script, all the characters are very earnest in their performance that lends the voice acting in S&P a certain charm of cheesiness that makes the whole experience whole. You've got a profoundly Japanese game about GIANT ENEMY CRABS and Evangelions, an obscure cult status and a cheesy English dub are like the cherries on top to make this game feel like some underrated classic which was only available on VHS until a recent remaster.
Controlling your crosshair is done with an analog stick, which when combined with controlling your character with the D-pad can take a lot of getting used to until you're able to control both your character and crosshair in concert. Your gun does have an alternate fire mode which can lock on to a target, but damage is reduced when locking-on, so manual aiming is recommended most of the time. Joystick-aiming isn't as accurate as responsive as aiming with the mouse or a lightgun is, but thankfully the game is designed to not overwhelm you with dozens of targets at once. The tutorial is neatly comprehensive and challenges most of the aforementioned mechanics have a decent amount of obstacles for you to test it out and realize how it can work on the field, rather than just presenting the inputs for each mechanic, doing it once, and then immediately moving onto the next one before you even get time to let it sink in.
The controls are surprisingly intuitive for the most part. Though I played this with an X360 controller instead of an actual N64 controller, I saw that S&P was designed around gripping the N64 controller in a rather particular manner, where you control your character by holding the D-pad on the left grip and aim the crosshair with the analog stick on the central grip, whereas most games took after Super Mario 64 and utilized the central and right grp instead. But on a X360 controller it's perfectly playable.
Though there are some things like rolling being activated by double-tapping left or right, and if there's any input you don't want to tie to a dodge move you want to bring up at a reflex' notice, it's a fucking double-tap input. This is made even worse with the game running at 30 FPS, ESPECIALLY when the framerate is dipping, which causes some of your inputs to get dropped and a double-tap input failing to register at a moment when you need it the most. Double-tap dodging just isn't very accurate and responsive, yet some moments in the game demand accurate rolling maneuvers.
The sword attack/reflecting projectiles is done by tapping the shoot button, but it is context-sensitive, so if there's nothing close you'll just fire a single shot. What this also means is that anticipating incoming reflectable projectiles and meleeing enemies close-up is largely a matter of mashing the shoot button. Like, there is a moment in the game when Brad will try to fight you with his own sword, but all you do at this point is mash the shoot button until you knock him back. There's no timing involved at all, which makes these parts feel rather thoughtless. The sequel to S&P would let you attack with melee regardless of context, but it had a three-hit combo with a significant recovery time for the last hit to discourage mashing. The only limitation to attacking with melee in S&P is that you temporarily can't jump again after performing a melee attack, so when you're facing an attack which moves from left to right across the ground and needs to jumped over with incoming reflectable projectiles simultaneously, you often want to reflect projectiles mid-air to offset the recovery and avoid being hit by ground attacks, which also gives you more room to double-jump after the recovery ends. However, this limitation is only ever played upon when combining incoming reflectable projectiles against attacks which need to be jumped over, which only really becomes a focal point in stage 2-2, but not so much for the rest of the game, making reflecting and slashing enemies a very straightforward case of 'mash the shoot button'.
You have a global timer which ticks down from 99 to 0, and once it reaches zero your health will slowly start to decrease. However, your timer can be refilled back to 99 by killing any kind of boss or mini-boss, which in-game are called Commanders. Alternatively, if your timer is running low, enemies will start dropping time pick-ups instead of point or health pick-ups like usual, so you won't get completely boned if you fail to kill a commander and couldn't completely refill the timer. But on the off-side, you won't get that health pick-up which you might have really needed. I like the inclusion of a global timer, because it does encourage you to play aggressively and rely more on the manual shot to kill a boss before time runs out, and stages are reasonably designed around the timer so it will never hit zero without you being able to do anything about it.
Some bosses can be milked for points, so sometimes you might end up milking a boss too long and fail to kill him before he times out. If a boss times out, the boss escapes and the game continues as usual. What is rather annoying is that although the timer for bosses is rightfully separate from the global timer, it is also invisible. So it's hard to gauge when a boss will actually time-out without trial and error, there's no reason why the boss-specific timer couldn't have been displayed as well alongside the global timer. Thankfully, boss timers are short enough so milking doesn't take ages either. Sin & Punishment manages to hit that sweetspot in milking where it's not too long and it's engaging enough, as opposed to doing a single repetitive task which puts you in no danger at all for two minutes.
