Asura’s Wrath (PS3, 2012)

I think Asura might be the angriest character I’ve ever played as in a video game. He spends half the game screaming incoherently and the other half punching things in the face. Just when you think Asura can’t possibly get any madder, he always manages to kick it up a notch. Basically, he makes Kratos look like Gandhi. But hey, that’s why it’s called Asura’s Wrath and not Asura’s Chillax.

Developed by CyberConnect2 and published by Capcom, the bizarre story shows us Asura’s unstoppable quest for vengeance on the pantheon of gods that killed his wife and imprisoned his daughter.

The setting is a doozy: a sci-fi mash-up Hindu and Buddhist mythology that reminded me of an anime-inflected Alejandro Jodorowsky comic (specifically Metabarons). Think gigantic god-shaped spaceships with names like The Karma Fortress, characters sprouting infinite arms  and people yelling stuff like “it’s powered by the Mantra energy of 3 trillion souls!”

The story goes through a loop of some smirking asshole god pronouncing that they have infinite power and you are but a gnat to them. Then you murder all their underlings, break all their stuff and smash them in the snotbox until they’re muttering “this… this is impossible… how could he.. be so powerful?”

Rinse and repeat up until you’re not just killing gods, but killing the smuggest asshole of them all: capital G God. (Asura also spends a surprising amount of time doing this with no arms at all, though this definitely doesn’t render him armless. ….I’ll get me coat).

To get an idea of the scale of how this goes down, a boss grows to approximately the size of planet Earth and tries to smush you with a humungous finger. The atmosphere burns, continents shatter, reality is rent in twain. This is the first boss.

So, with all that craziness, why has Asura’s Wrath been forgotten? Probably because it’s a grand narrative experiment that ultimately proved a critical and financial failure.

The gimmick is that this is videogame as episodic TV show. The game is divvied up into episodes, each with credits, recaps, previews and even a faux-ad break. Within those, the action is split between third-person God of War-style combat, incredibly easy rail-shooter sequences and QTEs. Lots and lots (and lots) of QTEs.

The QTE heavy design deservedly picked up a lot of criticism at launch, as in Asura’s Wrath you watch more than play. Even worse, most of the time completing the QTEs is irrelevant to what’s actually happening and failing them has no consequences other than your end-of-episode grade. The arena fighting fares a little better, but having just come off Platinum’s amazing Astral Chain I missed their finesse.

Perhaps Asura’s Wrath would have done better if it’d come out in the wake of Telltale’s The Walking Dead. That game, released just a year later, is similarly on rails and full of QTES but much more engaging due to a branching choice-based story. In that, you feel like your buttons presses have consequences. Here you feel like they’re simply giving your fingers something to do.

Capcom was also quite rightly pilloried for releasing the ending of the game as paid DLC. If I’d have bought this at full price I’d be pretty damn cheesed to have to fork out another £10 or so just to see how to the story wrapped up. As of April 2020 this DLC is still available and didn’t feel like so much of a rip-off after I’d paid just £5 for the base game. Even so, it’s a scummy way of doing business.

My only real beef with the game came when I’d completed Episode 18 and a popup told me that to see the ‘True’ Episode 18 I’d need to S-rank 5 levels. At that point I had no S-Ranks, and replaying levels to get them was a repetitive pain in the arse. Worse, when I finally did unlock it, it amounted to a two-minute, non-interactive scene that I really should have just watched on YouTube.

But though it’s an evolutionary dead-end in terms of game design, Asura’s Wrath is definitely barmy enough to recommend. There’s nothing else quite like it out there and while I won’t be playing it again in a hurry, its planet-smashing, god-punching, manically screaming nuttiness is going to linger long in the memory.

Metal Gear (MSX2, 1987)

One of the moments I was looking forward to most in my chronological playthrough of the Metal Gear franchise was the jump from The Phantom Pain to Metal Gear. This is a 28-year leap back in time from 2015 to 1987 that crosses an almost unbelievable technical gulf. I wanted to see what relation these two games had with one another and whether you can sense a continuity between them.

For those of you not steeped in Metal Gear knowledge, this is the first title in the series which launched on the MSX2 home computer in 1987. It’s known for pioneering the stealth genre, which came about by necessity rather than design due to hardware limitations on the number of bullets able to be displayed at once.

