World Kunitsu-Gami: The Path of the Goddess It’s meant to feel fantastical and from another era, but the game itself also feels like an anachronism. Something that shouldn’t exist in 2024. It’s not a sequel to a hit series. It doesn’t work in a popular genre. And it doesn’t pander to an international audience. It’s just a great gameand shows what’s possible when massive publishers take risks and create something completely different.
Path of the Goddess you play as the sword-dancing warrior Soh, who must unite the villagers and protect Maiden Yoshiro on a perilous journey to cleanse the mountain of evil. But instead of a straightforward third-person action game where you explore levels and cut through hordes of demons, Path of the Goddess is built like a tower defense game, where in addition to killing enemies in fluid, arcade combat, you can also assign unique classes to your villagers and issue orders to them on the battlefield.
“I’m a fan of old Japanese folklore and other weird folk tales, and I thought it would be interesting to incorporate them into a game set in the mountains of Japan, where a messenger from another world appears every night and you have to fend him off and protect the gods,” said game director Shuichi Kawata, also a longtime Capcom employee. “A big part of the idea was that I thought it would be compatible with tower defense. I think we managed to make every aspect of the game feel consistent, including player actions and enemy interactions, with Japanese culture.”
Path of the Goddess features dozens of intricate and evocative enemy designs for the evil spirits you face, called Seethe. Some have heads shaped like giant mouths with tongues sticking out of them. Others look like pearly white lumps floating in the air with unsafe hooks hanging from their undersides. At one stage, you come face to face with a huge, decayed tree whose roots come to life and attack you like a giant mutant earthworm. Their variety and level of detail is one of the key ways the game punches above its weight.
But the second most crucial thing that helps Path of the Goddess what stands out is how personalized and carefully considered every little detail of the game feels. “Combining multiple game elements will always increase the complexity of the game, but it’s important to be careful about what is and isn’t necessary for the game,” Kawata said. “To prevent the game from becoming a grind, I think it’s important to let users think about what to do based on the game materials provided, and the result should lead to a sense of accomplishment.”
The user interface is neatly integrated with the rest of the game’s look and feel. To access the main menu, you must travel to the village and visit Yoshiro’s tent, where a table in front of it collects various decorations, artifacts, and other items collected throughout your journey, which double as game power-ups, status-raising relics, and other unlockable upgrades. You level up the villagers’ roles by decorating their masks, and the save screen is a long horizontal piece of folded paper that you stamp with each fresh file. One of the game’s collectibles, an array of desserts, is located in a nearby box for you to examine at your leisure.
There are more than 20 stages Path of the Goddessand each of them has two phases. The result is three to five waves of enemies per stage with a generous number of checkpoints. No gameplay ideas were rejected during development, but testing showed that most of the stages initially felt too long and drawn out, so they were ultimately shortened. “A lot of people said that this part of the game was tedious and dragged on, so we decided to shorten it and speed up the pace of progress in the game.”
The game seems to be stripped down to the bare essentials, retaining only what is elegant, polished, and meaningful to the overall experience. While other games become check-offs in a marketing strategy, Path of the Goddess feels devoid of bloat. It’s the opposite of an open-world RPG with skill trees, gear points, and random loot that stuffs itself with hours of extra content to reach a certain number How long to beat.
“I think the sandbox on the playground is similar to this situation, and I used that concept to explain it to my team,” Kawata said. “The scope is fixed, and the use of sand is fixed, but you can use the sand at your own discretion.” That’s one reason I think people still call it Cult PS2 Classic or lost PS3 game. It feels like it was made for an era where a good idea, frosty design, and frosty gameplay were enough, if not to sell millions of copies, then at least to convince a big-name publisher to take a risk and create something fresh.
Before the throw Path of the GoddessKawata directed Shinsekai: Into the Depthsunderwater action and puzzle game on Apple Arcade, which was later ported to Switch. Much of that team was transferred to Path of the Goddessbut developers from other Capcom franchises with bigger budgets, such as Resident Evil also joined, bringing additional knowledge and experience with the RE Engine, which is becoming more and more standard across Capcom’s portfolio (Monster Hunter it also moves to this With Monster Hunter Wilds). Still, Hirabayashi said the team remained “relatively compact relative to the size of the production volume.”
Unlike many of these games, Path of the Goddess costs $50, which is slightly less than the price of fresh generation products such as Street Fighter 6 AND Dragon Dogma 2but just above cheaper games on Steam like Hell Divers 2whose $40 price tag many consider a key part of its massive sales success. I asked what was behind the decision, which anecdotally, some PC gamers still think is too high.
“As a brand new title, we took on a number of challenges, such as a ‘unique, Japanese-inspired setting’ and a ‘new gaming experience’ that combines action and tower defense,” Hirabayashi said. “We decided to set the price as affordable as possible so that as many people as possible could play the game.” He emphasized that the game’s size is comparable to a full-priced game, but it’s clear that Capcom is hedging its bets, as Path of the Goddess It’s also “free” for paid Game Pass members on Xbox and PC. When I asked earlier at Summer Game Fest how the deal came about, Hirabayashi said the goal was to get the game in front of as many people as possible, given that it’s an unknown IP in an unusual genre.
I hope it works. We’ve seen that a bold vision that works and a cult of fan enthusiasm aren’t always enough to warrant a sequel or a chance to continue the work that came before. Here is a unhappy story Hi-Fi FeverGOTY 2023 candidate from Tango Gameworks. The studio was founded by Resident Evil director Shinji Mikami (Kawata and Hirabayashi were on the film team) Resident Evil 4(the last one led by Mikami), who left a year before Microsoft announced the closure of Tango Gameworks.
As skyrocketing development costs force publishers to retreat to established retailers and popular licenses, there is a real fear that the top of the gaming industry could calcify even more than it has in recent years through remakes, sequels, and live lottery machines. When I asked if we might see more experiments like Path of the Goddess of Capcom, Hirabayashi said he couldn’t comment on the larger company’s policies. “However,” he added, “as an individual, I’m very grateful that there were so many people in the company who agreed with me to bring this title to users.”