Enemies will regularly drop point items on death. Each time you pick up another, the value of the point value will increase, starting from 1,000 and capping out at 50,000. However, if you get hit, the point item value is reset to 1,000. So if you want to score high, don't get hit. Items which would have normally been health items become point items instead if your health is completely full. Larger enemies will often have several destructible parts which can be targeted first for extra points, and sometimes bonus targets will appear which need to be shot for points, though they disappear quickly. For every thing you hit, your HIT counter increases by one. At the end of each stage you will get an additional bonus for your total HIT counter (which persists between stages), and a bonus for time and health remaining. The weird part is that for every 100 HITs you don't gain an extra live or something, but an extra continue. There's no lives in S&P, there's your health bar and if it reaches zero, it's game over and start anew... unless you decide to use a continue. Knowing Treasure, they very likely didn't intend you to creditfeed your way through, though the idea of being able to earn continues might give everyone else the wrong impression that you're free to use them. But then the game never makes it clear that you shouldn't use continues other than resetting your score to zero if you do, and since scoring doesn't earn you extra extends or anything, who knows? It sure as hell resulted in the usual suspects complaining that the game was too short and too easy. That's what happens when you're not clear enough about this kind of thing.
Sin & Punishment provides several difficulty settings to help you ease into the game more so you can get used to the control scheme more. Anyone should be able to beat Easy, and Normal is a decent challenge. Beating the game on Normal will unlock Hard, and Hard revamps the stages to include more enemies, more attacks or revamped attacks for boss fights, damage received is increased, and health items yield less HP on Hard (30 on Easy, 20 on Normal, 10 on Hard), meaning there's much less room to recover from mistakes. For example, there's an attack from a boss where it fires 5 continuous beams aimed at towards the screen, and slowly shift left and right and need to be jumped over, while incoming missiles need to be reflected as well. Hard Mode then adds additional lasers which are fired in the gaps between the existing ones, but these quickly disappear after reaching your platform. So when jumping between lasers, you need to also take in account that the free space you're jumping towards now also might have a laser fired through it, making proper timing with the double-jump even more essential.
The game starts off with Stage 0, which is more of a tutorial stage where you're presented with a lot of targets (mutated bees and centipedes?), most of which don't even fire back, it's pretty much impossible to die on this stage unless you're really trying to. This stage largely serves for new players to get used to the controls and for advanced players to shoot as many targets down as possible for the highest score.
Stage 1-1 starts off rather tamely. It's got a bit of everything, which is perfectly suitable for an introductory stage (not counting Stage 0). Stationary grunts act as basic fodder, there's some basic jump-over and strafing obstacles, the wall 'boss' is placed right at a moment when your timer is close to hitting zero and acts as a reminder that the timer actually matters and that you can reflect missiles for massive damage, and the ninja is one of the more interesting milking opportunities because milking the constantly spawning ships while the ninja attacks is actually decently challenging. A final battle against a gunship has you once again make use of reflecting missiles while parts of the gunship can be destroyed for additional point items.
In Stage 1-2 you climb on top of an elevator while dealing with a never ending stream of grunts, grunts on hoverbikes, and another assortment of Ruffians. Grunts will shoot at you from the center while laser turrets often rise from the sides of the elevator to sweep your legs and ninjas absail from the shaft to get onto your platform, testing your accuracy and controlling the crowd so you don't get overwhelmed by enemies everywhere. The lizardman boss you face is too agile to be reliably shot with the manual shot and is better off fought with the auto-shot, also because birds in the background will fire homing reflectable orbs which you can reflect back at the lizardman, on top of inflicting massive damage with the sword if he jumps close. The birds constantly respawn and can be milked, but since they also provide the main means of damage with which to defeat the lizardman boss and the timer is pretty low by this point in the stage, you need to make a calculated trade-off.
After that some beast called Radan which the grunts are hunting jumps down and wrecks everyone's shit, after which you're assaulted by a massive deluge of mutated (?snails). This part is pretty interesting, The snails come at you in a single line which can randomly shift a bit to the right or to the left, and the catch here is to aim carefully at the line of snails so you can catch every single one, before they can crawl over the platform you're standing on. For every X amount of killed snails, they'll also drop a point/health item. After a while another moth boss will fly in, who seeks to impede your snail hunt by firing lasers at the ground from above, which either need to be quickly strafed or rolled through. The hard part is combining this while maintaining 100% accuracy over the snails. The snail stream ends eventually, and the moth boss has very little HP and can be finished off very quickly once the stream ends. It's not so much a boss, as it is an obstacle in your snail hunt. Obviously you could kill it as soon as it appears which would make all of this easier, but then you'd lose out on snails and points gained. The only problem this part highlights is that the HUD elements at the top of the screen should have become transparent if you aim at the top of the screen, it's hard to hit the snails right as they appear from the top, because the HUD is obscuring your aim.