Working within these constraints (and drawing from a childhood love of hide and seek) a 24-year-old Hideo Kojima took over the project, knocked up a goofy little story about a soldier infiltrating Outer Heaven – a base where all is not as it seems – and the rest is history.

I played Metal Gear back in the run-up to the release of the fourth game in the late 2000s and was apprehensive about returning to it. I remembered a fiddly, unintuitive and ugly game that practically required a walkthrough to complete. I played it via MSX emulation, followed a guide to the letter, heavily relied on save states and was honestly glad to see the back of it.

This time I vowed to do better. I played the version included in the HD Collection port of Metal Gear Solid 3 and didn’t follow a walkthrough. I did reference maps of the levels, but that simply gave me clues on where to head next (and which keycards to use on which doors) rather than explicitly tell me what I need to do.

And wouldn’t you know it, focusing on the game and not flipping through a walkthrough made the whole experience much more fun. Even better, while it’s very dated you can absolutely detect the design ethos that’d be fully expressed in future games.

and so history was made

Most obvious is the cardboard box. This unassuming tool allows you to remain still and not alert guards and would go on to become an icon of the series. But here there’s also the remote-controlled missiles to disable electric floors, enemies being alerted through noise and the need to find a gas mask to get through noxious areas.

But the gameplay similarities go deeper than common tools. Despite Metal Gear‘s distance from The Phantom Pain you spend most of your time doing the same thing in both games: observing enemy movements, figuring out where their blind spots are and mentally plotting a route past them. This loop of observation, planning and execution (and rapid improvisation if it goes wrong) is at the heart of every Metal Gear game and is present and correct right from the first instalment.

Perhaps the only thing really lacking in Metal Gear is the series’ idiosyncratic personality. The bosses are pretty generic, announcing their names and attacking. Outer Heaven as a location is drab and dull-looking. Even Solid Snake and Big Boss (now retconned as The Phantom Pain‘s Venom Snake) are extremely two-dimensional characters (though they’re Mamet in comparison to the barely-there support team). But to be fair, it was made in 1987.

But you can see glimmers of what’s to come. Kojima’s predilection for breaking the fourth wall shines through in the late-game sequence when Big Boss orders you to turn off the game system. I particularly got a kick out of the HD Collection updating the dialogue for the PlayStation 3, meaning I had a character from a game released in 1987 and set in 1995 telling me to turn off a console from 2006.

And there are the touches that prefigure Kojima’s later obsession with details. For example, at the end of the game you must escape from the base before it self-destructs. You’re on a tight timer, but if you use the cigarettes in your inventory (which are useless up until now) you get extra time added on. I read this as being the more the player leans into the cool action hero stereotype, the less pressure you’ll be under.

It’s difficult to outright recommend Metal Gear to anyone other than a really dedicated fan. It hasn’t aged amazingly, offers no narrative insights you can’t get from reading a summary and isn’t a great looker. But this is the primordial ooze of Metal Gear and it’s fascinating to see the genesis of ideas that’d go so far.

Next up: Metal Gear 2: Solid Snake.

Final Fantasy VII Remake (PS4, 2020)

Final Fantasy VII means a lot to me. By 1997 my most-played video games were the Sonic the Hedgehog Mega Drive titles, Street Fighter II, DOOM and Super Mario 64. As far as games with stories go, the most complex I’d experienced was The Secret of Monkey Island.

So when I got my hands on Final Fantasy VII‘s epic tale, featuring charismatic characters, beautifully rendered environments and subversive politics it blew. my. mind. Nothing in the Final Fantasy series before or since came close to the time I had with VII. I played each of them up until Final Fantasy XIII, which I abandoned after six hours of confusing gibberish.

After that, I figured my time with Final Fantasy was over. We’d had a nice run together, but our tastes were clearly heading in different directions. My scepticism of modern-day Square-Enix storytelling led to me skipping Final Fantasy XV and Kingdom Hearts III. But then came the Final Fantasy VII Remake.

I was doubtful that it could capture the tone of the original, but hey, it’s getting great reviews. And let’s face it, I’m stuck indoors in lockdown with nothing better to blow £60 on. Ah why the hell not?

