A recent demo of next year's most bonkers action game reveals the reasons behind Asura's Wrath.
UK, November 3, 2011
Asura's Wrath was one of the major hits at what was otherwise a very quiet Tokyo Game Show this year, a beacon of madcap creativity amid a sea of sameness. It was almost more captivating because we had pretty much no idea what was going on in it, most of the time. Demos have showcased epic one-on-one battles with six-armed, white-eyed Asura facing off against enemies of galactic proportions, punching each other across the moon or . Were these boss fights, or was the whole game structured around these showpiece confrontations?
Recently, though, we got to see Asura's Wrath in a more natural setting, and got an idea of what it's like outside of those arena battles. Alongside announcing a release date – February 24th in Europe, 21st in North America – Capcom and CyberConnect2 also let slip more details of the game's background, revealing why it is that Asura is so damned angry all the time.
Asura's Wrath's plot spans thousands of years, a saga of gods, betrayal and an eternal power struggle. Asura, like many of the game's main characters, is a demigod who once served as a General in the court of the divine Emperor. But he was framed for the Emperor's murder by another demigod, Zeus, who then killed Asura's wife too for good measure and took his daughter captive. In one of the opening cinematics, we see Asura before all the wrath, when he still had eyes instead of glowing white-hot rage-beams. The story, which is split up into episodes, follows him as a rebel outcast, searching for his daughter and regularly coming to blows with the other demigods in those awesome set-piece battles.
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The fact that Asura isn't mortal explains why he's able to survive things like being cut in half with a sword longer than the diameter of a planet, as happened to him at the end of the TGS demo - but it takes him a while to recover. The next episode takes place 500 years later, with Asura enshrined in stone and worshipped by the mortal people of Earth, who have constructed an altar around his fossilised form. After shocking a women and a small baby half to death with his sudden resurrection as he bursts from the rock face, he follows her through a snowy mountain to her village.
The mortals in Asura's Wrath talk a different language from the demigods, and the lack of translation communicates Asura's lonely detachment as a god alone in a world of humans. He's still badly damaged from the fight with Argus, wandering this atmospheric mountain with nothing but angrily sparking wounds where his six metallic arms should be. The action, predictably, doesn't take long to kick in – as the woman is stolen away by angry-looking black venous monkeys that look like they've fallen victim to Spider-Man's black suit, there's a fast-paced on-rails chase sequence that segues into a fight with a giant black turtle and his smaller turtley minions.
Forced to fight without arms, Asura is no less devastating, kicking and headbutting and clobbering the smaller enemies into submission. There have been a few changes to the fighting system since Tokyo Game Show, with a new evasion button added and rather less emphasis on button-pummelling (or Synchronic Action, as the game generously calls its own quick-time events). It's still as spectacular as ever, though, just as fast and fluid and violent outside of the boss confrontations as it was within.
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It's also comforting to know that the lower-level enemies are as creatively designed as the bosses. Seeing Asura headbutt a giant Buddha with machine guns for arms to death is just as entertaining as seeing him clash with other demigods. And though the action is rightfully front and centre, learning a bit about this game's context casts it in a slightly different light, making it look more like an aeon-spanning epic saga than just a sequence of barmy, brilliant action sequences.
The game's starting to come into focus, but Capcom will probably go all quiet on Asura's Wrath now until the beginning of next year, when the gears will be put into motion for that February release.