After reaching the top of the elevator, you face off against the Radan from before. He'll shoot you with balls which either need to be jumped over or stood under, though this attack is entirely random and devoid of real challenge. Just jump when necessary. Radan can also fire a heavily telegraphed laser beam from his mouth, though it is instantaneous and its timing needs to be memorized, you're lucky if you can jump over it properly the first time around. After that it will leap at you, but you can knock it back with your sword. The idea is to knock Radan back until she (Yes, she. The story says she used to be Brad's GF until she took some blood and transformed into an electric wolf thing) falls from the central platform, which inflicts huge damage and also spawns an additional point item. Do this twice and it's dead. Oh right, there's also another one's of Brad's GFs who wants to stop you from killing Radan, just shoot her at the start of the fight and she goes down instantly.
After killing Radan, Brad's GF awakens her powers (because she ingested Brad's blood), and starts teleporting loads of grunts at you. This part is essentially just a giant shooting gallery as thrown grunts barely damage you. Nothing wrong with it, though the position of the spawned grunts are rather on the random side, which is something that will aggravate most scorehunters. After blasting her off, she turns into a giant Evangelion, and so do you! Despite your new form, the controls are identical. Unfortunately this boss fight is lame. The way you lay down the damage is very straightforward and one-sided (keep shooting at a single stationary target) with no additional damage opportunities like reflectable projectiles or sword attack opportunities to make it faster for the more aggressive player, and the weak point of the boss often remains in one place and isn't very hard to hit. The way you avoid damage is also very one-note for this phase. Each boss attack in this phase involves a heavily telegraphed melee attack, but it's all still very unengaging because it's purely a matter of rolling at the right moment (you can jump over some swings, but the swing is short enough in duration that you can roll through it, so it doesn't make that much of a difference whether you roll or jump), save for one where a constant tracking laser burst of sorts is fired which needs be rolled through twice. The second phase on the other hand is more interesting, because now the weak spot is a small hardly visible green orbs which constantly moves left and right, and you have incoming groups of waves whose positions are random, but they can be canceled with a melee attack. The pink waves also drop a point item. Then there's also constantly incoming whirlwinds which can be canceled if you shoot them enough. There's a lot more to take into account here simultaneously, and more decisions to make. Hard mode also adds some sets of homing lasers which need to be dodged by strafing, but sadly are only fired five times at the start of the phase rather than continuously. Just as sadly, the third and final phase is completely banal. The boss will fire sets of homing lasers at you, but these are simply avoided by regularly strafing left and right. This feels more like finishing off a weakened enemy, but the preceding phases weren't that difficult to warrant a breather moment like this, so this part doesn't feel that deserved.
Instrumentality happens, shit happens, and Achi teleports Airan to safety... inside the Armed Volunteers flagship with Brad at the helm. So you make your way through its trapped innards in Stage 2-1. There's mines on the grounds which need to be shot or jumped over, and laser turrets at the sides which fire sweeping lasers. You automatically move forwards, so there's no 'taking it slowly' and inching forwards like a total noob. The turrets and mines can also be sliced with the sword, though mines create a lasting and damaging explosion upon being hit, so hitting one right as you slash it won't do you much good. Else you could just spam melee for the whole stage. Eventually you stumble upon Leda, another one of Brad's GFs which transformed into a small talking cat-like thing, and after a brief boss fight it's another autoscrolling section about shooting laser turrets on the walls before they can zap you, with a whole minefield on the end which needs to be cleared out before you run into it. Then you fight a weird Anemone boss where you need to shoot three of its legs in quick succession before they regenerate and then shoot its cores. The window you have for destroying three of them in Hard is very small, so you need to weaken each leg before destroying it, which could have been made more clear at first. I was constantly wondering what the hell I was supposed to do here at first.
The next boss is a giant crawfish who captures Achi into a giant slimy pokeball as you give chase. This fight is great, it manages to combine strafing away from walls, jumping over pits, aiming at a constantly shifting targets and reflecting mines on the move seamlessly which makes for a fun boss fight, alongside item pick-ups being placed in your path as a reward for timing your jumps between gaps perfectly. Things also start involving spacing control once the boss fires huge psychic waves which covers almost the entire breadth of the platforms you're walking on and jumping off.
This all ends with a fight against Brad himself and Leda, where Brad will dodge all your shots you fire at him, but you can keep him busy that way so he won't shoot you while you are trying to damage Leda with your sword when she tries to close in. Kill Leda, and it will enrage Brad to engage you in a glorified sword-fighting QTE, just without the prompts. Then you knock him out of the bridge window, but he recovers by landing on top of a fighter plane which just happened to be hovering there. This does make for an interesting 'rival' fight since Brad's aim is represented by a green crosshair on the screen which is identical to yours, and which you're also trying to avoid. Sadly the melee aspect of this fight is underwhelming.
