Viewtiful Joe is designed to offer classic platform action with state-of-the-art graphics and visual effects. Players take control of regular Joe, a cel-shaded hero whose side-scrolling adventures are presented in the style of a movie. Joe soon gains the ability to transform in to Viewtiful Joe, a superhero with the power to befuddle his enemies with cinematic special effects. As he makes his way through the adventure, he earns new and more powerful abilities.

These powers allow Viewtiful Joe to execute special combos, or even control the flow of time. He can speed things up for a flurry of fisticuffs, or borrow a trick from Max Payne to slow the action for some cinema-style battle. Conceived and designed under the guidance of Capcoms Atsushi Inaba (producer of Steel Battalion) and Hideki Kamiya (director of Devil May Cry), this PS2 port of Viewtiful Joe is among the first releases from the Capcom-funded, independent Clover Studio.

Though PlayStation 2 gamers had to wait almost a year longer than their GameCube counterparts to play Viewtiful Joe, they do enjoy an extra feature, in the form of a hidden character. They say a playable, cel-shaded version of Dante, the hero of the Devil May Cry games, can be unlocked through skilled play.