It's honestly fucking wild how hard I ended up falling in love with this game and what it was doing by the end when in the beginning it genuinely wasn't doing too much for me.
The over the top battle shounen vibes, which can work for me on occasion (Jujutsu Kaisen, recently got into Hunter x Hunter), don't generally hit for me. The story wasn't doing much for me, more man pain save the daughter god killing wasn't doing a ton for me.
But there's a point in this game where it finally just all clicked correctly into place. The way the game uses QTE's to better cement you within Asura's perspective. Every weighty punch and fluid blow landed or received absolutely felt by how much you hammer on those fuckin buttons.
The gusto and fucking aspirations towards making this shounen power trip about the angriest motherfucker alive doing his best to protect those he cares for. It just fuckin clicks. The setpieces get better and better. The QTE's become more personal and hard hitting. I was rooting for Asura and doing my best to help him. I wanted to get my synchronicity rating as perfect as I could because I felt the weight of every missed QTE.
It's corny to say but genuinely this game makes you FEEL like you are Asura. It makes you feel like you are throwing those punches, crunching your own hands to dust by mashing the fuck out of that circle button. And the intense varied ways a person can punch a dude are represented perfectly with the wonderfully expressive and beautiful art direction and animation. This is absolutely one of the better looking games of that gen while also being one of the better showcases I've seen of Unreal 3 on consoles. It looks fuckin excellent. The watercolor palette, the shimmer, the wonderful reds, greys and harsh black lines. It evokes every inch of its inspirations and then some.
The final boss (within the DLC) is genuinely one of the greatest uses of QTE's I think I've ever seen in my life. I'll go more into that in the review of the DLC specifically but holy fuck it's wild as hell.
I think what finally brought it into focus for me was thinking of it less as a character action game, because honestly while the combat is serviceable it's more a bridge to the setpieces than actually all that great, and more as a evolution of games like Dragon's Lair, Space Ace and Time Gal.
Once I looked at it more in that light, played much more aggressively with the combat and let the game take me onto it's wild ride it completely fucking hooked me. Some of the sequences, shots, compositions absolutely deserve to be immortalized in some fashion.
It couldn't really work the same at all within any other medium. While described as "interactive anime" I would say it's trying to pave its own footprint into cinematic gaming as a whole and changing the players relationship to QTE's themselves. It does its best to make you apart of the spectacle and it realized it's lofty ambitions with absolutely flying colors.
Asura's Wrath made me appreciate how systems we can take for granted as fairly basic in principle can be used to great effect when given more attention and focus and when working within the framework/narrative presented. MGR does similar but it don't hit in the same way this does with them. It's just so excellent.
I really gotta play more Cyberconnect2 games.
The over the top battle shounen vibes, which can work for me on occasion (Jujutsu Kaisen, recently got into Hunter x Hunter), don't generally hit for me. The story wasn't doing much for me, more man pain save the daughter god killing wasn't doing a ton for me.
But there's a point in this game where it finally just all clicked correctly into place. The way the game uses QTE's to better cement you within Asura's perspective. Every weighty punch and fluid blow landed or received absolutely felt by how much you hammer on those fuckin buttons.
The gusto and fucking aspirations towards making this shounen power trip about the angriest motherfucker alive doing his best to protect those he cares for. It just fuckin clicks. The setpieces get better and better. The QTE's become more personal and hard hitting. I was rooting for Asura and doing my best to help him. I wanted to get my synchronicity rating as perfect as I could because I felt the weight of every missed QTE.
It's corny to say but genuinely this game makes you FEEL like you are Asura. It makes you feel like you are throwing those punches, crunching your own hands to dust by mashing the fuck out of that circle button. And the intense varied ways a person can punch a dude are represented perfectly with the wonderfully expressive and beautiful art direction and animation. This is absolutely one of the better looking games of that gen while also being one of the better showcases I've seen of Unreal 3 on consoles. It looks fuckin excellent. The watercolor palette, the shimmer, the wonderful reds, greys and harsh black lines. It evokes every inch of its inspirations and then some.
The final boss (within the DLC) is genuinely one of the greatest uses of QTE's I think I've ever seen in my life. I'll go more into that in the review of the DLC specifically but holy fuck it's wild as hell.
I think what finally brought it into focus for me was thinking of it less as a character action game, because honestly while the combat is serviceable it's more a bridge to the setpieces than actually all that great, and more as a evolution of games like Dragon's Lair, Space Ace and Time Gal.
Once I looked at it more in that light, played much more aggressively with the combat and let the game take me onto it's wild ride it completely fucking hooked me. Some of the sequences, shots, compositions absolutely deserve to be immortalized in some fashion.
It couldn't really work the same at all within any other medium. While described as "interactive anime" I would say it's trying to pave its own footprint into cinematic gaming as a whole and changing the players relationship to QTE's themselves. It does its best to make you apart of the spectacle and it realized it's lofty ambitions with absolutely flying colors.
Asura's Wrath made me appreciate how systems we can take for granted as fairly basic in principle can be used to great effect when given more attention and focus and when working within the framework/narrative presented. MGR does similar but it don't hit in the same way this does with them. It's just so excellent.
I really gotta play more Cyberconnect2 games.
2 Comments
Ayyy that's totally fair! Honestly a chunk of the first quarter (most of part 1) didn't resonate with me. But once it picked up for me I loooved it but it defo won't work for everyone I think.
MobileSpider
1 year ago