Stage 2-2 is definitely one of the highlights of the game, what with flying around on a block of debris past several battleships and fighter planes zipping past all kinds of bullets and missiles. It's probably also the longest stage in the game, probably because the developers completely let their creativity loose here. The funniest part is that this stage probably didn't require that many new resources to be made, because you're constantly fighting the same battleship model, but because of the camerawork and stage design they're able to reuse them incredibly efficiently.
The reflect mechanic is utilized to a tremendous extent here. Several times you will hover over the deck of a ship as missile launchers keep launching missiles at you, which you can then reflect back. However, several naval targets in the background will pop up which can be easily killed with only one reflected missile, whereas they take too long to kill with just your gun. The amount of missiles fired is exactly enough for you to reflect one to every background target (plus-minus one, which needs to be compensated for by shooting one target with your gun since you have to do something inbetween the reflecting. The ship decks are also always populated with grunts for you to pick off for some points), and to each missile launcher which takes two. Sometimes background targets do not always appear, so you need to reflect a missile to the bridge or one of the missile launchers which can take at least two before exploding. This eventually gets expanded with you having to face off against a pair of AA turrets which constantly fire a stream of sweeping bullets which you need to jump over, alongside another stream always aimed above you to prevent you from freely double-jumping all over the place. Keeping in mind the delay before being able to jump again after performing a melee attack, having proper jump timing is essential (and to some extent knowing
when to reflect as the act of reflecting itself only requires mashing). On top of that, you need to be able to divide all the incoming missiles evenly across all the targets on screen, including the turrets. And even the turret setups get progressively harder. Later on you will face a ship upside down and the incoming bullets will come at you in a small sine wave rather than sweeping back and forth, and the impressive last encounter with the turrets has you make a head-first dive from high in the sky into a battleship and a barrage of bullets as you're constantly playing hopscotch while trying to reflect the missiles back at a far away target. Paradoxically, these parts are easier on Hard, because on Hard the rate of fire of the turrets is increased, making each stream appear like a proper stream of bullets, whereas the lower amounts of bullets fired on Normal makes it all the incoming bullets harder to read.
Interspersed between those encounters are some mini-boss fights involving fighting a gunship with tricky tracking lasers which need to be constantly jumped over or rolled through while you're trying to keep an accurate lead on the gunship, before finishing off by reflecting six missiles at once back at it while jumping over a laser crawling across the platform you're standing on. Considering it's easier/less busy compared to most of the battleship/turret/missile launcher parts, it would suit the challenge curve more if this mini-boss appeared a bit earlier on. Soon after comes the Raptor Seemer mini-boss, which is one of those 'you can only damage me after I attack' bosses and are usually kind of boring, but here it's fine because there's enough targets in the background for you to shoot at while you're avoiding its attacks. The Sentry Machinery mini-boss constantly drops groups of bomb at you which you need to stand between or cancel by meleeing, but because you can't shoot and deal damage to the boss if you prefer to take the safer option by meleeing the bombs, you just have to position yourself properly. Occasionally the boss will fire huge yellow blasts at you which need to be double-jumped over, though the size of the projectiles kind of implies at first that double-jumping over it is unfeasible, so the visual for the projectile could have been made smaller to compensate.
There's a moment when you zip past the water and a gunboat drops several mines in your path. This one always got me at first because what the mines themselves actually did and how to avoid them was rather poorly telegraphed. Basically mines which are a bit lower along the water need to be jumped over when they explode, and you should be on the ground when the mines which are a bit higher up zip past you. It's just not made very obvious at first. Even worse is when the platform shifts 120 degrees to the other side so the mines start coming from the right instead of the left, but even in this transition you still have to deal with the exploding mines, and whether you need to jump over them or stand still when they're at the middle of the screen at this point with no way to discern height, is completely and unreasonably vague.
One mini-boss later you face off against Brad standing atop his own fighter plane while leading a whole squadron of them, aaaaand this fight is rather underwhelming. Main reason being that the attacks aren't very difficult to avoid and don't deal much damage either, especially after you learn how each attack works. The most interesting part of this fight is trying to destroy all four of his supporting planes before destroying the plane he's standing on. That doesn't necessarily make for a bad boss fight itself, but it's rather underwhelming when you're fighting the head honcho of the Armed Volunteers himself. So then you blow his shit up, Achi gauds Brad into transforming into his Ruffian form, but Brad instead self-destructs so he won't be remembered as a killing beast. In any case, this stage STILL isn't over, because you have the giant mobile flying railgun fortress to deal with which seemingly came out of nowhere.
