Lupin III: Lupin is Dead, Zenigata is in Love

I have no idea how or why this rules so much but it does?

It's of course an incredibly janky game. The moment-to-moment gameplay goes from unpolished to awful (the Zenigata beat-em-up chapters are both baffling and incredibly tedious. Why is Zenigata the only character not allowed to shoot his gun?). But for a game released in 2007 this is structurally impressive. It's a full-on setpiece based action game, taking some basic action-adventure mechanics and spinning them into bite-sized cinematic fragments of what's basically a lost Lupin III movie. The pacing is absolutely perfect (If we ignore the lack of checkpoints. Save states are your friends), as each section is short enough to be fun and make its point, without overstaying its welcome. And the same is true for the non-playable sequences, which are full of classic Lupin charm, but also always short enough to balance the play rather than overshadow it.

It's like. Wow, half of the time this thing is an absolute pain to play, but design-wise this feels like a mid to late ps3 era game, and that's sort of impressive.

I just had a big smile stamped on my face throughout all of this. It's just really fun and creative. And the Italian version even features the whole cast from the original Italian dub of the show!