Asura’s Wrath

Asura’s Wrath is one of the few new IPs we will see this year that blends the line between anime and video game. Asura’s Wrath was an overall good game and good anime, but not a perfect game or instant classic.

 

Story (Spoiler-Free)

Asura’s Wrath blends together anime paradigms with ancient Asian mythology into an action packed, over the top, balls to the wall story that will make the player not want to stop playing. There are moments of saddness, bits that will have you raging at the villian, and random moments that will have you scratching your head and saying “wtf” as only an anime can. The storyline is one of the game’s strong suits, although the true ending is kind of abrupt.

Gameplay

In this game, about half the game is quicktime events during cinematics and the other half involves melee combat on the ground or ranged combat on rails. Most of the game plays like an interactive anime show broken up into about 18 episodes that are about 10-20 minutes each. Each episode starts with a cinematic that usually involves some quick time events, then breaks into melee and/or ranged combat sections. Every few episodes will have a boss fight that are the highlights of the game as each one has absolutely crazy and awesome events that will blow most people’s minds.

The main goal of melee combat is to avoid damage while performing combos and heavy attacks while building up a “Burst Meter” Once the meter is full, Asura can perform a devastating attack that will end the combat or move combat into the next phase repeating the process over again. The combat feels basic and rather repetative as the game progresses making it the weakest point of this game, but it’s rather fun during boss battles where melee gets more interesting due to the crazy things asura and the bosses due to each other.

Ranged combat is where things really start to get fun! Most all of these sections are on rails but allow the player to move around to dodge incoming attacks. The player holds down one button to constantly fire and moves the crosshair over the screen locking on to parts of enemies. Once locked on, pressing another button will launch a volley of attacks onto the locked on locations. The more enemies the player locks on to the more powerful the ranged attacks will be. While performing these attacks the burst meter is filling up constantly again and oncefull will progress to the next phase or next cinematic. In practice this fighting style is a ton of fun as the player single handedly destroys entire fleets of enemies and ships.

At the end of each episode the game assigns you a score of D through S depending on how well you performed in battle, how mlong it took you to defeat the episode and how accurate you were during quick time events.

B( . Y . )bs

This deserved its own section. Not only can you see these glorious orbs of milky pleasures, you can splash them with water!

Conclusion

The game unfortunately only lasted about 7 hours and would have been shorter if I hadn’t died a few times during some boss fights. Although the game was short and some of the melee combat felt repetitive, the game was full of awesome moments especially during the boss battles and the story was thouroughly entertaining. Asura’s Wrath overall did a good job at blending story telling with gameplay, but there was definately some areas for improvement for the sequel. The game set an example of how epic a boss battles should be and will leave lasting memories in the minds of those who play it.

Asura's Wrath, 3.9 out of 5 based on 15 ratings