After seeing this trailer at Captivate, the hotel was rattling with chat of ‘God Finger’, ‘Heavenly Point’ and ‘Space Cuticle’. The game was actually Asura’s Wrath and, with so many of the games on show such as Dragon’s Dogma suggesting a shift towards more Western influences with new Capcom games, it had a distinctly Japanese feel along similar lines to the likes of God Hand.
However, while there’s nothing new about an action game featuring gigantic Gods, there’s one series that PlayStation fans are particularly familiar with, so I asked director Seiji Shimoda how far the similarities run…
First of all I’m honored for Asura’s Wrath to be mentioned in the same breath as God of War – I have played it and it’s an incredible game. Superficially, there are some resemblances but we’re hoping that, as you see more of Asura’s Wrath, you’re going feel that it’s something completely different; that it doesn’t really compare with anything else in action gaming.
This fight shown today occurs at the beginning of the game and he is actually one of the weaker bosses. The boss fights aren’t all going to be on this scale… well, the scale may be grander but that’s not to say the bosses have to be bigger, if that makes sense; some will be quicker or simply better fighters. We’re striving to use bosses to heighten the drama of the story, not just use them as an action set-piece at the end of a level.
It’s not your typical action game where you start out with a small sword and work up to a huge weapon; it doesn’t have that style of progression. However there are various stages where Asura can power up – you have already seen here that he started out with two arms and then he has six, and there will be quite a few transformations along those lines. The character you see here is not all there is.
We’ve tried to make the camera feel part of the game, not just a lens to view it though, so that the action and the drama feel grander, if you will. So to take today’s example, we’ve placed the camera in a position that makes the boss seem huge. In the fighting sequences, you want the camera really close up so that each punch is at its most visceral. We keep going through this internal self-critique over camera placement and you’re going to see that it’s not there for the sake of being there, but it almost feels like another character.
That’s just about all we know about Asura’s Wrath right now, other than that it satisfies a common request from modern games fans – the option to choose between Japanese and English voiceover. It’s coming to PlayStation 3 in 2012.
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