Asura’s Wrath Episode 18: The Breaking Point

Platform: PS3 (PS4 via Playstation Now)

Metacritic: 71

Asura’s Wrath is a very mediocre game, but its also a game I love. Hey, no-ones perfect. It finds itself firmly in mediocre territory due to a rather unique (in my experience) problem. The good parts of Asura’s Wrath are great, nearly masterfully done elements that showcase the designers love and ambition for the game. But the scales are matched with the bad, which are terrible and nearly ruin the whole experience. Also, a lot of Asura’s Wrath barely counts as a game, and would find itself more in line with a semi interactive movie, so that doesn’t help.

First lets talk about the plot. Asura’s Wrath combines Buddhism and Hinduism with Sci-Fi. It takes place on the fictional world of Gaea which is constantly attacked by a mysterious race of monsters called Goma. Humanities only defense against the Goma are 8 generals imbued with god like power, by focusing on a single “mantra”, an emotion. The generals thrive on mantra generated by the prayers of those they protect. However they soon discover that there is a far greater source of mantra, available to them. If they sacrifice humans and absorb their souls, they become more powerful than through prayers alone. So the generals plot to ascend to godhood by using their powers to rule over humanity, killing humans en masse, to collect their souls. But, Asura doesn’t go along with it, so the other gods kill him and kidnap his daughter. However this is where the core theme of the game comes in. Asura’s Wrath is so intense, that he literally climbs his way out of hell, to get revenge and save his daughter. The game follows Asura’s quest for revenge against these new “gods”.

First some general good stuff about Asura’s Wrath. It has really well directed cutscenes (more on those later). It also has an incredibly well done, section of the plot, that is completely wordless. Asura and the mysterious woman he protects, don’t speak the same langauge, so they communicate wordlessly. The game does a shockingly good job showcasing their relationship without words, and actually eliciting real emotions from the player. Again I would like to emphasize this is in a game about a man so angry, he can’t die.

Now onto the bad, to get to the real core issue of the game, a majority of the levels in Asura’s Wrath are un-skippable un-failable quicktime events. Basically they are movies, where your button presses do nothing except effect the score you get at the end. Your score does almost nothing, except for one major thing we will discuss later. The levels that aren’t movies, are either one of three other things. They might be unique but mediocre 3rd person shmup (Shoot Em Up) segments, or they might be incredibly stylized and surprisingly well balanced beat em segments, or they might be the boss fights, which is where Asura really shines. Throughout the game, Asura fights interesting and over-the-top bosses that take the rather bland gameplay found in other stages, and use them in an interesting way. The Bosses are also amazing in scale, one of which Wyzen is bigger than the planet itself.

However these boss fights while great are few and far between, leaving a lot of movie watching in between them. Also Asura’s sound design is terrible. The game features maybe 4 or 5 tracks of music, very few actual sounds, and the mixing is terrible. I spent a lot of time messing with my audio output settings trying to hear the dialogue, and the sound effects try their hardest to shatter any sense of flow.

Here is the most egregious part of the game. The real ending isn’t in the game, instead it was sold as DLC that had to be purchased and downloaded after release. Even then, in order to actually play the real ending, you have to get an S rank on at least 5 levels. Yep, the score is used for 2 things, unlocking an ending you have to buy, and unlocking different health bars and concept art. However different health bars also require you to get S ranks, so thats not really another goal.

Now that we’ve gone through the good and bad, lets talk about the masterful moment. The final on disc chapter of Asura, is where the developers finally pulled everything together, and its great. Its massive in scope, includes all of the possible types of gameplay, and it ends with an awesome boss fight. As Asura and his newfound partner Yasha look down on the planet, the Goma ascend from the planet. The camera zooms out to show the scale, with Asura and Yasha tiny at the bottom, with the planet stretching out into the distance, and the Goma towering over them. Then the title appears, establishing that this is what Asura was always meant to be.

What follows is a perfect version of the Shmup gameplay, some pretty epic cutscenes (Asura gets 1000 arms, and combines them into two huge ones), and an amazing boss fight.

The developers also found the right tone for their dialogue, by having Asura and Yasha make cheesy quips at each other. For example, Yasha asks “getting tired?” and Asura responds “When did you start telling jokes?”. After defeating the massive tentacles in space, Asura and Yasha descend to the planets core, to fight the Goma core. This is the best bossfight in the game, the Goma core has pretty predictable moves, but they are still somewhat hard to dodge, making for an interesting fight. Beyond that, the developers finally truly connected the cinematics with the gameplay, with fail-able (and awesome) QTE cutscenes mid fight. After defeating the boss, Asura returns to his daughter and the credits roll. Overall this ending section feels way different than the rest of the game. Throughout the game, there are weird unique moments, that are drawn out by un-needed cutscenes, or endless waves of guys to beat up in mediocre combat. But this final level gets it all right, and shows us what the developers were trying to make the whole time. Asura oozes style throughout, but in this final level, the gameplay finally matches. Had the game all been this quality, it would be a masterpiece, but unfortunately, what we got was a mess of greatness and true garbage.

Would I recommend playing Asura’s Wrath? Yes and no. More over I would recommend just watching a playthrough on youtube, over-all it will be largely the same experience. But if you want to play through it, I would recommend getting Playstation Now on PS4, this will let you play through Asura and 100’s of other amazing games for the 15 bucks. Basically I’m saying Asura might not be worth the price of admission, but your own mileage may vary.