It didn’t take long to fall in love with Cloud, Aerith, Tifa and Barret all over again. A few hours with the Remake confirmed that Square had brought what I loved about the original into the present. The characters felt true to how I remembered them, the writing was moving, the voice performances are note-perfect (and often very funny), the score is incredible and rather than shying away from the anticorporate environmentalism of the original the Remake dove into it even harder.

Best of all, most of the new stuff added to expand the original’s opening into a 40-hour experience is great. They successfully fleshed out the AVALANCHE team, extravagantly expanded the Wall Market sequence (the best bit of the game by far) and the incidental NPC dialogue and environmental design does a lot of heavy lifting into showing us everyday life in the dystopian, decaying city of Midgar.

Plus, the combat system kicks ass. Once you get to grips between quickly swapping between characters and firing off abilities, and once you understand the path to victory is always Assess > Pressure weaknesses > Stagger it’s very satisfying. I beat most bosses by the skin of my teeth: low on items, MP and usually with a well-timed limit break consigning them to oblivion.

It’s not perfect; you have to run through the same sewer dungeon twice, the dull final dungeon in Chapter 17 stalls the momentum and the side quest design is a bit uninspired. But these are mere flies in the ointment and the rest of the game is so good it was easy to ignore them.

And then came that ending.

Fuck me…

Spoilers after this picture of Aerith bashing someone with a folding chair.

So, throughout the game you contend with creepy floating shrouds with mysterious intentions. Sometimes they help, sometimes they hinder. I had my doubts about their inclusion, but the rest of the writing was so good that I had faith it’d work out for the best.

They turn out to be *rubs temples, sighs* interdimensional time-travelling ghosts intent on making sure the events of the 1997 game proceed unaltered. The game culminates in the party entering some kind of space portal that leads to them to the bizarro universe of the ‘Crossroads of Destiny’ where you fight and kill a hundred-foot tall purple personification of the abstract concept of fate. Considering that just an hour or so before I was having trouble battling several dogs at once, this is quite the leap.

After this, we see that previously dead characters have miraculously returned to life and that there may now be an entirely separate parallel universe in play, symbolised by the alteration of a cartoon dog’s appearance.

In its final hour, the Remake undermines all the stakes the previous 35-40 hours had established. After all, if anything can be changed, if death is irrelevant, and if we can kill destiny what can possibly threaten the characters now?

It seems silly to drastically lower your opinion of a game just because of a terrible ending, but if I was served a delicious five-course gourmet meal on glittering china and the final dish turned out to be a lump of shit, I’d have to reevaluate what’d come before.

Don’t get me wrong, I recognise that a remake of a game twenty years on from the original needs to change things and that simply regurgitating what we all know is artistically bankrupt. Inventing time-travelling ghosts in order to give yourself an in-universe permission slip to do new things is insanely overcomplicating things.

If you want to tell a different story just tell it. 

The ending gives me no confidence that anything good will come of this self-granted creative freedom. As of the last hour of the game, the plot now features time travel, characters returning from the dead, personifications of abstract concepts, intersecting alternate timelines, extradimensional travel and metafiction ghosts. That’s all in addition to and on top of the already extremely crazy alien god parasite Gaia theory psychological freak out of the original.

I feel like what’s coming down the line is going to be a narrative train wreck and my anticipation for the next instalment has dropped off a cliff. If this stupendously terrible ending is what the writing team come up with when they’re let off the leash, god only knows what nonsense they’re cooking up for next time.

Assassin’s Creed Origins: The Hidden Ones DLC (PC, 2018)

Assassin’s Creed Origins‘ The Hidden Ones fits perfectly in my theory of DLC development. Aside from minor cosmetic stuff, major games usually get two or three large DLC packs. The first of these is almost always a straight continuation of the core game – for example, Control‘s recent ‘The Foundation’ pack.

It makes sense if you think of the development team moving directly onto DLC once the game has gone gold. In business terms, you want a DLC episode out fairly soon after launch in order to stop players trading the game in and creating a glut of cheap second-hand copies. So take the path of least resistance and just make more of what worked. Plus you don’t want to get too experimental too early for fear of alienating potential Season Pass buyers.

All of which adds up to The Hidden Ones being… fine. Set a couple of years after Assassin’s Creed Origins ends, Bayek travels to the Sinai Peninsula. Here you find a selection of sadist lieutenants who must be assassinated in order to reveal their commander, who is sorely in need of a hidden blade to the back. Business as usual.

