world Kunitsujin: Path of the Goddess The game is meant to feel like a fantasy from another era, but the game itself also feels out of place. This is something that shouldn’t exist in 2024. It doesn’t work with popular genres. And it’s not meant to cater to an international audience. It’s just a great gamewhich shows what can happen when big publishers take the plunge and try something completely different.
“We believe it is important to meet user expectations with new games [existing] series and remakes, but we also believe it’s equally important to accept the challenge of creating something new,” said game producer Yoshiaki Hirabayashi, a veteran of more than 20 years at Capcom. my city In a recent email interview. “As a brand new game, we are taking on many challenges.
Goddess Road You play as the sword-dancing warrior Su, who must unite the villagers and protect the girl Yoshiro as he embarks on a dangerous journey to rid the mountain of evil. But unlike a simple third-person action game where you explore levels and slay hordes of demons, Goddess Road It’s structured like a tower defense game, and in addition to killing enemies yourself in smooth arcade combat, you can recruit villagers into unique classes and command them on the battlefield.
The key is to ensure that neither side overshadows the other and that each side survives in its own way. “We didn’t want to force players to use both elements equally, so we spent a lot of time adjusting the balance between action and strategy,” Kawada said. “As a result, players can enjoy more [either one], depending on their equipment and assigned villager role. It’s an unlikely mashup that works surprisingly well, without sacrificing quality to achieve its experimental creative vision. It’s also presented against an unabashedly Japanese backdrop.
“I’m a fan of old Japanese folklore and other bizarre folktales, and I thought it would be fun to incorporate them into a game set in the mountains of Japan, where emissaries from another world appear every night and you have to fight them off and protect the gods,” said game director Shuichi Kawata, a longtime Capcom employee. “A major part of the idea was that I thought it would be compatible with tower defense. I thought that by combining player behavior and the relationships between enemies with Japanese culture, we could make every aspect of the game feel cohesive.
Goddess Road There are dozens of intricate and evocative enemy designs for the evil spirits you face, called “The Seethe.” Some heads are shaped like large mouths with tongues hanging out. Others look like pearly white tumors floating in the air with dangerous hooks dangling from their bases. In one stage, you’ll face a giant corrupted tree whose roots come to life and attack you like giant mutant earthworms. Their variety and level of detail is one of the key ways the game punches above its weight.
But another main thing that helps Goddess Road What makes it stand out is that every little detail of the game has been customized and carefully considered. “Mixing multiple game elements will always increase the complexity of the game, but it is important to carefully select what is necessary and what is not necessary for the game,” Kawada said. “In order to prevent the game from becoming a ‘grinding’ game, I think it’s important to let the user think about what to do based on the given game materials, and the results should bring a sense of accomplishment.”
The user interface is carefully integrated with the rest of the game’s look and feel. To access the main menu, you must enter a village and visit Yoshiro’s tent. A table in front of her collects various decorations, artifacts, and other items that you collect during your journey. These items serve as power-ups in the game. status artifacts, and other unlockable upgrades. You can increase the character level of villagers by decorating their masks, and the save screen is a long horizontal folded paper that you can stamp on each new file. One of the game’s collectibles is a collection of desserts, located in a nearby box for you to examine at your leisure.
There are more than 20 stages Goddess Road, each phase has two phases. The result is three to five waves of enemies per stage, with plenty of checkpoints. While no gameplay ideas were abandoned during development, testing showed that most stages initially felt too long and lengthy, so they eventually shortened them. “A lot of people commented that this part of the game was tiring and made the game take longer, so we decided to shorten it and speed up the pace of the game’s progression.”
The game feels like it’s been stripped down to its essentials, retaining only the parts that are elegant, refined, and meaningful to the overall experience. Other games just tick a box on the marketing ploy; Goddess Road Feeling less bloated. It’s the opposite of an open world RPG with skill trees, gear points, and random loot that fills in content with extra time just to reach a certain amount How long to beat.
“I thought the sandbox on the playground was similar to this situation and used this concept to explain it to my team,” Kawada said. “The range is fixed, the use of sand is fixed, but you can use the sand however you want.” That’s why I think people keep calling it PS2 cult classic Or lost PS3 games. It feels like it was made for a time when a good idea, cool looks and fun gameplay were enough to, if not sell millions of copies, at least convince a well-known publisher to take a chance on something new.
before pitching Goddess RoadDirector Kawada New World: Into the DeepIt is an underwater action puzzle game on Apple Arcade and later ported to Switch. Most of the team was transferred to Goddess Roadbut from developers of other Capcom franchises with bigger budgets, e.g. resident Evil has also joined, bringing additional expertise and experience with the RE engine that has become increasingly standard across Capcom’s entire portfolio (monster hunter Also heading towards it and Monster Hunter Wilds). However, Hirabayashi said the team is “still relatively compact relative to the scale of production.”
However, unlike many such games, Goddess Road At $50, it’s just under the premium price tag of next-gen products Street Fighter 6 and Dragon’s Dogma 2but slightly higher than cheaper Steam games such as Hellraiser 2Its $40 selling price is seen by many as a key factor in its sales success. I asked why such a decision was made, and it was said that some PC gamers thought the decision was still too high.
“As a brand new game, we accepted many challenges, such as a ‘unique Japanese style setting’ and a ‘new game experience’ that combines action and tower defense,” Hirabayashi said. “We decided to make the price as affordable as possible to get the game into the hands of as many people as possible.” He stressed that the game’s scale is comparable to a regular-priced game, but you can see Capcom’s hedging Goddess Road It’s also “free” for paid Game Pass members on Xbox and PC. When I asked previously at Summer Games Fest how the deal came about, Hirabayashi said that considering it’s an unusual type of unknown IP, the goal was to try and get the game seen by as many people as possible.
I hope it works. We’ve seen that bold vision and fan fervor aren’t always enough to warrant a sequel or the chance to build on its predecessor. This is the sad story now Hi-Fi Audio Sprint, a 2023 GOTY contender from Tango Gameworks. The founder of the studio is resident Evil Director Shinji Mikami (Kawada and Hirabayashi are members of the film team) Resident Evil 4the last film directed by Mikami), who left Tango Gameworks a year before Microsoft announced it was shutting down.
With exploding development costs forcing publishers to fall back on proven sellers and popular licenses, there are real fears that the top end of the gaming industry could become even more sclerotic than it has been in recent years through remakes, sequels and live service lottery machines. . When I asked if we could see more experiments like this Goddess Road Hirabayashi from Capcom said he couldn’t comment on the big company’s policies. “But,” he added, “as an individual, I’m extremely grateful that so many people within the company agreed with me to deliver this game to users.”