It's an interesting part of the stage. At the start you routinely get formations of projectiles which move in a linear path over the screen, which you can either roll through or jump over. While rolling is safer, you can't shoot while rolling, so if you want to destroy all targets you want to jump when possible. The difference between this and the second Kachua fight is that here you're dealing with targets which only appear for a brief amount of time and have decently high score values, whereas the time bonus for killing Kachua and most commanders in general isn't that large to warrant really focusing on speedkilling bosses (on top of her weakspot being obscured whenever she attacks, making the idea of damaging her when she attacks and thus jumping over her attacks rather moot). The mini-boss afterwards has you destroy the thrusters of the whole fortress, and I frequently choke at this part. You have a constant stream of lasers which slowly inch back and forth which you need the jump over, and the safe spaces between the lasers also constantly have a laser fired in them which persists for a brief moment. This is kind of like an extension of the previous battleship/turret/missile segments, except now you have the free space to double-jump over the lasers while waiting for some space to free up, all the while trying to reflect back the missiles. If you're ballsy enough, you can reflect the missiles back to the four supporting thrusters first before destroying the central part and moving on. For survival, you want to go straight for the core.
After a brief section where you constantly take out pairs of turrets firing tracking orbs, the game briefly decides to go full retard by having you pass through an obstacle course of lasers being fired from the side as you fly right into the main barrel of the fortress to destroy it from within. The movements you have to do here require some ridiculous precision and foresight which you simply won't have at first because of how fast the incoming lasers are. While some incoming lasers do make it obvious where you need to strafe/roll, some lasers which require you to jump or stand in one place can be rather vague because the telegraphed safe windows don't appear human-sized at all at a first glance. Basically:
You need to make some very fast rolls to the left or right when a set of lasers is expanding from the other side, but because of the small amount of time you get between the lasers popping out and you being able to accurately react to it, this largely comes down to memorization more than anything. This kind of a challenge isn't impossible, but it would need obstacles which aren't as vague in trying to present where the safe spot is and which can be spotted and planned around from a larger distance. The invincibility frames of the roll also don't feel like they apply here at all. This part is doable without taking damage, you'll just need to put in a savestate here so you can properly get this part down (the stage select only lets you start from the start of 2-2, and this last part of 2-2 is a good
ten or fifteen minutes away from the beginning).
Right as you fly into the core, you need to melee it, else you don't get any end-of-stage bonuses at all. Which also isn't the most obvious of things. The game will play an alert sound whenever anything enters melee range (yes, that's what that beeping noise is for), though it sure as hell is useless for anticipating when to strike. By the time it plays, it's usually too late if the target in question only briefly appears in range, though it can be useful if you're getting showered in projectiles which can actually be reflected with the sword (if you know what the sound is actually for in the first place). The game pulls this stunt several times, when Kachua tries to close in and Brad initiating his melee combo. It's just one of those things which aren't immediately obvious at first, yet the game never really hints at how versatile your ability to melee things truly is.
After shooting down a bomb aimed at Saki in Ruffian form, Achi teleports Airan into a vision of sorts, where you're stuck with Airan's future son and it's 2017 and you're in New York in a train speeding at 500mph with Ruffians swarming in everywhere? Stage 2-3 has only one backdrop, and that's a train carriage, which comes off as rather cheap, yet it does not have the versatility of the camerawork for the battleships in 2-2 to make it work. I'm disappointed there's no section where you walk on the roof of the moving train. Almost every train chase scene in existence does that. It does feel like they cheaped out a bit here, what with the same backgrounds everywhere and fighting the same boss four times (but with different attacks). This stage does feel like a brief interlude, difficulty-wise. There aren't too many bullets being fired at you, and you can melee most incoming dogs and firebugs anyways. Only some of the bosses near the end can get rather tricky.
There's some fun parts involving balancing out killing incoming beasts and reflecting projectiles back at the destructible train seats for point items, and killing all the firebugs before they crawl all over at you, though the deluges of mudcrabs feel like complete filler. At that point the action falls to a complete standstill and you're just mashing shoot for melee until the crab horde passes. You can strafe a bit to the left or right while doing so to hit as many crabs as possible, but that doesn't take away from the fact that it is very unengaging to deal with, especially when you're not playing for score at all. And they keep throwing the same wave at you several times, except sometimes you have to shoot them off the ceiling so that they fall down (which doesn't make that much of a difference as they automatically fall down so you can melee them anyways).
