Summary
- Kunitsu-Gami combines action and strategy gameplay, allowing players to lean towards their preferred playstyle.
- Players manage villagers with different roles to defend against enemies and protect Yoshiro, with some levels requiring more strategic planning.
- The game features a beautiful and detailed Japanese-inspired world with various cultural elements and references.
It can be difficult sometimes to gauge whether a game is for you. You can appreciate a game’s aesthetic, world, and characters, yet be soured by the gameplay if it’s not something you’re particularly skilled at. For me, 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:Kunitsu-Gami: Path of the Goddess was one that caught my attention for all the right reasons—visually beautiful, thematically interesting in its respect for Japanese culture—but there was on🃏e thing giving me pause: the genre.
It’s billed as an ‘action strategy game’, and given I’m more of a ‘hit the thing until it dies’ rather than a ‘plan ahead and be prepared’ type of player, there’s a fine line between strategy gameplay I can handle, and strategy gameplay that makes me want to throw my controller at the TV. Kunitsu-Gami ignores that line as it instead invites players into a large room that caters to both action or strategy fans. Encouraging a mix of the two, it allows you to lean one way or another. I found myself not only excelling at the gameplay but thoroughly enjoying it. However, I must emphasise that I really did play it my way, so let me explain.
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You Don’t Have To Be An Exceptional Strategist To Enjoy Kunitsu-Gami
Kunitsu-Gami follows a familiar pattern level after level, for the most part at least. As samurai Soh with goddess Yoshiro in tow for you to protect, you visit different villages on Mt. Kafuku that have been defiled. The aim is to carve a Spirit Path through the village to the Torii Gate for Yoshiro to p❀urify it, but that takes time and crystals. By day, you go around purifying the village and freeing villagers, which in turn earns you crystals, which you can spend to assign different combat roles to villagers before using your remaining time to prepare for the night🀅 ahead by fixing barriers or lighting lanterns.
The Seethe come at night, pouring through the Torii Gates and heading straight for Yoshiro. It’s ♉up to you and your villagers to defeat them all and keep her safe. This is where the strategy comes in. Or not, if you’re me. Though you only start the first level with one role type for villagers, the Woodcutter, you unlock more as you progress through the mountain, unlocking roles that attack from afar like Archers, or roles that heal or debuff enemies. You can also choose where to place the villagers, allowing you to build the perfect line of defence against the Seethe while utilising the environment to your benefit by putting Archers up high and ensuring Yoshiro stays behind barriers.
I promise I did make an effort to do this. Not a finely-tuned orchestra of the best defence in the world, but there was some thought put into roles and placement. However, my playstyle with Soh was don’t dodge, don’t block, just whack. It was less strategy and more slap-egy (sorr🐼y). I would run ahead of my little line of defence and mop up all the Seethe wit🍷h Soh alone, cutting them to ribbons with his sword and using his special attack to take out many at once when they crowded me. You can equip Tsuba Guards and Mazo Talismans that give buffs to Soh or the villagers, so I ensured all mine were tailored to overpowering Soh and neglected the villagers. To be fair, I did upgrade my Archers to be powerhouses for any stragglers that got past me.
Once Yoshiro has cleansed the village, you unlock it as a little hub area where you can speak with her to upgrade Soh and the villager roles using Musubi, change out your equipped items, and tinker with a few other features. You can also set the villagers to repair the village, and pet the myriad animals. Dogs, deer, rabbits, they’re all there for Soh to poke at. However, cleansing each village also 🐓unlocks a boss battle. Upon entering this boss level, you have a moment with Yoshiro and the villagers you saved to assign roles and open a chest of goodies Monster Hunter-style before you start the main battle. Once again, my strategy was simply ‘hit it until it dies’ and I largely ignored my villagers. They all lived. It was fine.
Fun fact. I didn’t realise my villagers lost their roles after I assigned them during the level so I didn’t bother to re-assign for the boss. If you are silly like me and don’t ass♔ign them roles, they stand there quivering in fear as they are normal villagers.
As you progress through Mt. Kafuku, each area ups the ante. You unlock additional roles, new enemy types start appearing, the environment changes—such as a dark level where you have to light lanterns for your villagers to be able to attack the Seethe—and the bosses become more complex, too. There’s a particularly vicious centipede demon that made me use more health🐓-replenishing rations than any other, but he still ended up dead. I utilised my team of villagers a bit more as the challenge increased, but largely the plan always defaulted to: I’m on the front line, and the villagers are dancing in the background. Did I forget to mention they dance when they’re waiting for action? There’s a lot of dancing.
Alright, You Have To Learn To Strategise A Little
Everything was going great and I✱ was loving carving up enemies as Soh until suddenly I wasn’t. Kunitsu-Gami threw a curve-ball level where Soh becomes a spirit that can’t attack enemies but can still command the villagers. I had to put my big girl pants on and actually strategise properly for once. I still favoured ganking, setting up little death points of crowds of villagers that just annihilated the Seethe on any path leading to Yoshiro, I just wasn’t personally the one ganking anymore. Either way, a win is a win𓃲.
By the time this happens, you’ve gone through a few levels and know the game well enough to handle it.📖 If I can do it, I&rꦗsquo;m positive anyone can. I imagine in the whole of Kunitsu-Gami there will be a few instances where this happens, or some variation at least where the game forces you out of your comfort zone a little. But those added challenges are welcome. If your villagers are truly that terrible, you can easily reset all your Musbi points that you spent at no cost, so you can remove all of Soh’s upgrades and pump them into your villagers and ensure your equipment favours the villagers instead, too.
Kunitsu-Gami Is A Love Letter To Japanese Culture
I can’t emphasise enough how much I enjoyed Kunitsu-Gami’s gameplay. I think I fell particularly hard for it because I went in so♊ unsure of whether I would be able to do it, so when I found myself smashing level after level, I felt pretty damn good about it. But there’s another aspect of Kunitsu-Gami that’s worth mentioning: its incredible Japanese-inspired world.
It’s all too easy to overlook some of the fine details in the game unless you know what you’re looking for, and many of us Westerners won’t appreciate it all because we’re oblivious to what these things are. Every little detail and style of something seems to have a basiಌs in Japanese cultuꦏre and history.
The icon in the bottom right corner that shows the time of day by the sky changing behind a mountain has a shimmer to it, it’s water. That’s because it’s based on an old style of Japanese water clock. The save files take inspiration from Goshuincho, 𒉰the temple and shrine stamp books. The banners showing the villagers’ names and roles are reminiscent of the sashimono banners worn by soldiers in battle for identification. The mochi cakes in Yoshiro’s tent in the villages are the ones used in Japanese tea ceremonies. There are so many incredibly interesting elements like this, from Kagura dances to traditional masks, the whole visual and musical style of the game is strikingly beautiful and detailed.
Kunitsu-Gami: Path of the Goddess went frಞom a game I was interested in but unsure of, to one firmly on my wishlist that I aim to play at launch. I don’t know whether my personal ‘strategy’ of solely focusing on Soh whenever I can wil🐈l see me through to the end, but I’m sure as hell gonna try.
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