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You see, while Asura’s Wrath is hardly the most serious game in the world, it’s a surprisingly clever one. This is a guy who can kill a god with a headbutt, or punch his way out of a demonic fish that’s the size of America. It’s important to really convey just how seismic Asura’s beatdowns are. Tug that sucker like you mean it and await the colossal asswhoopin’ that always follows. Max it out, and a flaming right trigger and the word BURST pop-up on screen. There’s a red bar at the top of the screen, and the more damage you inflict, the quicker it fills up. There’s also a dodge and a lock-on, and you can counter when on-screen prompts demand it.Įvery one of these battles, or indeed any scrap in Asura’s Wrath, have a singular goal – getting old spiky head so angry that he flips out and unleashes galaxy-rippling levels of violence on anyone who dares glance in his direction. Hitting them is easy enough – Asura’s pretty good at hitting things, if you hadn’t already guessed – with one button delivering a heavy strike with a cooldown timer. They range from grumpy gorillas to angry elephants, with rhinos, giant turtles and some truly enormous stuff I won’t dare spoil in between. When you’re not having your eyeballs torn out by some of the most incredible scenes of unfathomable madness ever put on screen, chances are you’ll be smacking seven shades of Shinto out of the Gohma, the red-tinged ancient enemy of the people of Gaea. So good, in fact, that all that non-gamey stuff starts to become a hell of a lot more fun once it pops up. It takes a couple of hours to uncover it, but there’s actually a game hiding in here too, and it’s a pretty good one. If ever a game wasn’t a title designed by focus groups and marketing men… Later, you have to get drunk on Sake while the Hovis music plays in the background. It’s a game where you fight a Vega-cum-cowboy in the desert while you happen to have no arms, to the sounds of a Sergio Leone-alike rock remix.
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This is a game where the first boss is at least twice the size of the planet. The other thing to understand about Asura’s Wrath is that it’s absolutely, unequivocally insane. It just so happens that 12,000 years have passed in the meantime. So, naturally, it’s time to find the seven demigods who betrayed him and have stern (violent) words with them. When he wakes up from his fall (he’s literally cast out), understandably he’s a little peeved. Early on in this bonkers tale of revenge and regret, he’s banished from the story’s equivalent of heaven, his wife is killed and his daughter captured. You play as Asura, an extraordinarily angry demigod plucked from the footnotes of Hindu texts and filtered through a touch of Shinto, a smattering of Buddhism and a great dollop of modern day Japanese crazy. Cyber Connect 2 has built an interactive anime, one where huge sections are literally unplayable and others only ask for the bare minimum of QTE inputs. Understand one thing: Asura’s Wrath is a game like no other. Fast forward 8 or so hours, and I’ve ended up delighted. It was! Suddenly, this cloying Final Fantasy vomit-fest now sounded like a Kurosawa flick and looked increasingly like an episode of Dragon Ball Z animated with the thick black edges of Street Fighter IV. Then, for some reason – call it inspiration, call it despair – I glanced at the options screen to see if the original Japanese language track was available. Cutscenes, QTEs and some on-rails shooting, with endless talking about absolutely nothing and a gameplay-to-bollocks ratio of approximately 1:infinity. “What is this nonsense?” I uttered to myself with a look of contempt and mild disgust on my face. A couple of levels, or episodes as they’re known, into Capcom and CyberConnect2’s Asura’s Wrath, and things are not looking good at all. Rarely in games do you experience such a dramatic turnaround.