The second phase very last boss of this stage (Birth Model) also tends to fall square into "what the hell am I even supposed to do here", as to deal the most damage isn't just to shoot it directly as one would normally assume, but to shoot it enough so it gains enough force swinging back and forth, and then shooting the string it's hanging from to let it crash from the ceiling. Which is just one of those facets which falls more under puzzle territory and trying to figure out what the designer actually expects you to do here, because a regular mechanic this isn't. A negative side-effect from Treasure's brand of variety is that they tend to reach into left field, beyond the area of how you think you're supposed to play the game based from what you've already played. They don't always smooth you in properly. The attacks this boss throws at you, a bunch of mines which don't harm you at first but bounce up and down for a few times before exploding, are also another one of those vague elements which you're not sure what to do with at first. You can't cancel them with your melee, and because constantly strafing has the boss throw mines at every free position in your movement space, you feel very fucked. The idea here is to delay strafing left and right and only to strafe to the other side as soon as the other mines explode, but who's going to think of that at first?
Completing this dream quest finally convinced Airan to shoot Saki's in his Ruffian face to knock him out, so they cut open his chest, but Achi throws Airan into Saki's body against her will, after which Saki awakens and teleports away? Welcome to Stage 3-1, Hokkaido beach. Saki somehow managed to recover his human form, partially. At least he can use the gunsword. What follows is being chased around by tremors and shooting mudcrabs for point items before they get eaten by the tremors, interspersed by the Octpus [sic] Seemer fight where you gotta keep the main octopus head off bay by regularly striking it with your gunsword to keep it from spewing acid, while trying to shoot the tentacles to the sides for points, and again in quick succession to get the special target bonuses. It's a cool little fight with a lot of extra points on the line.
Some tremors and dogs later, you get to fight a Giant Spider, and then chase it into a convenience store. It hides behind the counter and pretends to be the clerk, but it only spawns extra spiderlings which crawl over the wall and over the counter. Terrible hygiene, I would never visit this store again. Some of these green spiderlings even explode. For its second phase it will spawn spiderlings which launch a miniscule fire pillar at your plane of movement, and the third phase further expands on this by having the Giant Spider launch huge cobwebs covering huge parts of the screen which shortly after become electrocuted if you don't make yourself lost in time, alongside green spiders dropping bombs from the ceiling, alongside a bigger spiderling firing a giant laser if it isn't immediately killed as soon as it spawns. This boss itself feels like an expansion on the Octpus [sic] Seemer fight from before. Now you need to watch out which parts of the screen you need to strafe towards in order to avoid the electric webs, you need to regularly cancel the bombs being dropped by spiderlings with your sword if you don't want to get blown up, you need to take care of the giant spiderling if you don't want to get zapped, and between all that you need to find some room to shoot the Giant Spider itself, who constantly shifts his weakpoint a little everytime you shoot it. This fight throws so many things at you that it can get rather overwhelming at first, but on repeat playthroughs this boss is always a blast to play.
Then the core of the Giant Spider tries to hide in a trashcan in the kitchen, so the obvious course of action is to give chase and launch it onto a thankfully-still-functional stove and cook spider for dinner. Except it keeps jumping around between the plates, so you need to shoot the plane it's going to jump to next in order to heat it up and get the spider core to stop jumping as it gets gradually boiled. Thing is that the closer it gets to dying the faster it starts jumping around, and it keeps sending out these pillars of lightning along your plane of movement which need to be rolled through. The easiest way to defeat this boss is to slightly weaken it at first with the autoshot, then fully try too cook it twice in quick succession before it starts building up ridiculous speed and the pillars force you to roll and stop shooting a bit (which in turn allows the spider core to keep jumping again). For this fight, I think having obstacles which can only be rolled through a rather bad idea (as opposed to obstacles which can be jumped over), as it prevents you from keeping a good shot on the spider core which then has it jump as exponentially more difficult to keep up with speeds, which when combined with the random spawn positions of the lightning pillars can make for some rather uneven difficulty here, as the most reliable way of beating it involves speedkilling the boss before it actually gets to the incredibly difficult part, which just feels like cheesing.
After Saki and Airan take a well-deserved break to eat some cooked spider, Achi teleports in from behind to kidnap Airan, so you gotta go save her! Commence Stage 3-2: taking a stroll through the woods. This stage is very weird, because it is an actual run 'n gun side-scrolling stage, with no autoscrolling to speak of (in the first half anyways), but with the base controls still intact! Instead, you have to keep moving to the right on your own. I think that to this day I still haven't seen any other run 'n gun like Stage 3-2 where you can aim at targets in the background and alongside your plane of movement with a crosshair, with background objects acting as cover between background enemies and you. There's even enemies who stand between you and the camera, which can only be killed by using your sword. Well, there's Stage 3 in the sequel, though that one is completely autoscrolling. It's weird that they'd decide to do something largely different right before the end of the game, but then that's the whole game for you.
