They don’t make a lot of games like Kunitsu-Gami: Path of the Goddess any more. It is a game unstuck in time, a polished, action strategy hybrid that feels more at home on the PS2 or PS3. It feels like it should not exist, and yet here it is.
Kunitsu-Gami: Path of the Goddess is an action strategy game set against the backdrop of Japanese folklore. You play Soh, a warrior tasked with protecting a priestess named Yoshiro, who is tasked with purging a mountain and the villages on it of evil spirits known as Seethe. To do this you’re going to need to do an elaborate purification ritual based on the Shinto ceremonial dance of Kagura. Gameplay-wise, this means reversing the creeping spread of evil from areas and villagers, assigning jobs to those villagers and placing them, tower defense style, down various lanes between the source of the corruption and Yoshiro.
During the day you use crystals (Guess what? They’re Orbs!) to push Yoshiro forward, undo corruption, unlock collectibles and items, prepare fortifications, and strategize for night time. Every night a new wave of Seethe emerges from the Torii gates, and you must survive the onslaught. Soh acts as both a commander and a soldier, and in addition to the regular stages there are also boss battles, which switch the dynamic from linear, lane-based tower defense mode to big area fights.
On top of all this, the cleared stages themselves can be visited and rebuilt by the rescued townsfolk. The base building mini game allows you to unlock materials to upgrade the individual classes of villagers, yielding potential equipment for your quest. I am a sucker for any time a game asks me to rebuild a town, and this game is no exception.
Playing Kunitsu-Gami brought to mind so many games I treasure: Pikmin, Odama, Actraiser 1 & 2, Giants: Citizen Kabuto, Dark Cloud 1 & 2, Brütal Legend, Overlord. The presence of Capcom’s own Ōkami looms heavily over this game, not simply in its shared themes, look, and gameplay but also the fact that it includes unlockable costumes and music from that game itself. In my mind’s eye I can see a younger version of myself picking up a battered copy of this for Gamecube from an EB Games, only to find out it’s worth either $5 or $300 dollars on eBay a few decades later.
To the extent that there are games like Kunitsu-Gami still being made, bizarre idiosyncratic genre hybrids, they are usually the province of either indies (like the recently released Cataclismo, which rules) or Nintendo (they’re still making good Pikmin games), and they are rarely allowed to have this level of sheer detail, polish and care. Every inch in the game, from the grotesque movements of the Yokai-coded Seethe to the elaborate dances of the villagers, pops in the RE Engine. One of the game’s collectibles is sweet treats, which are painstakingly rendered at a fidelity akin to food in Final Fantasy XV, that one burger from Resident Evil 2 or the more recent Monster Hunter games. This is to say nothing of the soundtrack by Chikara Aoshima, which goes alarmingly hard and includes one track with a freakish John Zorn style sax solo.
This would be enough to cement the game into cult status for me, but luckily it’s also a blast to play. The hybrid fusion of tactics and action feels legitimately tight, and the game is fairly good at drip feeding you new mechanics to ramp up complexity. It keeps adding new weapon types and quirks, and many of the bosses can get tremendously challenging. You think you’ve seen what the game has to offer early on, and then suddenly it makes you do a battle entirely on boats. You are often forced to consider your army composition to react to enemy behavior and stage layout, so you can’t just use the same strategy over and over again. The lone thing I have found frustrating in my playtime is that repeating stages for challenges to unlock upgrade materials and equipment takes a while, but that’s a consequence of how long the stages take generally, and many of the challenges add new restrictions and interesting angles to previously mastered levels.
Also, if you play the demo, be aware that progression doesn’t transfer over to the full game. So if you do play the demo, don’t spend too much time dawdling.
When you play something like Kunitsu-Gami, it feels closer spiritually to something like Fat Princess, Tokyo Jungle or the games that Clover and then Platinum used to make. It is a mutant that escaped containment, a game that feels like it should be trapped on PS3 (or the Xbox 360). It does not feel like new software, but a title you need a particularly glitchy and experimental emulator to run.
There is a poverty of possibility in the current game space. The people who make decisions involving money love a sure, reliable, easily repeatable release. Kunitsu-Gami should not be a rarity, but we live in the wasteland that this over-financialized system has created. While the indies can do a lot, there needs to be space made for this type of vintage single A release. I would say that Game Pass is the perfect venue, but I also thought that about Hi-Fi Rush and look what that got them.
Download Kunitsu-Gami if you can. It’s on Game Pass, or it's like fifty bucks on Steam and PS5/Xbox. The demo is also fairly robust if you are on the fence. I hope it’s a success, and that it ushers in not only a resurgence of orb-based gaming but also of daring, weird, less than AAA games that are still, against all odds, being made.
Kunitsu-Gami: Path of the Goddess is available on PS4/PS5, current Xbox consoles and Steam. As of this writing, it is included on Microsoft's Game Pass.
