God Hand on PlayStation 2 is one of the most satisfying games I’ve played in a while, emphasizing the directly-controlled experience and pure fun. Fighting enemies requires quick response times and not overestimating your attack windows before the enemy counterattacks. It’s fair, fast-paced, and fun. Because it’s difficult, there’s pride and satisfaction upon beating an enemy using your skill and wits.

As far as the “wits” element goes, there’s ways to exploit enemies in God Hand. Enemies have a limited aggro range, so it’s possible to run up to one, lightly poke them, then run like hell until they retreat to their spawn point, and repeating until they’re defeated. For crowd control, learn the minimum distance required for your taunt, then use it to bait individual enemies away from the rest of their mobs so that you can fight enemies one at a time.

The plot is kind of stupid and pointless, but I expected that. The crazy boss introductions are funny, and it’s one of the best things about the game. There’s endless appeal in God Hand‘s countless boss fights against unpredictable enemies. There are also occasional minigames in stages that parody retro videogames. Very rewarding.

An interesting thing about God Hand is the level of physical exertion required to play it. Even basic enemies take a considerable number of hits to defeat, and every one of your attacks requires a single button press. Their relative speed combined with how important it is to maximize attack opportunities means you’ll constantly be button mashing.

If you’re prone to repetitive strain injury or anything similar, you may want to exercise caution when approaching God Hand. I have no history of anything like that, and I found myself ending play sessions not because I wanted to, but because my hands were too sore to continue. In addition to being generally unpleasant, such soreness impacts your mashing rate and impacts your damage-per-second. The game’s general difficulty means retrying sections is routine, further piling up strain. I first beat the game when I was around 19 years old too, so I was in the best physical condition of my life.

There are some ways around this. One is to use a controller or emulator turbo function instead of mashing. This is arguably cheating, as the variance in attack speed seems like a deliberate test of skill—one that you’re eliminating. But it’s better than less physically-capable players having to skip this great game.

Another is to customize your combos to rely on multi-hit attacks, which consist of several strikes for one button press. Unfortunately, these moves are normally not advisable. They have a high point cost, reducing the number of attack combinations you can make with them.

Also, shorter attacks allow for more input windows to dodge out of sudden enemy counterattacks, which is an incredibly important skill. You can mitigate this by preemptively not spending too long attacking one enemy for backing off. Despite these flaws, it’s again superior to skipping God Hand, and this option at least isn’t cheating.

The existence of multi-hit attacks technically means God Hand has accessibility options, I suppose, but you still need to progress far enough to purchase said attacks from the game’s shop. Still, I think the physical exhaustion is actually pretty cool, and it’s stuck with me in the years since finishing God Hand. It heightens immersion to have a tactile analog for your player character breaking their fists upon hordes of enemies. There’s nothing quite like a good workout, after all.