Game Journal: Violent Storm (2 Loop Clear, Hardest)

I cleared both loops of Violent Storm (a 1993 beat em up by Konami) on the hardest difficulty, including the Violent Round!

NOTE: This was played on the Japanese version, which gives you extra lives at 500k, 1.5 million, 2.5 million etc points. The other versions don't give you any extra lives at all.

I learned how to play arcade beat 'em ups by playing The Punisher last year, but playing Violent Storm is what made me truly fall in love with the genre. I love its cramped tight arenas, its fast pacing and low health enemies, its incredibly strong throws and pummels, and its brutally strong enemies who can sometimes be completely impossible to fight head-on if you don't have a way to get the jump on them. Its second loop throws in all sorts of extremely silly Mario Maker-esque level design, with huge enemies chasing you through an entire section of a stage, a big group of fish dancing on a pier, barrels and enemies raining down from the sky, and giant groups of elite enemies arranged like bowling pins.

The only things I don't love about are its boss fights (which are all 1v1 fights that tend to come with strict loop execution tests), its easier parts (stages 1, 2, 5 and the first half of stage 3) and how incredibly strong the player's dash attack is against most enemies. But the dull parts are pretty quick to breeze through, and the game still finds plenty of ways to challenge you even when you're using your dash attack as much as possible. I feel like if the original team got to make a sequel to this game, it would have cleaned up those issues and been one of the best games ever made. But even as it is, it's still incredible!