Capcom made a game that doesn’t belong in 2024 and it’s awesome

The world of Kunitsu-Gami: Path of the Goddess is meant to feel fantastical and from another time, but the game itself also feels like an anachronism. Something that shouldn’t exist in 2024. It’s not a sequel to a hit franchise. It doesn’t work in a popular genre. And this is not to please an international audience. It’s just a great game and shows what’s possible when big publishers take a chance on something completely different.

“We believe it is important to meet the expectations of our users with new titles in [existing] series and remakes, but we also believe it’s just as important to rise to the challenge of creating something new,” game producer Yoshiaki Hirabayashi, a more than 20-year veteran of Capcom, told Kotaku in an interview last by email. “As a completely new title, we are facing a number of challenges.”

Path of the Goddess has you play as the sword-dancing warrior Soh, who must rally the villagers and protect the girl Yoshiro on a treacherous journey to purge evil from a mountain. But instead of a straightforward third-person action game that has you exploring levels and plowing through hordes of demons, Path of the Goddess is structured as a tower defense game where, in addition to killing enemies yourself in arcade combat liquid, you can also recruit. villagers into unique classes and order them around the battlefield.

A key was to ensure that neither side overshadowed the other and that each was viable in its own way. “We didn’t want to force players to use both elements equally, so we spent a lot of time fine-tuning the balance between action and strategy,” Kawata said. “Therefore, the players could enjoy themselves more [either one], depending on their equipment and the certain roles of the villagers.” It’s an unlikely mix that works surprisingly well and doesn’t sacrifice quality to realize its experimental creative vision. It is also presented in a context that is unabashedly Japanese.

“I’m a fan of old Japanese folklore and other strange tales, and I thought it would be interesting to incorporate them into a game set in the mountains of Japan, where a messenger from the other world appears every night and you have to avoid them and protect the gods,” said game director Shuichi Kawata, also a longtime Capcom employee that we were able to make every aspect of the game cohesive including player actions and enemy relationships with Japanese culture.”

Path of the Goddess features dozens of intricate and evocative enemy designs for the evil spirits you face, called The Seethe. Some have massive mouth-shaped heads with tongues protruding from them. Others look like pearly white tumors floating in the air with dangerous hooks hanging from their bottoms. In one stage you are confronted by a massive corrupted tree whose roots become alive and attack you like a giant mutant worm. Their variety and level of detail is one of the main ways the game punches above its weight.

But the other main thing that helps Path of the Goddess stand out is how customized and carefully considered every little detail of the game feels. “Mixing too many game elements will always increase the complexity of the game, but it’s important to choose carefully what is and what is not necessary for the game,” said Kawata. “To prevent the game from becoming an ‘abrasive’ game, I think it’s important to let users think about what to do based on the given game materials, and the result should lead to a sense of achievement. “

The UI is carefully integrated with the rest of the game’s look and feel. To access the main menu, you have to go to a village and visit Yoshiro’s tent where a table in front of it collects ornaments, objects and other items you’ve collected on your journey, which double as the game’s power-ups. status upgrade relics and other unlockable upgrades. You level up your villagers’ roles by decorating their masks, and the save screen is a long horizontal piece of folded paper that you stamp with each new file. One of the game’s collectibles, an array of candies, sits in a nearby box for you to examine at your leisure.

There are over 20 stages in the goddess path, and each of them has two stages in it. The result is three to five waves of enemies per stage with generous control points. While no gameplay ideas were discarded during its development, testing revealed that most of the stages were initially too long and drawn out, so they ended up being made shorter. “Many people commented that this part of the game was tedious and made the game play longer, so we decided to shorten it and increase the pace of the game progress.”

The game feels stripped down to the bare essentials, keeping only what’s stylish, polished, and meaningful to the overall experience. Where other games go to the box for a marketing strategy, Path of the Goddess feels free of bloat. It’s the opposite of the open-world RPG with skill trees, gear scores, and random loot that’s topped off with extra hours of content just for hitting a certain number on How Long To Beat.

“I think the sandbox in a playground is similar to this situation and used that concept to explain it to my team,” Kawata said. “The purpose is fixed and the use of the sand is fixed, but you are free to use the sand as you wish.” That’s part of why I think people keep referring to it as a PS2 cult classic or lost PS3 game. It feels made for an era where a good idea, a cool look, and a fun game were enough, if not to sell millions of copies, then at least to convince a well-known publisher to take a chance on something. cloud.

Before introducing Path of the Goddess, Kawata directed Shinsekai: Into the Depths, an underwater action puzzle game on Apple Arcade that was later ported to Switch. Most of this team transferred over to Path of the Goddess, but developers from Capcom’s other bigger-budget franchises like Resident Evil also joined, bringing additional knowledge and experience with the ever-growing RE engine. standard across Capcom’s portfolio (Monster Hunter is also going at it with Monster Hunter Wilds). However, Hirabayashi said the team remained “relatively compact for the size of the production volume.”

Unlike many of those games, however, Path of the Goddess is priced at $50, just below the next-gen premium price of things like Street Fighter 6 and Dragon’s Dogma 2, but slightly above cheaper Steam games like Helldivers 2, whose $40 many consider the price to be a key component of its sales success. I asked what goes into making that call, which anecdotally some PC gamers think is still too high.

“As an all-new title, we’ve taken on a number of challenges, such as a ‘unique Japanese-inspired environment’ and a ‘new gaming experience’ that combines action and tower defense,” Hirabayashi said. “We’ve decided to set the price as affordable as possible to allow as many people as possible to get their hands on this game.” He pointed out that the game’s size is comparable to a full-priced game, but you can see Capcom defending itself in the fact that Path of the Goddess is also “free” for paid Game Pass members on Xbox and PC. When I asked him earlier at Summer Game Fest how the deal came about, Hirabayashi said the goal was to try to get the game in front of as many people as possible, given that it’s an unknown IP in an unusual genre.

I hope it works. We’ve seen that a bold vision it delivers and a cult following from fans isn’t always enough to warrant a sequel or a chance to continue building on the work that’s come before. This is now the sad story of Hi-Fi Rush, GOTY 2023 contender from Tango Gameworks. That studio was founded by Resident Evil director Shinji Mikami (Kawata and Hirabayashi were on the cinematography team for Resident Evil 4, the last Mikami directed), who left a year before Microsoft announced it was shutting down Tango Gameworks.

As rising development costs push publishers to gravitate towards proven vendors and established licenses, there’s a real fear that the top end of the games industry could calcify even more than it already has in recent years through remakes, sequels and machines of lottery with direct service. When I asked if we might see more experiments like Path of the Goddess from Capcom, Hirabayashi said he couldn’t comment on the larger company’s policy. “However,” he added, “as an individual, I’m very grateful that there were so many people within the company who agreed with me to give this title to users.”

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