For Your Consideration: Kunitsu-Gami: Path Of The Goddess
A lot of people have been talking about how Capcom’s newest game “Kunitsu-Gami: Path of the Goddess” evokes the same vibes as a PlayStation 2 game, but I’ll be the first to go a few steps further.
You see, when I was growing up we had two movie rental stores in town. One was a chain and the other was a local business with a more curated selection of films and games. The chain store would get the newest releases, but if you went across the railroad tracks you would find a selection of the new shit, the classics, and the obscure. Kung Fu films, indies, and Japanese Horror lined the shelves between the usual fair. The games were just as varied. Disaster Report, Guilty Gear, and Odama (without the mic strangely enough) were just a few of the titles you could choose from. While both stores were fine, if you went 35 miles down to the next city over you had a few more options, including a store with rent-able Gameboy Advance games, Aqua Teen Hunger Force playing on the TV, a working House Of The Dead arcade cabinet, and hentai mixed in with VHS tapes of Pokemon and Mortal Kombat: Defenders Of The Realm.
Kunitsu-Gami is a PS2 game that you could only find in that store, tucked between copies of Resident Evil Survivor and Point Blank.
When KG was first announced, I thought to myself
“Wow. That looks cool as shit. Better not learn literally anything else about it.”
That’s my newest tactic to avoid getting too hyped for things. I mean I already know I’m going to play it, so why spoil myself? When it finally came time to play I was hit with several crashes, but after a new update for PC the crashes only seem to occur if you’re streaming through discord. I almost didn’t want to recommend this game until the issues were fixed completely, but since the game itself is worth it’s weight in good times it wouldn’t be fair to dismiss it on that merit alone.
Kunitsu-Gami is a strategy game in which you play through bespoke levels eliminating the “Seethe”- a demonic scourge that’s plaguing the local mountainside. You spend the day filling your ranks, purifying the area, and assigning roles to your units, and during nightfall you and your crew fight through waves of Seethe whilst keeping the titular goddess safe from harm’s way. It’s mix of character action with tactical unit placement is a refreshing take on the real time/tower defense genre. Unit management is thankfully done while the game is paused, but choosing where to move units is still challenging and fun.
When you’re finished with a level you can use the newly-cleansed area as a base-camp, assigning units to repair and build structures to gain points to enhance said units. You’re always doing something in Kunitsu-Gami. While the base building and fight segments are divorced from each other the break between modes is a great way to split things off and to take a breather. In between these levels are boss challenges that have their own specific sets of rules. Some of the fights are easy enough, but later on as the game progresses you’re sure to feel the heat.
While the story takes a bit of a back seat, the emotion is still present. There’s almost no spoken dialog during cutscenes. The physical actions of the cast speak for themselves. There’s a lot of love in this title’s presentation, and seeing a game like this hit storefronts in the midst of the usual suspects is nothing short of a miracle. It makes me smile knowing that the middle-budget outing is still a viable route in Capcom’s tour of AAA hits.
Kunitsu-Gami: Path of the Goddess is available for Steam, Xbox Game Pass, and PlayStation.
-PA
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