Asura's Wrath being the laughing stock of excessive QTE use during the 7th gen has become a bit of an unfair reputation, considering how little credit it tends to get for how successfully it actually manages to pull it off. Described as an "interactive anime" by the developers themselves, it is clear that the people behind this production knew what they were doing, using all the classic tropes and cliches that have turned shounen into such a successful venue for guys being dudes.

So well executed in fact, that soon you forget that you are for the most part just pressing button prompts as you watch long ass cutscenes of big muscle guy punching another big muscle guy. There is definitely an art to making visceral rage and violence this engaging and purposeful, emotions that the japanese have managed to perfect and capitalize on with animation for decades now, and Asura's Wrath pays tribute to that legacy in a grand display of revenge melodrama between gods that puts God of War to shame.

It's an escalation of every increasingly insurmountable odds that Asura inevitably bursts through with his fists, fury and will alone, surprassing the greatests of Platinum Games finales, and it's amazing what a few buttons can do to elevate a story that we have seen told countless times before to new heights of catharsis. The final boss (which is locked behind payed dlc, a decision that sits at the pantheon of bad Capcom ideas) gets his shit kicked in so hard that by that point you welcome those QTEs with open arms.

The bittersweet ending note of Asura's Wrath is wondering how much more amazing it would have been were it a real ass videogame.

Are we so gullible? Do we as an audience not demand anything from our art? There's no story, no new mechanics, no real characters, no interesting or enjoyable visuals, no compelling gameplay, no original ideas at all in fact. Is a faceless strawman to antagonise really enough to get millions of people to play an Unreal Engine asset flip made as artlessly as possible? Is no one else actively disturbed by how blatantly and gracelessly this rips mechanics from every popular game of the last 2 decades, without integrating any of them together whatsoever? Has art ever felt this cynical before?

Feel free to discount my opinion. I am a 'salty Pokemon fanboy' after all, and I only gave this game an hour or so of my not particularly highly valued time. I personally just prefer the art I engage with to care for the art form it sits within, even a little bit. Palworld hates video games. It sees nothing more within them than a collection of things to do and hopes that by shovelling a flaccid farcical version of as many of them as possible into your mouth it will somehow constitute a 'video game' when all is said and done. It doesn't. I'm deeply saddened that so many gamers think so lowly of our art form that they genuinely think this is acceptable.

There's really no other way to put it. This game (and possibly franchise) is morally and creatively bankrupt. Between the shallow depictions of mental health whether there's dramatic zooms of the protagonist self harming or even going as far to have chapters end with you jumping off a building and the following interludes flash a suicide hotline message until the level loads or the awkward anime dub tier voice acting berate you with insults or commentary on your surroundings because Konami needs to remind you this is in a fact a serious game and they're afraid of leaving things to interpretation, I fail to see how the 2 hours I spent with this tech demo can leave me anticipation of the upcoming Silent Hill 2 remake or "missing the point".

This whole experience ends up feeling like a parody of the thing it's trying to comment and I don't think that's the takeaway someone with diagnosed BPD should be feeling.