Get a maiden to the shrine. Strike down all the demons standing in her means. Purge defilement from a mountain and restore the land to its pure concord and splendor. That’s Kunitsu-Gami: Path of the Goddess in a nutshell, and one in every of my favourite issues about it’s how little it strays from that humble, easy idea. In a sea of bloated sequels and creatively bankrupt knockoffs, Path of the Goddess is a enjoyable, targeted mashup of strategic planning and motion gameplay that doesn’t get misplaced within the particulars.
Made by Capcom and out on PlayStation 5, PS4, Xbox Collection X/S, Xbox One, and PC on July 19, Path of the Goddess combines the third-person action-feel of a Ninja Gaiden with tower protection administration for individuals who hate how these phrases sound collectively. Suppose Gears of Battle’s horde mode with swords as an alternative of weapons and the sensibility of the PS2 traditional Okami. One second you’re assigning roles to your allies and ordering them across the battlefield, the following your furiously spamming combos to attempt to fend off tanky foes who’re about to homicide everybody.
Purchase Kunitsu-Gami: Path of the Goddess: Greatest Purchase | Humble Bundle
Based mostly in Japanese folklore, Path of the Goddess mixes historical past and fable to craft a lovely and compelling journey that seems like enjoying by a sequence of poems. You management Soh, a masked warrior guarding the Maiden Yoshiro on her strategy to eliminate evil spirits known as Festering Seethe which have taken over a mountain and corrupted its inhabitants. There’s virtually no dialogue and hardly any story. Cutscenes are temporary and few and far-between. As an alternative, Path of the Goddess rapidly shuttles you from one degree to the following, its primary marketing campaign neatly organized between escort missions, boss battles, and time spent rebuilding the locations you’ve liberated from the Seethe. It feels refreshingly old-school in that regard.
Every stage begins at daybreak. You run round constructing defenses and traps, purging the defilement from animals, vegetation, and villagers, and accumulating translucent pink orbs left behind that function a key useful resource. These orbs are spent to carve a path ahead for Yoshiro so she will be able to slowly conduct her cleaning ritual throughout the map. They’re additionally required to improve villagers to numerous roles from melee wooden cutters and long-range archers to shaman healers and tanky sumo wrestlers. Spend all of the orbs on Yoshiro and also you’ll be defenseless. Waste all of them in your allies and he or she’ll be lifeless within the water.
After a couple of minutes, evening falls and the Seethe start arriving by gates and attacking in waves. Whereas villagers can take down small enemies no downside, larger ones require swift consideration. That is the place Path of the Goddess’ motion gameplay is available in. Soh has fundamental single-button-press combos that do respectable harm, however including a heavy assault to the top of every of them strings collectively a sequence of dancing sword assaults that you may steer however not cancel. It’s like winding up a toy ballerina after which watching it slash by hordes of enemies. It’s a small however novel innovation that makes fight really feel fluid and rewarding even at its simplest and repetitive.
Path of the Goddess doesn’t cease there, although. Soh has a dodge and guard assault full with timed-parry mechanics that add an additional degree of depth. Repeated assaults will momentarily stagger an enemy however Soh’s guard might be damaged, too, if it’s used too many occasions in a row, leaving him frozen and susceptible for a number of seconds. Soh additionally has a particular meter that slowly fills up, letting him unleash numerous final assaults that may flip the tide of a struggle in key moments.
It’s a good fight loop that slowly will get extra fascinating over the course of the sport as you unlock new skills and discover objects that grant you particular perks. A small ability wheel permits you to put money into a pair dozen upgrades like a higher-risk, higher-reward fight stance in addition to charging assaults that break extra of an enemy’s stagger meter. The result’s moment-to-moment fight that makes you are feeling sturdy and agile however not overpowered, constructed on sufficient customizable parts that you just really feel like you’ve got some significant choices for the way to strategize round every new encounter.
The opposite huge a part of that technique is your villagers. Each time you defeat a boss you earn a brand new masks that represents a unique function you’ll be able to assign to the villagers serving to you in your journey. You begin from scratch every mission, enrolling whoever you occur to seek out alongside the street in your demon-hunting campaign. Primary roles require fewer orbs however aren’t as sturdy. Ones just like the sumo who aggro enemies or the cannoneer which has a gradual charge of fireplace however does plenty of harm price extra.
All of them have completely different strengths, weaknesses, and use instances, and one of many many issues Path of the Goddess will get proper isn’t making any of them really feel out of date or redundant. My favourite by far, although, is the sorcerer. It expenses up a spell that provides you a map-wide tremendous you should use immediately in the event that they’re nonetheless alive. It seems like getting a nuke killstreak in Name of Obligation and it saved my ass so many occasions.
Boss fights, for essentially the most half, prioritize enemy designs and animations over distinctive mechanics. Most of them look unimaginable, even when gameplay-wise they weren’t the general spotlight of the sport for me. Few issues really feel higher in Path of the Goddess than knocking an enormous Seethe on its again after which calling in your troops to unleash hell. I’m nonetheless fascinated with the enormous poison toad my cannoneers all blasted directly with large fireworks, killing it even whereas I used to be nonetheless incapacitated.
There’s just one factor dragging Path of the Goddess down and it’s the settlement rebuilding part. After liberating a village you’ll be able to return and discover it freed from enemies, which principally means strolling round to numerous sections and assigning employees to repair a home, bridge, gate, or shrine that’s on a timer to finish after a set variety of battles. There’s no actual have to prioritize one set of repairs over one other and essentially the most useful rewards are for ending each restore in a specific map location, which means you’re going to must get all of it achieved sooner or later anyway. Thus each cool battle is adopted by an unwieldy and perfunctory repairs section that may have been simpler simply to handle from the primary map menu.
It’s an undercooked system so far as technique video games go, one which stands out partly due to how well-balanced and thoughtfully crafted a lot of the remainder of the sport is. One factor I particularly love about Path of the Goddess is the UI, which feels folded into the very material of the expertise. Soh’s well being is proven by way of a scroll subsequent to his physique, the improve menu for his skills is a sword hilt the place you swap out the tassel and runes, and the save display is a protracted sheet of folded paper that will get stamped.
They’re the small bits of polish that make an already nice sport even higher, they usually remind me of the PS2 period when extra video games felt like they had been making an attempt to discover their very own path somewhat than comply with within the footsteps of what everybody else had already achieved. It’s that spirit of authenticity and unwavering dedication to a particular imaginative and prescient that makes Path of the Goddess so refreshing proper now, particularly at this degree of finances, manufacturing, and high quality. When so many video games really feel like they may have been made by anyone for no one, Path of the Goddess seems like one thing distinctive made for individuals who by no means knew how a lot they’d adore it. Inventive swings like that don’t at all times work out. Path of the Goddess is one which positively does.
Purchase Kunitsu-Gami: Path of the Goddess: Greatest Purchase | Humble Bundle
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