All things considered, this stage works out surprisingly well. To shoot along your own plane of movement, you simply need to aim towards the general direction you want to shoot at, provided you're not aiming at a background enemy. You can even shoot at the foreground enemies, though it's easier to just slash 'em. You can slash most things in your path while aiming at the background. While the lack of auto-scrolling does mean the non-stop intensity takes a hit, the timer is strict enough (but with extra time items placed at reasonable positions) to keep you moving, as there's a succinct lack of commanders in this stage for resetting your timer back to 99. At the start there's a lot of flying targets you can shoot for point items, but stopping to take aim and grab all the items takes time, and if you're slow you might find yourself running out of time.
Background enemies will fire a burst of bullets towards the foreground at fixed positions, though in some cases (depending on the enemy) the burst of bullets can have random trajectories, as the bullet trajectories aren't always well telegraphed. At other times you have two enemies popping up which shoot towards the right, and with a third one popping up shooting towards the left. There's no real clear telegraphing or a visual targeting line of sorts to indicate where they are firing, save for the orientation of the enemies, which isn't something you will be paying a lot of attention to when you're constantly on the move. The grunts on your path tend to be of the meleeing kind, and I find them rather irksome to deal with because they seem to be running off a global timer rather than being active when they appear on screen, often throwing off my timings when it's safe to approach them for a melee strike. You can even
hear them performing their melee attack at regular intervals when they are
off-screen. Meaning it's safer to kill them by aiming in their general direction than with a sword strike, though especially with analog aiming that takes away some of the aggression you can exert on this stage.
At some point you'll even get chased by a giant invincible humanoid dinosaur-thing, which even other Ruffian grunts are running away from. Which then has you slashing mines on the ground and enemies in your path, taking out background enemies who dickishly fire a burst of projectiles in your path, and slashing the head of the dinosaur-thing itself to keep it from breathing fire. A mistimed jump can screw up your streak here. After that the stage heads a bit more into platformer territory with blocks being placed at regular intervals you have to jump over. And each time you jump to a new block, a grunt will pop up from the background to nail you with his random spread, making jumping while staying on top of the same platform rather unfeasible. But if you try to back up a bit, another grunt will pop up in the background aiming at the block/floor you just backed up to. THe idea being: keep moving. What's less fun is that if you want to get the most points, you'll have to methodically bait out and shoot every single grunt popping up in the background, for every single block. Which is a massive pace-killer.
The stage further proceeds to throw dragonflies at you which move like Medusa Heads and need to be slashed a few times before going down, but unlike Medusa Heads they take up too much screenspace and the waves they move in are too damn broad, to the point where it becomes too chaotic to determine what the safe spots are with the dragonflies and where you need to stand in order to not collide with them. It's not like you can kill them in one hit either. So it mostly comes down to figuring out the safe spots, which are always static anyways. The other option is to inch forwards slowly, which is the scrub's way of doing things. This lack of room to reasonably predict and respond the trajectory of a contact-damage type enemy also rears its ugly head again with the starting attack of the Larva Seemer, where you need to stand at this one spot in particular to avoid colliding with the Larva, as there's absolutely no other means of avoiding contact with the Larva Seemer. The fight itself is pretty interesting, as you're constantly from the run from the Larva Seemer while you have to deal with something akin to Barnacles in Half-Life while the Larva Seemer is firing big-ass fireballs which can only be reasonably avoided by standing in the pits between the platforms you need to jump on top of, and there's still the same background enemies to contend with, and the same point item carriers which need to be destroyed by aiming to the front, else they electrocute you if you get close, as they're invulnerable to your sword. Save for the 'gotcha!' introductory attack, this is actually an entertaining chase sequence.
After a weird out-of-place 'platforming' segment where you're trying to squeeze yourself between rolling spiked balls to get through, the stage becomes fully auto-scrolling anyways, and all the platforming is tossed away. Instead you have the constant streams of bullets from grunts to worry about. This part actually features objects as cover between you and the enemies more prominently than in the first part of this stage, and it actually suits the action here more, because in the second part the danmaku becomes a lot more dense, and you can't back up and take things easily the same way you could in the first half. Grunts constantly keep popping up, and flying bees and centaurs act as mini-commanders who will cover the screen in attacks if you don't speedkill them. This briefly follows a fight against Man Seemer, which functions identically to the Moth Seemer fight in 1-3 where you're trying to prioritize destroying background targets while damaging the boss when the chance presents itself. Here that means double-jumping over its attacks and slashing it while you shoot the Ruffian eggs in the background. This boss times out very quickly, so you need to make the most of it.
