Sin and Punishment is an on-rails third person shooter game for the Nintendo 64 and recently re-released onto the Wii’s Virtual Console. According to nerdier sources the correct title is “Sin and Punishment: Successor of the Earth” but that’s not what the Wii calls it. I never had an N64 when I was a kid and even if I did I wouldn’t have paid a ton extra to import games from Japan that I can’t read. So since this is an N64 game as well as a Japanese import you can correctly assume I never played this game prior to its re-release onto the Wii. Having no impression of it at all, the first thing I noticed was that this game is pretty anime. You play as a fourteen year old boy with a lazer gun and some sort of sword and he fights ninjas and giant monsters. About 30 minutes into the game he transforms into a giant robot and trashes Tokyo. In the end you fight (a copy of) Earth which is actually pretty cool.There’s also a cute fuzzy animal that bounces around and talks with a squeaky voice ^__^ .
Being an import from Japan, you’d generally expect to see some Engrish to be prominent in this game. Well surprisingly enough there’s hardly any at all (although the dialog still sucks) except for one notable example. Where it’s supposed to say “Difficulty: Hard” it actually says “Difficulty: Easy” and where it’s supposed to say “Difficulty: Super Duper Ultra Hard” it actually says “Difficulty: Normal”. But it was a simple mistake that can be easily overlooked. The game wouldn’t quite be so challenging if it wasn’t for the fact that moving the crosshairs with a joystick takes a lot of practice. At least first person shooters are tolerable with joysticks because they move the entire camera, but in this game the camera points the same direction the all the time and the crosshairs move independent of it. It feels like one of those old laptops where you move the mouse by pushing a little knob with your finger. Now imagine trying to use one of those laptops only with the windows running around the screen and shotting lazers at you. That’s about how easy this game is to play, and also about how good the graphics are.
Which brings me to my next point, the graphics. They sucked. It took me about ten minutes to figure out that my character was actually a boy instead of a girl. A lot of the time the game just looks like a giant explosion of polygons and only after the second time playing you realize what each particular arrangement of polygons means. It’s sort of like the game is using a demented symbol language to tell you what’s going on instead of just straight up showing what’s happing. But in perspective most N64 games were like that.
There was a story too but I couldn’t make heads or tails of what was going on. This was partly because the voice acting was so horrible that sometimes I couldn’t even understand what they were supposed to be saying, but mostly because it straight up was a stupid story. I’m going to just leave it at that because thinking about it hard enough to describe it gives me a headache. Go read Wikipedia if you really want to know the details.
Despite all the negative stuff I’ve said so far this game is actually a lot of fun once you get used to the aiming controls and graphics. The game is notably short (I beat it in a little over an hour my first time), and there’s not much to unlock or do differently each time you play, but it’s still a fun shooter despite being shallow. Even the bad stuff is likable in the same way B movies are likable; it’s an acquired taste. Overall I recommend this game if you want a simple shooter that won’t take up too much of your time.
8/10