Top 10 Final Battles #6: Viewtiful Joe 2

Viewtiful Joe 2 is one of my favorite games of all time.  It is the only game I have ever given a perfect 10 out of 10.  It exceeds an already fantastic game in every way including in its amazing final battle.

Context:

With all the other happy ending-controlling Rainbow Oscars gathered and kept safe with Joe's dad Jet, and with the evil-spreading Black Film destroyed, the heroes Joe and Silvia need only one more Rainbow Oscar: the blue one Captain Blue was changed into before being taken by the big bad Black Emperor of Gedow.  That means smashing their way through Gedow's giant moon base full of robots and weirdness taken straight out of the Aliens franchise (as opposed to the first game's villain's Star Wars motif).

At the end of the very long, very difficult gauntlet, the emperor himself sits in wait, ready.

His plans are pretty much foiled by now, since the heroes have the Oscars and his Black Film is gone, but when Joe points this out, the Emperor pulls out his secret weapon.  Apparently it wasn't as gone as they thought.

"The Black Film is unbreakable!  It can never be destroyed completely!"

With the mighty Black Film once again in his possession, the Emperor has an edge and demonstrates its power by breaking the fourth wall and telepathically putting it on the projector in the theater Joe's adventure is connected to.  As demonstrated earlier when Joe's dad Jet accidentally put it in, that only leads to trouble.  How interesting that he could reach through the screen like that.  Up to this point the only ones who have been able to were people from the real world.  Maybe that means he is?

The film's darkness covers the movie and summons the literally astronomically-sized killer robot Dark Kaiser!  One has to wonder where the hell Jet is while this is all going on.

It's an intimidating intro accentuated by Keith Czaristica's booming performance as the emperor.  His warped voice effect adds to the emperor's villainous tone and was carried over to the anime (in Japanese, at least).

With a robot that big, it'll take way more than Six Majin to take it down, so the heroic duo calls forth a robot even bigger, so big that the entirety of Six Majin itself acts as the helmet, Megazord-style!  After an awesome transformation sequence straight out of a toku series, the helmet combined with Joe's new dreadnought-like ship forms the Six X Six machine!  Not only is this one bigger, but it can instantly switch to a new Silvia-styled form!

Phase 1

I wasn't kidding when I stated that these mechs are astronomically big.  The entire fight takes place in the Milky Way Galaxy!  You move around on an asteroid belt that surrounds the sun and each of the planets is about the size of a beach ball!  There's God of War and Asura's Wrath, and then there's this!
Granted, it's most likely just a big movie set, given the world they're in, but even so, how many games can claim to have a giant robot battle weaponizing planets?

Both robots use this galactic environment to their advantage.  Dark Kaiser plants itself into the sun to discharge explosive shockwaves and flaming fire dragons that circle the field.  At that point, Mars, Earth, the Moon and Venus gravitate away from the sun and onto the asteroid belt so that you can hit them with mach speed to get the firey aura that makes you immune to the fire, as utilized in the fight with Fire Leo in the first game.  You also need mach speed to avoid the firestorm of missiles Kaiser shoots from its fingertips.

But it's not just the sun Black Kaiser weaponizes.  By opening its torso, Black Kaiser's core uses a tractor beam to have Jupiter shoot bouncing pink projectiles out of its red eye or trap you with Saturn's rings.  Depending on your distance when that happens, you have to use either Silvia's guns at long range or Joe's punches at close range to hit the exposed core, so even though the fight largely utilizes Joe, there's a chance for Silvia's sleek new mech to shine.

It's bigger, badder and far less frustrating than the first game's penultimate boss as well as a spectacle from start to finish.  There's always room in a game for giant fighting robots pounding on each other.

With Black Kaiser destroyed, our heroic duo is free to take the final Rainbow Oscar, but at the last minute, Jet, of all people, jumps in out of nowhere to grab it! Joe's dad was the Black Emperor all along!

This was before the series sort of established this twist as a tradition when they did it a third time later, so it came off as a major shock to me when I first played through the game.  It's always the person you least suspect.

However, it does raise a few questions.  Namely, why didn't he use the Rainbow Oscars when he had them?  And why did he make it so difficult for the heroes to get them if they were doing it for him?  Like with the first game, the anime version made more sense, but I'll get into that later.

Using the Oscar's power, The Black Emperor morphs into the ultimate hero: The Dark Hero: Jet Black! Ironically this dark hero is very white.  I guess because white symbolizes death in Japan.

The Oscars give Jet the power to influence the real world, which he uses to boot them all out onto the stage of some ceremony called the Viewtiful Awards, literally setting a stage for a finale.  Joe and Silvia are powerless in reality, but thanks to the Oscars, Jet is just as powerful in the real world as he is in the movies.

Phase 2

For the first time since the beginning of the game you are forced to fight with no powers and now it's against a super powered final boss.  Jet must be toying with them because he takes it easy, but getting through this part is no cakewalk.
Jet surrounds himself with pink crescent blades that orbit around him and occasionally he shoots a rather large blast of energy that has to be jumped over.  To avoid getting hit you have to go in between the narrow spaces in between the blades, jump over the blasts with the right timing and quickly hit him three times (very easy with Sylvia's quick-punching boxing glove gun).  After those three hits, he moves to the opposite side of the stage, adds a blade and repeats the process two more times.

Keep in mind, that when they aren't transformed, Joe and Sylvia take twice as much damage, which means that on the harder difficulty they can die in just a few hits at this point alone unless you pack some double take items that refill it when you die!  It's a total feeling of helplessness until the audience comes to save the day!

The people in the audience cheer, telling the duo not to give up and that they believe in them!  That audience is what gives their powers life.  The heroes are as real as the people who believe in them.  This restores their powers so they can now go all-out against Jet, who stops playing around.

