It had been a long time since I’d had the fantasy of renting a movie theater to play a video game. Then I played “Asura’s Wrath.”
An Eastern answer to “Star Wars,” “Asura’s Wrath” is aggressively cinematic, looking to the distant past and future for narrative and artistic themes. Aerial armadas are joined on the ground by giant metallic Buddhas itching to destroy you. Wide shots of dogfights in space recall scenes from “Return of the Jedi,” except here the explosions look uncannily like cherry blossoms popping. Our hero, Asura, is a sort of Hulk-meets-Vishnu, sprouting additional arms as he gets angrier.
And boy, does he get angry. A demigod, Asura is repeatedly betrayed by his fellow deities. They kill his wife, kidnap his daughter and put him through such laughable physical punishment that he makes those angry birds on your smartphone look merely annoyed by comparison.
Amid the beat-downs and epic battles, though, the game makes time for beauty. On more than one occasion, Asura is thrown through the atmospheric barrier, but the effect isn’t so much “ow that would hurt” as “what a pretty shooting star.” A battle on the moon, with the Earth looming in the background, feels vast and gorgeous, and I won’t soon forget a visit to a kind of paradise, where the rice wine flows freely and Antonin Dvorak’s “New World Symphony” plays on a loop.
| ‘Asura’s Wrath’ |
| Systems: PS3, Xbox 360 |
| Price: $59.99 |
| Rating: 4 out of 5 stars |
These scenes make “Asura’s Wrath” the perfect example of the oddest trend in gaming today: beat-’em-up games that are beautiful. The most mindless of all genres, in which you just go around punching people, has become home to the medium’s most daring artists. It started perhaps with “God of War,” which had you wrestling with the likes of Zeus, and reached its pinnacle with last year’s “El Shaddai: Ascension of the Metatron,” the most visually imaginative game ever made.
“Asura’s Wrath,” for its part, offers a twist on gaming’s most fashionable art style. While a lot of games try for a “living painting” look of watercolors flowing across canvas, “Asura’s Wrath” is more like a living sculpture, with characters that seem etched from clay.
Indeed, if anything, “Asura’s Wrath” is too focused on style. Several times during the game, I thought, “They should make an anime of this,” and then I realized this was the anime of it. “Asura’s Wrath” treats being a game as a part-time job, and is so focused on mimicking a TV show that it regularly brackets the action with interstitial titles, as though it’s returning from a commercial break.
Bizarre decisions like this remind you that you’re watching as much as playing. But with a game that looks this good, that’s not such a bad thing.
