If Capcom was a Hollywood director, Kunitsu-Gami: Path of the Goddess would be the epitome of a “one for me” project, the kind of thing you hope a creative entity would spend its clout on after delivering a long string of hits. It represents a long overdue return to the kind of game that Capcom was making in the mid-aughts with wildly imaginative brio, when it was throwing all sorts of ideas at the wall to see what stuck. This is the period that gave us the likes of Killer 7, Viewtiful Joe, Ōkami, God Hand, and No More Heroes, critical darlings that failed to set the charts on fire but hold a place of honor in many an intrepid gamer’s heart.
Kunitsu-Gami feels like a late arrival to a party that got cut short nearly 20 years ago. It is, at heart, a tower defense game, but it’s one that’s held aloft by breathtaking artistic direction, a deep and abiding love for Japanese mythology and tradition, and one of the most deceptively simple gameplay hooks that the world of AAA gaming has seen in years.
The setup is that a great collective race of demons known as the Seethe have managed to corrupt all things that live on the fictional Mt. Kafuku in ancient Japan. Yoshiro, the mountain’s maiden protector, is called to purify the evil alongside her sword-wielding protector, Soh, but is defeated by the evil deity at the summit of the mountain. Rather than face the monstrosity directly, Soh and Yoshiro decide to take back Mt. Kafuku, one village at a time, rebuilding the devastation and giving hope and empowerment to people as they go from outpost to outpost.
To do so, Soh carves a path for Yoshiro to follow through every village, leading to a demon-infested torii gate. Yoshiro will perform a purifying ritual dance as she makes her way down the path during the day, but once night falls, demons will stream out of the gate, and Yoshiro will be unable to move. Because Yoshiro is defenseless during the ritual, the job of slaying the demons falls to Soh and the villagers. Kunitsu-Gami, then, is less tower defense than maiden defense.
The game gets nearly endless mileage out of its aesthetic, bringing grim Japanese folklore and bright, sparkling festival culture to vivid life. But its rapturous take on mythology is still the window dressing over the remarkable, elegant work the developers have put into making the business of managing a small army worth returning to time and time again.
Each stage perfectly raises the stakes, with a new twist, a new hit of complexity, or a new power. Kunitsu-Gami does this without overwhelming the player in menus, statistics, and meaningless numbers that tend to make strategy games utterly inscrutable. Here, the visual language does most of the heavy lifting when it comes to communicating each villager’s role in battle with beautiful simplicity, with only two dedicated buttons needed to manage the mayhem.
By the end, when there are half a dozen paths for the demonic horde to get to Yoshiro and end her life in three hits, the fact that it all seems manageable is a triumph of good, accessible game design. Kunitsu-Gami’s rural Japan is a place of natural beauty, of dance, of light and revelry in the face of darkness. There are very few games that have dared to convey this very culturally specific magic in such a distinctive and compelling way.
This game was reviewed with code purchased by the reviewer.
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