The music used is fantastic.  It's upbeat, but intense enough to work as a final battle track.  While the first game's final battle music was an epic score combining the two combatant's themes because of the battle between master and student, this one is better suited for the final stretch of a challenge and fast-moving intensity.

At this point Jet drops the orbiting blades and adopts a more hit and run style.  One of Jet's primary tactics is floating away before attacking, meaning there's a need to constantly rush him until it's his turn to attack.  Like the previous phase he shoots balls of energy, but now also shoots them in a rapid fire circular pattern in addition to a regular straight shot.  There it's a matter of dodging them to get to him.

You also have to dodge his sword.  Jet will go straight up to you and start chopping his sword in a series of extremely fast swipes.  Like regular enemies he swipes them high or low with the danger indicators to tell you where, but here slow motion is a requirement and it's less forgiving because if you miss one you cannot slow motion dodge it or the rest of them and you're going to take a whole lot of sword.  It's one of the biggest health-drainers by far, meaning nailing the dodging is essential.

When you do manage to dodge it all, he's open for a pounding, and it's that satisfying feeling of dodge and riposte that makes this final battle so invigorating and a test of skill, when you aren't chasing him around the stage.

Jet mixes things up by lowering gravity and using his own version of the fire and lightning aura Joe and Silvia have.  While he has them up, regular attacks are useless and the finishing move he uses for his sword attack if you don't dodge (or jump out the way and don't try to) shoots out fire and lightning dragons that you also can't slow-mo dodge.

You need to know when to approach and when to back off.

Similar to Fire Leo in the first game they can only be dispelled using the corresponding element, meaning you have to switch it up and focus on using either the zoomed-in upgraded version of the red hot kick and cool blue kick or in Silvia's case, hit him with her record ability for her lightning aura.

The part where he lowers gravity is also surprisingly in his favor.  In most games lower gravity makes things easier by slowing things down and allowing for the careful adjustment of jumps, but here you have to be careful of when to use your double jump because while you're falling you're a sitting duck and even your diving kicks and slam attacks that drive you downward take a long time and are almost guaranteed to miss.  Keeping on your toes and adapting is another aspect of a great boss fight.

The whole fight is a spectacular duel that hits all the notes of a triumphant victory and I like it when the final phase of a boss is less overblown than its previous phases to give it a sense of condensed power.  Viewtiful Joe 2's final boss hits a lot of the same notes as the first game's, but in my opinion, 2 does it better.

Dark Kaiser more intimidating and grandiose than King Blue's fight, the twist actually makes some amount of sense and the final fight with Jet has the boss using hit and run tactics rather than the player practically needing to do so against Captain Blue.  The fight with Jet is also treated as its own level, unlike the last game where every time you lost to Captain Blue you had to go back to fighting King Blue again.  That was unbearably aggravating because it's wasting time on something you already did.  That with the added spin of being powerless at first and the use of two characters makes Viewtiful Joe 2's final boss battle one of my favorites of all time.

After defeating Jet and showing him the heart of a true hero, in true cheesy style, the evil possessing Jet is purged from him, Captain Blue is changed back to normal, explains Jet's backstory about his love of movies and there's another cliffhanger for the final game that even a decade later has never been made.

Except in the anime, that is.

I know it's not related to the game, but I think it's worth noting how the anime played with the game's plot elements to make a story with similar themes and ideas.

The anime makes a number of changes to the story and the final battle, which I think are for the better.  The Rainbow Oscars are completely absent.  Instead it revolves around the Black Emperor insidiously trying to ruin the happy endings of movies in order to make them into black films, which as demonstrated in one episode, gives him incredible power that's ultimately counteracted by film cels of the very first Captain Blue film, known as the white film, hidden in Silvia's belt buckle.  It's a nice element of hope and love vs. despair long before Danganronpa was doing it.

Captain Blue also isn't changed into the blue Rainbow Oscar and is instead turned into a magical film crank Gedow uses to create its monsters.  He's also given a lot more connection to Jet being possessed, with his scar being from a fight with Jet rather than from Hulk Davidson, as mentioned in the first game.

Fitting with the franchise's film motif, the crank makes things happen when it turns.

The biggest difference is of course that the anime has a conclusion for all this and it's pretty much nothing like in this game.  The anime doesn't include Dark Kaiser or Jet's white hero form.  The real climactic battle takes place in the Black Emperor's UFO, specifically a dimensional space where he stores pieces of the movies he visits, but they don't know it's Jet.

Like the game it's shown that the hero's adventures have been a big movie all along being shown at the "Viewtiful Film Festival."  There Jet reveals himself as the Black Emperor and there's a battle in Jet's theater in which the movie characters come in to help.  After purging the evil from the Black Emperor using the white film it's revealed the one possessing Jet was some kind of almighty evil known as the Evil King that had Jet hijack the Viewtiful awards and spread despair, allowing the Evil King to take its colossal form in the real world.  I guess it's kind of like Ameno-sagiri in Persona 4.

The heroes are able to transform in the real world thanks to their adoring fans whereas the Black Emperor and Evil King get their power from despair and negativity. Because of that the heroes do lose their powers temporarily like in the game when the Evil King fills the audience with despair so they stop believing in them.

In the end, a complete white film manifests from the cels, titled Viewtiful Joe.  It's shown to the world and like in the game, that audience gives Joe, Silvia and Junior their powers again.  With that, Joe finishes the Evil King off with a super glowy fist containing the hopes of everyone he's ever met and it is glorious.  I think it's a better final confrontation than Viewtiful Joe 2, but sadly this is for games, not anime.  I can't wait for the English version of that.

It's also essentially the same finishing move to the next game on the list.  What a coincidence.