Each of these targets is squirrelled away inside a large complex surrounded by bodyguards, though by the time you get to the DLC Bayek will be so brimming over with cool assassination skills that it’s fairly trivial to take them down. After about two hours of mildly diverting sneaking and stabbing I’d completed the main story, which I’m already forgetting.

The side quests are a little better. These have a few interesting Witcher 3-esque twists to them, with one in particularly rounding off one of my favourite subplots of the core game.

That’s about all I have to say about The Hidden Ones. It exists, it’s okay and that’s about that.

I suspect it’ll be completely forgotten once I get stuck into the final DLC, The Curse of the Pharaohs.  This promises supernatural happenings, mythical beasts and killer mummies. Now that’s the good shit.

 

 

Astral Chain (Switch, 2019)

I love Platinum Games’ secret sauce. Their combat systems flow together like no other studios’, rewarding precision, tactics and fast reflexes. On top of that, they’ve got style coming out the wazoo, with fights taking place to an intense guitar-led soundtrack, lots of flashing lights, and your character constantly vogueing for the virtual lens.

No other studio does this schtick so well and no other studio could have made Astral Chain. This is a barmy anime-inspired adventure about super-powered teen future cops wielding demon-slaves from another dimension aboard a dystopian floating city. You mix acrobatically disintegrating killer monsters with bobby-on-the-beat police work. I mean, tracking down a guy’s wallet is a lot easier when you have an invisible science-fiction hell-dog to sniff it out for you.

The plot is total anime nonsense, but coming here for that is like putting a porno on and wondering when the electrician is going to fix the woman’s TV. Best just to ignore it.

I’m here to kick some ass and look good doing it, and Astral Chain provides that in spades. But you’re going to have to work a little harder than usual to get there. The core of combat is synchronising with a partly AI-controlled partner – your ‘Legion’. This is connected to you by the titular ‘astral chain’ and the key to the game is managing both yourself and your Legion at the same time.

For the first few hours it’s a pat your head/rub your belly kind of deal. You have to split your attention between what you’re doing, what your Legion is doing, what enemies are doing and various meters and cooldowns that dictate what you can do. For a while, I was worried that this was too esoteric – that I’d bounce off it in the way I did The Wonderful 101.

Then it all clicked and I spent the rest of the surprisingly lengthy adventure slinging my pet monsters all over the arena, balletically backflipping over enemy strikes, switching up weapons mid-combo and generally owning bones.

It looks great (especially for a Switch game), sounds lovely and has a pleasantly off-kilter personality. But the fighting is the draw here, and if you’re into deep and flashy video-game combat – and if you specifically liked Bayonetta and Metal Gear Rising – it’s a no-brainer.

 

John Woo presents Stranglehold (Xbox 360, 2007)

In a gaming landscape where major titles try to be all things to all players, 2007’s John Woo presents Stranglehold makes for a nice throwback. The goal of the developers is simple, a power fantasy in which you shoot hundreds of besuited gangsters while looking cool. Stranglehold takes place over six levels, can be beaten in about five hours and was well worth the 50p I paid for it at CEX.

As you can probably guess from the title, John Woo’s fingerprints are all over the game (and he pops up as a very polite bartender). Chow Yun Fat reprises his role from Hard Boiled as the improbably named Inspector Tequila and proceeds to spend much of the game in slow motion with bullets lazily spiralling past his head.

Your time is spent blasting through a series of gun-fu playgrounds. You’ll run in slow motion over the backs of golden dragon statues in a Chinese restaurant, swing from chandeliers and (the definite highlight in my opinion) run up the back of a Brachiosaurus skeleton. You do all this while toting guns that never need to reload while the game displays a frankly pornographic focus on bullet impacts on flesh and the environment.

If you’re not sold yet, there’s a special attack in which the camera spirals around Chow Yun Fat doing his most determined face while reloading his weapon. He proceeds to spin around annihilating everyone in the room while doves fly out of nowhere. Is it possible to be more John Woo than this? No. It is not.

There is a bit of awkwardness to put up with due to the 2007 release. Graphics are sometimes a bit wonky, the camera is a little too close to your character, there’s a godawful turret section and the plot isn’t much to write home about. But Stranglehold is so brief n’ breezy that none of this makes much of an impact.

Good times all round. Shame that Midway Chicago never got to finish the sequel before Midway went under.