Asura's Wrath

Asura is not happy. Once a demigod himself, he has been betrayed by his former associates, who have kidnapped his daughter. His mission is simple: Get her back while slaughtering anyone who stands in his way. Judging from the boss encounter we saw, he might have his work cut out for him.

The hack-and-slash action game Asura’s Wrath was first announced at last Tokyo Game Show with a trailer that culminated in a planet-sized behemoth attacking Asura with a single jab from his index finger. During a presentation at this year’s Captivate 2011 event, developer CyberConnect 2 provided some welcomed context to the encounter.

The battle begins in a large, open area, with the lumbering demigod Wysen far in the distance. As Asura approaches, he attacks with a targeting reticle. The boss fires back, and Asura grabs and throws back some of those projectiles. Once he gets a bit closer, the giant begins pounding the ground, causing boulders to fly into the ground. Asura hops from rock to rock, in a series of QTEs. When he’s in position, Asura leaps onto the titan’s fist and slides down his arm, delivering a haymaker to his jaw.

Wysen counters by commanding a warship to attack, and eventually ends up flinging Asura to the ground. In an especially inspired move, Wysen performs a spinning midair somersault, crashing his ample posterior into Asura’s lifeless form. Wysen then taunts Asura, saying “Can you feel it? She suffers to atone for your sins. Oh it is such a tragedy,” as he pounds Asura over and over again. Asura’s eyes flash open, and before you know it, Wysen is launched out of the planet’s atmosphere, into space.

Wysen then activates something he calls the Mantra Reactor. As the game’s director says, Asura’s Wrath will combine elements of both Asian mythology and science fiction.
“The powers these gods have in the game, we wanted to make sure that it’s not just a mysterious godlike power without any rationale behind it,” says CyberConnect 2’s Seiji Shimoda “We wanted to blend it to the technology, to the science fiction aspects in the game.”

The reactor makes Wysen grow until he dwarfs the planet. Asura then squares off as he faces a sky-filling finger. Apparently, when Asura gets particularly steamed, strange things happen to his body. Here, he sprouts an additional four arms, which he uses to pummel the massive digit with a flurry that eventually causes Wysen to explode in a fiery supernova.

We weren’t able to play the game during the demo, but UI elements made it clear that the game mixes traditional hack and slash combat with QTE moments. According to Capcom, however, that doesn’t begin to tell the whole story.

“I think that even though we’re calling it an action game, you need to forget what you know about action games when it comes to this game,” says Capcom producer Kazuhiro Tsuchiya. “Most action games are built around the concept that at certain intervals things happen that players expect; the bosses, the way they fight and things like that. We’re trying to make a level of variation in this game so that players don’t get bored, they’re not too expectant of certain elements, and we can keep them guessing about what’s coming.”

During the presentation, the Asura’s Wrath team kept hammering home the point that the game would also be melding a dramatic story and action in a way that other games haven’t been able to do. They wouldn’t elaborate beyond that, so it still remains to be seen not only if they’ll be able to pull off that goal, but what that goal actually translates to. One thing’s for sure, however: the character of Asura definitely seems as though he has enough rage inside him for everyone.