Capcom made a game that doesn’t belong in 2024 and it’s awesome.

world Konitsu-gami: The Way of the Goddess The game is supposed to look fantastical and from another time, but the game itself looks like it’s from another time. Something that shouldn’t exist in 2024. It’s not a sequel to a successful franchise. It doesn’t work in a popular genre. And it doesn’t appeal to an international audience. It’s just an excellent game.This shows what can be achieved when big publishers seize the opportunity for something completely different.

“We believe it is important to respond to our users’ expectations with new titles in [existing] “We believe we can produce and remake a new series, but we also believe it’s equally important to take on the challenge of creating something new,” said game producer Yoshiaki Hirabayashi, who has worked at Capcom for over 20 years. Kotaku In a recent email interview,” . “As a completely new title, we are dealing with a number of challenges.

The path of the goddess It puts you in the role of sword-wielding warrior Suoh, who must rally the villagers and protect the maiden Yushiro on a dangerous journey to cleanse the mountain of evil. But instead of a straightforward third-person action game that has you exploring levels and fighting your way through hordes of demons, The path of the goddess The game is designed in the style of a tower defense game, where in addition to killing enemies yourself in smooth arcade combat, you can recruit villagers into unique classes and command them on the battlefield.

One of the keys to success was ensuring that neither side was superior to the other and that each side was able to succeed in its own way. “We didn’t want to force players to use both elements equally, so we spent a lot of time fine-tuning the balance between action and strategy,” Kawata said. “So players could enjoy more action and strategy.” [of either one]“It’s an unexpected mix but it works surprisingly well and doesn’t sacrifice quality to achieve his experimental creative vision. It’s also presented in an unabashedly Japanese context.

“I’m a fan of old Japanese folklore and other strange 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 the other world appears every night and you have to fend them off and protect the gods,” said game director Shuichi Kawata, also a longtime Capcom employee. “The main part of this idea was that I thought it would be compatible with tower defense. I think we were able to make every aspect of the game cohesive by incorporating the player’s actions and the relationship between the enemies with Japanese culture.”

The path of the goddess The game features dozens of intricate and interesting designs for the enemies you face, called The Seethe. Some have heads shaped like giant mouths with tongues sticking out of them. Others look like pearly white tumors floating in the air with dangerous hooks attached to their bottoms. At one point, you encounter a massive, rotten tree whose roots come to life and attack you like a giant, mutated earthworm. Their variety and level of detail is one of the main ways the game punches above its weight.

But the other main thing that helps The path of the goddess “What makes the game stand out is how much the developers care about it and take care to consider every little detail in the game. Mixing multiple elements in the game would increase the complexity of the game, but it is important to carefully choose what is necessary and what is not in the game,” says Kawata. “In order to prevent the game from becoming a ‘boring’ game, I think it is important to allow users to think about what they should do based on the material presented in the game, and the result should lead to a sense of accomplishment.”

The UI is carefully integrated with the rest of the game’s look. To access the main menu, you need to go to a village and visit Yoshiro’s tent, where a table in front of it collects various decorations, artifacts, and other items you’ve collected throughout your journey that also serve as power-ups in the game, status-boosting relics, and other upgrades that can be unlocked. You can level up villagers’ roles by decorating their masks, and the save screen is a long horizontal piece of folded paper that you stamp with each new file. One of the game’s collectibles, a set of sweets, is in a nearby box for you to examine whenever you want.

There are more than 20 stages in The path of the goddess“Each stage consists of two stages. The result is three to five enemy waves per stage with generous checkpoints. While no ideas for the game were ignored during development, testing revealed that most of the stages originally felt too long and drawn out, so we ended up making them shorter. “Many people commented that this part of the game was tiring and made the playtime longer, so we decided to shorten it and increase the pace of the game’s progression.”

The game feels like it’s cut back to the basics, keeping only what’s stylish, polished, and meaningful to the overall experience. While other games turn into just ticking boxes in a marketing strategy, The path of the goddess It feels like it’s free of bloat. It’s the opposite of an open-world RPG with skill trees, equipment scores, and random loot that fills itself with extra hours of content just to hit a certain number. How long does it take to multiply?.

“I think the sandbox on the field is like that situation, and I used that concept to explain it to my team,” Kawata said. “The range is fixed and the sand usage is fixed, but you’re free to use the sand as you wish.” That’s part of the reason I think people keep referring to it as Great classic game on PS2. Or lost a PS3 gameIt seems designed for an era where a good idea, attractive looks, and fun gameplay were enough, if not to sell millions of copies, then at least to convince a well-known publisher to take a risk on something new.

Before throwing The path of the goddessKawata took out Shinsekai: Into the Depthsan underwater action puzzle game on Apple Arcade that was later ported to the Switch. A large part of this team moved to The path of the goddessBut developers from other bigger-budget Capcom franchises like vampire They also joined, bringing more knowledge and experience with the RE Engine that has become an increasing standard across Capcom’s portfolio (monster hunter And it moves towards it too with Monster Hunter WildsHowever, Hirabayashi said the team remained “relatively compact for the production volume.”

Unlike many of those games, however, The path of the goddess It’s priced at $50, which is a little less than the next-gen premium price of things like Street Fighter 6 And Dragon’s Doctrine 2but a bit higher than cheaper Steam games like Helldivers 2which many consider a key component of its massive sales success. I asked why this decision was made, which some PC gamers still feel is too high.

“As a completely new game, we had a number of challenges, such as a ‘unique Japanese-inspired setting’ and a ‘new gameplay experience’ that combines action and tower defense,” Hirabayashi said. “We decided to make the price as accessible as possible to allow as many people as possible to get this game.” He emphasized that the game’s size is comparable to a full-priced title, but you can see Capcom’s hedging in the fact that The path of the goddess The game is also “free” for paid Game Pass members on Xbox and PC. When I asked earlier at Summer Game Fest how this deal was reached, Hirabayashi said the goal was to try to get the game in front of as many people as possible, since it’s an unknown intellectual property in an unusual genre.

I hope it works. We’ve seen that a bold vision that works and a fanbase that loves it isn’t always enough to warrant a sequel or the opportunity to build on the work that came before. This is the sad story now. Hi-Fi Rusha 2023 Tango Gameworks GOTY Award contender. The studio was founded by vampire Director Shinji Mikami (Kawata and Hirabayashi were on the cinematography team) Resident Evil 4(The last game directed by Mikami), who left a year before Microsoft announced the closure of Tango Gameworks.

With exploding development costs forcing publishers to retreat to trusted vendors and popular licenses, there is a real fear that the high end of the gaming industry could calcify even more than it has in recent years through remakes, sequels, and live-service lottery machines. When I asked if we might see more experiments like The path of the goddess From Capcom, Hirabayashi said he could not comment on the larger company’s policy. “However, as an individual, I am extremely grateful that there are so many people within the company who agreed with me to bring this title to users,” he added.