I shouldn’t have to start any review with my definition of what a game should be, but in the case of Asura’s Wrath I’m awfully tempted. A major reason for this is because I’m torn when trying to describe it. Asura’s Wrath tries to be a game, but it’s a shallow one in terms of gameplay. This is unfortunate, since it’s obvious that so much painstaking love of anime and manga went into crafting its over-the-top style and presentation. One that’s filled with arena battles to fight in, shooter levels reminiscent of Panzer Dragoon, and a heavy dose of Quick Time Event driven gameplay — a mechanic that requires the player to press a button in time with an onscreen prompt to further the action taking place on screen. Asura’s Wrath wraps all of these gameplay styles around a seamlessly presented space opera story, and follows the furious title character through 18 episodes of rage-filled scenarios and planet-shattering action sequences. On the surface that last idea alone sounds so cool, but sadly Asura’s Wrath squanders its potential by wildly unbalancing its gameplay to cutscene ratio — a move that hamstrings its promising qualities.
In order to get a firm grasp on what disappoints me about Asura’s Wrath, it helps to step into a time capsule for a second and travel back to the early ’90s, where full-motion-video games promised a future of action-heavy interactive cut-scenes as a healthy future for the medium. These primarily video-driven works presented gameplay that only moved forward (often in small increments) if you pressed a button in accordance with a set of scripted on-screen prompts. Get it right and you get treated to a cooler action sequence; get it wrong and suffer harsh consequences or fail states. It helps to clarify that the consequences of missing a button prompt in Asura’s Wrath are typically more forgiving, but games steeped in this style slowly disappeared because they offer little in terms of actual gameplay. Sure, an interactive movie can be entertaining, but it sacrifices the elements of player creativity and freedom that make video games a fun format.
