Captain Blue, a hero, has finished his career and would prefer to become a director. To find the main lead actor he doesn't let his candidates follow a script or do some lines but he organises a fight where the final winner will be able to call himself "actor". You'll be able to do a lot of fighting against more and less known characters from the VJ-universe.

Interesting is that the fights and the complete whole constantly hide a different objective you need to reach to be able to proceed: surviving and beating bosses are the more classic ones, but you'll also sometimes have to beat a number of opponents, only be allowed to die a maximum amount of times or collect certain items. Some of these objective therefore result in that collecting coins alone isn't enough.

Equal variation is found also with the amount of moves and your special powers, but more on that in an instant. There's also a lot of different characters (Joe, Gran Bruce, Sylvia, ...) but sadly enough certain ones are much more fun and powerful to play with than others so they're not really balanced. For the Playstation fans there's also a nice extra in the form of Dante who takes a break from his fighting in the Devil May Cry-series.

I'm always a bit hesitant on the controls of PSP fight games. Luckily these have been kept relatively simple which was more than necessary. Your hands are as usual in a cramp after an hour of gaming but that's probably more due to myself than the makers of the game! Just as in all Viewtiful Joe games the 4 VFX powers (slow, mach speed, sound effects and zoom which makes you a bit bigger so that you can hit even harder) and the special attacks are again present. As said these specials vary depending on character and they're more than useful. Unfortunately this can't be said from the VFX stuff as the fights are clearly not made for them and the chaos and intensity of the combat isn't really suitable to use them. Too bad as this is for me exactly what made the previous games so special. Another negative result is that you'll start limiting yourself pretty quickly to the usual button bashing.

Also specific about the Viewtiful Joe games are of course the graphics and we can't complain about them here. The visuals are sharp, colorful and splash from your screen while also the animations and moves of the characters are nice. The characters have been given some perfect voice-acting and the soundtrack nicely adds to that in its own way.

Those fed up with the singleplayer can have fun with the Trial Mode and the multiplayer combat. The Trials don't bring much new but you can put your teeth in them to accomplish the challenges and try to break your record. Next to that you can fight with up to four people as well as finish the singleplayer missions together with them. A lot of fun and although the chaos gets a bit worse it doesn't stand in the way of the joy. Also nice is that you only need one UMD to be able to play with two.