I prefer the second half more because it can keep up the intensity in line with the rest of the game, which the first half of this stage rather lacks and can only recreate when you're being chased by a larger enemy, such as the Larva Seemer and dinosaur-thing. One of the prime features of run 'n guns without auto-scrolling is that they let you blast through the stages at a blistering pace once you're good enough. However, S&P is not designed around speedrunning the game like something Alien Soldier is, and neither is 3-2. Because a lot of targets are in the background and can't be immediately aimed at because of analog aiming, the pacing a player would take if he wanted the score the most points would be very stop 'n go. There are very little bulletsponges blocking your path which would facilitate something like sword strikes and reflecting missiles for quick and massive damage to speedkill your way through either (though there are the turtle lizards around the start of 3-2, but they're completely harmless). You're then usually standing still or going back a little so you can nail some extra targets, which only isn't the case when you're being chased by a larger monster. The scoring bonuses for milking and just
hitting things are far above the time bonuses you get for killing commanders. While the timer does motivate you to keep going, it's more for the sake of survival, nothing like Gigantic Army's scoring system where health remaining and time remaining matter exponentially more than the points you get for killing enemies. If you can't play for better times, then you might as well have an auto-scrolling stage on your hands, which is exactly what the second half of 3-2 is. At least when auto-scrolling, the time pressure manifests itself differently: you only have a limited amount of time to shoot down all these targets, and fucking up on killing bosses means the global timer ticks down dangerously low.
The progression of the escalation of the action as a whole does feel rather incongruent. The first act starts on a somewhat straightforward side as the mission is just to get to the choppa and escape, before 1-3 suddenly goes full fucking End of Evangelion. The majority of Act 2 is a completely cuhrazy action setpiece where a missus with a handgun on a flying brick proves more effective than any piece of warmachinery or ultra-bred mutant warrior, before calming things down a bit with a hallucination sequence. Then Act 3 is... again rather straightforward? There's a whiff of aloofness and everydayness to the backgrounds of 3-1 and 3-2, to chasing a giant spider into the kitchen or taking a stroll through the woods, that feels completely out of place for a final act, even if the difficulty of 3-2 does suit one. You'd think that gauging by the rate of escalation that 2-2 would be more appropriate as the final stage, that things would get only progressively more crazy over time with peaks at the end of every act, but S&P is again weird like that.
So, at the end Saki finds Achi standing over Airan's unconscious body and reveals all her plans to Saki (some sequelbaiting which managed to be realized after nine years), so Saki knocks Achi into the sea, so Achi decides to fly directly into orbit and
transform into a replica of the very Earth itself, which then begins to attack the real Earth. Obviously that shit can't fly, so Saki asks Airan to hang onto his heart (much like the backpack loli in Berserk) as he transforms into Evangelion mode to face the final boss and protect the Earth.
Your own life doesn't even matter anymore, the integrity of the Earth itself is your HP bar now. The Earth clone will launch a barrage of meteors and bullets at the real Earth to kill it, and the only way to prevent that is to shoot the incoming projectiles directly to reflect them back at the Earth clone. This fight is epic, literally. While mechanically it's something completely different compared to the rest of the game as character movement and reflecting projectiles are barely tested in this fight, it's undeniably one hell of a way to end the game. You find yourself constantly struggling to hit the incoming projectiles before they hit the Earth, and becoming overwhelmed as smaller mistakes and lapses of accuracy result in even more projectiles piling on and onto your plate. Only huge balls of lava can't be reflected with your Force, but need to be reflected back with your FISTS. If you manage to win without letting your Earth take a single hit, you will earn the Perfect Bonus of 5 million points,
and it IS possible to achieve. In a way it is in line with the rest of the game that the final boss feels like a complete non sequitur, and it is somewhat fitting that it largely challenges you on one of your most basic skills: aiming with your crosshair. That's just Sin and Punishment for you.
Though the N64 does hold the game back in a lot of ways, it is still technically impressive that the game remains highly playable despite the limited hardware capabilities. Sin and Punishment is an injection of concentrated adrenaline and acid, one of a pure and rare kind. Treasure manages to derive a surprising amount of mileage out of a static set of player abilities, one which ensures the game never feels stale despite its longer-than-usual length. Just do yourself a favor and play this game ASAP. It's a total hoot.
and a half.
