All style, zero substance.

Asura's Wrath is a visual feast, and that's all that it is. It aspires to being a little bit more than that, but it never comes close to reaching the heights of its most obvious inspirations.

The immediate opening of the game is strong. The scope and scale are massive to the point of being dizzying, and it actually made me feel a little ill trying to take it all in. This is not a negative; the game aims to be big, and it nails that aspect. While there aren't ever that many entities on screen at any given time, Asura's Wrath excels at selling the illusion of staring at hundreds upon hundreds of ships firing thousands upon thousands of lasers. This tapers off as soon as you're finished with the introduction; it isn't more than ten or fifteen minutes before you're fighting a small pack of red monkeys in a field that's got about as much visual fidelity as you would expect from a game ten years its senior. Between this and the constant, unending flashbacks and needless tutorialization, the budget of the game feels as though it was stretched thin enough to snap before you've even gotten an hour into it.

It does get better from there, but never consistently. Some fights are an absolute treat to look at, with impossibly massive characters and weapons violating every law of physics to explode or slash or punch in the most spectacular way imaginable, Isaac Newton be damned. Other fights are the ones that happen against the big red tortoises or the big red elephants, where they take place entirely in flat, open spaces that are bland to look at and even blander to slog through. If the stated goal was to make an interactive anime, then this is one with a lot of filler and a below industry-standard budget. Anything that aired on television with this many flashbacks to events we've already seen would be rightfully skewered by the critics, but it's considered novel for a video game, so it's given a very undeserving pass. Try your best not to say "Fullmetal Alchemist!" when the eye catches appear.

There's a part of me that wants to ring the sexism bell for how underwritten the female characters are, but that would be pretending as though the men are at all characters, either. Still, though, every single woman is either dead or possessed by the end of the base game. Mithra's dialog consists almost exclusively of the the words "no", "help", and "father" in varying combinations. Durga barely gets a sentence out before she's killed off. The character whose death unlocks Asura's rage is imaginatively named Girl — not Shrine Girl, or Village Girl, or Heathen Girl, just capital-G Girl — and she gets about as much collective screen time as most of the demigods that get the honor of having a name that you don't need to dig through supplemental material to find. I say this, of course, knowing that it's not as if anyone else is all that better. Kalrow's personality is that he's old. Augus likes fighting. Sergei is flamboyant. Asura and Yasha are the closest things to actual people, and their duality of "one is angry and the other is cool" means they're about as emotionally complex as Shadow and Sonic the Hedgehog. Hell, the final fight against Vlitra is basically just the ending sequence of Sonic Adventure 2 with about the same voice acting quality. Sorry, Liam O'Brien, but Robin Atkin Downes is really phoning it in. It sounds like he's faux-yelling because his mom is asleep in the next room and he doesn't want to wake her up.

Part IV is better for how it re-contextualizes the QTEs and provides a meatier story with better setpieces, but this is because it is a complete and shameless fucking rip-off of the ending to Tengen Toppa Gurren Lagann. It's shocking. Chakravartin is the Anti-Spiral, Asura is Simon, Mantra is Spiral Energy. Asura flies into space on the outside of his ship while doing the Gunbuster pose, transforms into Super Galaxy Asura, and then gets into a punch-up with Chakravartin's true, lanky form in a grey-gold void. There are literal shot-for-shot recreations from Lagann-hen, the second Gurren Lagann movie; missing a QTE can result in Chakravartin landing an uppercut on Asura that is identical to the one that the Anti-Spiral lands on Simon. Destroying all of the world's Mantra also leads to the exact same result of destroying Spiral Energy, except that it happens to this game's Simon instead of this game's Nia. There's a line between homage and theft, and Asura's Wrath charges over that line and becomes such blatant, audacious stealing from better material that it just made me angry. Ironic, I suppose.

The base game is unfinished. This isn't a secret; even people with passing knowledge of Asura's Wrath are likely aware of the fact that the actual ending of the game was sold for another $6.99 on top of the $59.99 asking price. Most people wrote this off as classic publisher greed, but I think that's too easy of a justification. The game only pushed something like 36,000 copies in its first week of NA sales, and selling the ending of your game separately isn't exactly the kind of business decision you make for something that's already successful. Capcom said they weren't even surprised by the poor sales. Nobody expected this to succeed. For that, I pity everyone who worked Asura's Wrath. It's clear that they tried, if nothing else. Seiji Shimoda, the game's director, practically never worked on anything else in the industry again after this. I didn't care for this, but I don't think he deserved to be put on CyberConnect2's back burner for a full decade after the fact.

Asura's Wrath is something I won't forget, but it's not something I'll cherish. But they'll probably never get another chance to try again, and that sucks.