Asura's Wrath is just the game I needed to see at E3 this year. For the most part the entire show has been pretty stock. Sure its always interesting to catch a glimpse of something new from games like Gears of War 3 or Uncharted 3, but for the most part we already know they will probably be quality titles and just from playing previous entries in either series we know how they are going to play. In the context of E3, they are not the type of game I want to see. Asura's wrath however, is unlike anything you have seen before.
The game is off the charts in terms of scale and sheer amount of craziness contained in it. The art style alone is incredibly unique. It meshes Japanese mythology with a healthy dose of sci-fi to create an image that is individual to anything you could have really seen before. Capcom's Kazuhiro Tsuchiya spoke about the art style as something that was sprouted by an inital desire to have no influence from any other games to come through. They wanted to create something completely new for Asura's Wrath and they have, for the most part, achieved that.
This insatiable quest to create a game
that is completely different to the rest of the market reaches to the
gameplay also. Tsuchiya mentioned that they have approached the
design of Asura's Wrath in a manner not typical to the rest of the
industry. The entire story was planned out before any sort of work
began on creating an actual game to play. As a result, Asura's Wrath
contains extremely variable action from moment to moment as each
aspect of the gameplay was designed based on the particular scene
from the story that was in question. Its an interesting approach that
gives the game an incredibly immersive and cinematic feel, but it
remains to be seen just how of much Asura's Wrath will in fact remain
as varied as Capcom claims. The clips of the game that have been shown
so far shows off this variable action however, as the first boss fight
was a breathless affair that started with your foe being of similar
stature to the player character and ending up larger than the actual
planet the game takes place on. Yes, that's right, bigger than a
planet. That says all that needs to be said about the tone of Asura's
Wrath, wouldn't you say?
