A massive thank you to Skillshare for sponsoring this video. The first 1000 of my subscribers
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so you can explore your creativity. Remember when quicktime events were the scourge
of the games industry, in the same way that generic green-y brown cover shooters and motion
controls once were? Gaming trends come and go to the point that it might legitimately
be difficult to remember, but there was a point in time around the late 2000s and early
2010s where seemingly every game had them, and every review slated them. The quick time
event in most games was and is a means of allowing developers to illustrate spectacle
beyond what the mechanics of their game allow for—giving players the chance to soar above
and tackle beasts of a scale beyond normal comprehension—but they do so by drastically
limiting what actual control the player has over the action; in many cases reducing their
input to “guess the button press” in order to keep a cutscene moving. In games such as
this, it seems like the more daunting the task, the simpler the means of overcoming
it actually are. For sure, this feels like a decidedly quaint
issue by today’s standards, but it’s one that dominated many discussions of games back
in the day; and it’s this context that has made revisiting 2012’s Asura’s Wrath—a
collaboration between Capcom and Cyberconnect2—all the more intriguing a process all these years
later. In an era where derrision of quicktime events reigned supreme, here we have a game
that doubled down on this divisive control method; where quick time events weren’t
limited to the occasional cutscene but would characterise the majority of your playthrough.
Asura’s Wrath was widely heralded for the jaw-dropping, universe-spanning scale of its
wildly over-the-top encounters as well as its unique TV show style of presentation,
but saw critics decry the simplicity, the rigidity of how it all played out—leaving
many to deem it to this day as little more than an interactive anime; a title more fun
to watch than to actually play. And yet, booting it up recently, I find myself
in almost total disagreement with that notion—for me personally, this game is an absolute blast
to control. Far from the more cynical applications of quick-time events in bigger budget games
that feel like they just want to show off some kind of graphical fidelity, there’s
a commitment to quicktime events as an aesthetic choice in Asura’s Wrath—a baseline that
this is going to form the mechanical meat of their game, that very much uses the language
of games to communicate that intent—that allows the developers to make those button
prompts as satisfying and meaningful as possible; tying those very prompts and the ensuing chaos
into the game’s themes in order to tell a story that intrigues beyond its bombast—coming
across as way more clever than its seemingly simple plot might let on.
Indeed, as this frenzied tale of revenge plays out with Asura going after the demigods who
betrayed him, killed his wife and kidnapped his daughter, you’d be forgiven on first
glance for thinking that our hero doesn’t really seem to have much of an arc in the
traditional sense. As the title suggests, he is indeed angry at everyone and everything
he comes across, right up until the very end of the game. Sometimes he’s bitter too—both
traits you wouldn’t normally associate with a particularly likeable character. That said,
as I played, I couldn’t help but find Asura’s propensity for fisticuffs rather charming.
Asura’s is a rage that only becomes more righteous as the literal millenia pass; as
he climbs step by step out of hell and the punishment bestowed upon him (and by extension
the world around him) by these prideful, arrogant demigods only grows in severity and unfairness.
All Asura can do is continue to frantically fight against it. It’s all he knows—it’s
a pretty negative emotion to boot—and somehow, in this instance, embracing that fact feels
like the only way for Asura to make things right.
This is because, similar to last year’s Sekiro, Asura’s Wrath actually utilises
its Buddhist imagery as a key thematic component of its story, and it might be the thing that
turns Asura from mere angry man into a surprisingly rich character—and it’s all in that name.
I’ve seen a lot of descriptions of this game describe Asura as a deity stripped of
his powers. And unfortunately this does require me to attempt to condense an entire spiritual
structure into a couple of paragraphs so bear with me here.
In extremely broad terms, Asura is, well, asura—a demigod which, despite the obvious
power they display, is a realm of existence below that of an actual god, thanks to the
Asura’s propensity for anger and other such negative traits. One might even consider this
realm lesser than the human realm as, lacking this negative baggage, humans possess a greater
potential to escape the cycle of death and rebirth as per the Buddhist tradition and
achieve nirvana. This all bears itself out in game in the form
of a wildly heightened identity crisis. Asura is tormented by others like him—demigods
who are willing to destroy everything around them to achieve some kind of superficial power
or status. Asura’s resillience in his anger, on the other hand—his inability to be swayed
in his attempts to batter everyone in his path and his adamant refusal to be worshipped
as his former cohorts so violently demand of humanity—ironically becomes the thing
that grounds him, setting him apart from his more aspirational foes.
As such, Asura’s Wrath ends up as a surprisingly complex, harrowing and ultimately bittersweet
tale of someone coming to terms with and at times embracing their own anger rather than
ridding themselves of it as a more traditional narrative might dictate. It’s the story
of a man trying desperately to find some justice for the wrongs and hardships inflicted upon
him and those he cares about—upon the world and the natural order of things—only for
some new, bigger, more abstract barrier to be placed in front of him at every step; throwing
Asura further into confusion the angrier he gets. If there’s a larger thematic question
the game asks, it’s this—just how do you achieve karmatic justice in a world that so
quickly moves beyond your understanding of it?
