Asura's Wrath - Demo

Capcom has been releasing videos of Asura’s Wrath for the past year. The game features a man or mini-god, gifted with six arms and a haircut straight from some Akira Toriyama manga who battles giant gods. The proportions are supposed to be the draw, with several bosses being much bigger than the player character. According to the developers – all who obviously suffer short-term memory lost – this is because they felt most games did not emphasize size in boss battles. Their memory fog, I must note, include the entire God of War series, the recent Souls games, and Shadow of the Colossus. But the developers insist that it is only Asura’s Wrath where size truly matters.

Regardless, I was anxious to try the demo. I have a soft spot for epic battles, which must come from those fantasy binges as a kid (sort of like an acid flashback). So I was eager to check out the demo released today on PSN.

Often when a game has a boss that’s proportionately larger than the player character, the game uses several tricks to really incorporate the illusion of the villain’s size. God of War, for example, often employs a fight that has several distinct stages that is sometimes incorporated across an entire level. This gives the sense that it’s a slow whittling away and not simply hacking away at the bosses ankles. The Shadow of the Colossus has the player climbing parts of the beast to get to its weak spot. The bosses in the Souls games are just fucking hard.

The demo for Asura’s Wrath is one long quick time event that has interrupted by cut scenes and what I guess is supposed to be a story, if one could be discerned from that jumbled mess. To be fair, the only playable portions of the game were episodes 5 and 11, so I’ll withhold any other comments about the story. The fights though were really disappointing. The boss in episode was big, but besides polygon count, you never really felt or were intimidated by its size. No, I was sweating the PS controller buttons that would pop up. If I missed those, then my character was truly dead.

This game could still go either way. It’s often unfair to judge a game by its demo. Sometimes it takes a lot longer than an episode to get into the meat of the game. So far, I was not impressed. But I will keep my on the reviews once it’s released. Maybe in the full the bosses are better integrated into the levels. That is the dwarf Asura’s only hope