ヴァンキッシュ

Western game design over the Xbox 360/PS3-generation owes more to Shinji Mikami than anyone in the West. Resident Evil 4 popularized the third-person shooter genre so familiar today, and Vanquish seeks to reinvent it with a focus on core mechanics and unabashed attitude once so prevalent among Japanese video games.

Playing as Sam Gideon, a character that seems to embrace everything lovably bad about 1980s video game protagonists, the player rockets through battle arenas that look like the spotless white future of Tron while slowing down time for critical shots. Gideon’s suit is equipped with jet boots that let the player boost from cover-to-cover, a necessary task given their temporal protection.

The sleek design and fast-paced action is what separates Vanquish from its competitors. Where Uncharted and Gears of War plod through their self-serious, cinematic campaigns, Vanquish encourages players to blaze through the game’s eight hours for a high score. The game’s nonsensical story and macho characters with horrible one-liners are a breath of fresh air. No emotional interplay is necessary when you are gliding between collapsing buildings and firing rockets at giant robotic spiders — so why bother? This isn’t Mikami’s answer to Uncharted 2. This is the game you daydreamed about during history class in 1997.