Kunitsu-Gami: Path Of The Goddess – no focus group has been anywhere near this (Capcom)
GameCentral plays several hours of Capcom’s strange new action strategy game, that channels the weird invention of the PS2 era.
It’s always interesting to see what games companies do when they’re winning. The towering success of the PlayStation 5 has, for reasons that are still not fully understood, turned Sony into a sullen hermit, while the common response from many Western publishers, like Activision and EA, is to give up bothering with lesser titles and double-down on the one or two that sell the most. So, while previously they may have published some smaller titles, once their cash cow is established they no longer feel the need.
Clearly, Capcom doesn’t publish anything on the scale of Call Of Duty or EA Sports FC but it’s enjoyed a celebrated run of critical and commerical hits ever since the Resident Evil 2 remake in 2019. And what have they done with that newfound wealth and influence? They’ve allowed their developers to make whatever they want, which has resulted in Kunitsu-Gami: Path Of The Goddess – a game so ruthlessly Japanese it’s almost impossible to translate its name, let alone explain what it is.
We certainly didn’t understand what it was until recently, when we got to play several hours of the game and gain at least a rough grasp of what it’s all about. The best way we can think to summarise it is as a real-time strategy game mixed with Onimusha, in terms of both the simple combat and magic use, and the reliance on Japanese mythology. That doesn’t come anywhere close to describing how odd the game is though, or how much we enjoyed playing it.
At this point, we’ve asked three different Japanese language experts about the phrase Kunitsu-Gami and all of them have given the same furrowed-brow expression of confusion when they see it, before suggesting that it doesn’t really translate into English at all. Which only further endears us to the fact that that’s what Capcom decided to call their game. The closest match though seems to be ‘gods of the land’ or perhaps ‘local deity’, but ultimately it doesn’t matter as the Path Of The Goddess is much more descriptive of the gameplay anyway.
We weren’t allowed to see the opening of the game, so we’re not sure exactly how the set-up is presented, but basically you’re at the top of a mountain haunted by demons and a slowly creeping miasma. You play as a warrior/shaman call Soh who is trying to protect a shrine maiden name Yoshiro, who is able to purge the ‘defilement’ as the pair of you work your way down the mountain and through several villages.
Yoshiro’s method of defilement removal involves walking incredibly slowly between one torii gate and the next. In the real world these are typically found at the entrance to a Shinto shrine, with the ones in the game acting …read more
Source:: Metro