The thing is though, it’s precisely this dilemma that makes the game’s very real
sense of humour that much more enjoyable—that balance of real, torturous pain inflicted
by truly evil forces upon someone who doesn’t deserve it, and the fact that, no matter how
absurd or abstract this world becomes, Asura has one answer for it all. That is, without
a hint of consideration or hesitation, simply punch it harder, punch it more. In the same
way that Devil May Cry revels in taking the grandeur of the dark fantasy genre and cheekily
slicing it down to size, it’s hilarious to see a cosmic being in the middle of some
hugely dramatic or pompous speech, only for you to hit the circle button and bring an
end to it with something as simple as a fist to the face.
Which finally brings us onto this game’s combat, which like the story, I feel gets
a bad rap. Contrary to popular belief, the game is not actually “all quicktime events”—in
fact, a good deal of your time with Asura’s Wrath places you more or less in full control
of the titular angry man as he runs around enclosed arenas or along paths taking part
in beat-em-up style combat or shmup sections. It controls like a regular brawler with boss
battles and everything—one button for light attacks, another for heavy, and another for
dodging. It’s far from the most complicated brawler
in the world, its camera and the occasional glitch can leave it all feeling a little awkward
at times, but these sections are still fairly satisfying in the same way that Dynasty Warriors
can often be and, what’s more, these boss battles can actually end up requiring a good
deal more than mashing as complicated patterns require some pretty precise timing to overcome.
Sure, it’s all simply in service of filling up a bar to hit that Burst meter but once
you do, that’s when the real magic of Asura’s Wrath comes to the fore.
This is where the game’s much lauded spectacle is fully on show, where simple brawls with
fodder enemies suddenly evolve into sequences where a sword can drive you from the moon
right through the Earth’s core; where a flurry of punches can drastically alter a
planet’s very structure. And even though on the surface it looks like a movie is just
playing out, every aspect of Asura’s explosive movement requires some kind of input from
the player and, importantly, one that’s consistent with the way you controlled the
brawler section that preceded it. Something as simple as mapping the quicktime
events to the buttons you’d normally press to carry out those actions elevates the game
above the Simon Says approach you see in many other titles. You’re still hitting the light
attack to bombard your enemy with rapid blows before finishing them off with a well-timed
Y heavy attack to smash them in the face or throw them across the galaxy. You’re positioning
your feet in a way that allows you to brace for the sheer force you are about to rein
down upon your enemy; you’re made to hit that button as hard as you goddamn can for
sustained, sometimes punishing periods of time, so you can really feel that delightfully
anime senstaion where a punch has already connected but somehow you’re still driving
your energy through it. The action you’re required to carry out
maps so intuitively to what is happening on screen while also taking into account things
like player eyelines and how characters maneouvre themselves to ensure that a button press is
never an abstract guessing game. There’s never the scenario here where you’re too
busy focusing on what commands to enter to pay attention to the chaos it’s all supposed
to be causing—there’s a clarity to everything here that allows you to bask in the action
on screen while remaining fully aware of what you might be expected to do next.
Indeed, rather than in other games where these instances are a move away from more tactically
satisfying play, here the quicktime event is a perfectly crafted tool to emphasise the
power of every punch thrown. The points at which you control the game quote-unquote “normally”,
with freedom of movement and strategy, often feel rote in comparison to what follows it.
The context changes between every cutscene and sure, your can’t really “lose” in
these sections, but it’s all so consistent with how you control the game normally that
it doesn’t feel like you’re shifting away to some wildly uninteractive form of play—rather
the game is using regular beat-em-up button layouts in order to place you more directly
in control of the insane narrative playing out in front of you. This is the quicktime
event as an artform—it’s the ideal of what the concept is supposed to represent
in my eyes and I really struggle to think of any game that utilises it to this level
of effectiveness. What can I say—it just feels damn good to control this mad anime.
It’s for these reasons that I’ve found myself disagreeing with a lot of pieces I’ve
seen on this game that say just to watch a playthrough of Asura’s Wrath rather than
play it yourself. Admittedly there’s a lot getting in the way of that, with the rigmarole
of navigating just which DLC you need in order to get the (completely necessary) true ending
to the game (which led to a weird scenario in which said DLC cost as much as the full
game I bought on ebay—DLC pricing is wild). That said, I do believe there is something
you miss out on, a ferocity that you don’t fully experience, when that punch Asura throws
lacks your frenzied button presses propelling it. Even in the small crowd of quick-time
driven, “cinematic” games, Asura’s Wrath stands out as a remarkably singular experience
that I think deserves far more credit as both a story and a real, tactile video game than
it ever actually got; one in which getting the full, glorious picture of this utterly
insane adventure is only truly possible when that controller is in your hand.
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