This game is a master class on how to fuck something up. It really deserves attention as a work to analyse in a way that helps developers and video game theorists to understand the flaws and victories of this interactive medium.

Character design and world building is one of the best things it has to offer, along with music, the choices that were made to create this game were perfect. Asura and all of the other character have aesthetic aspects taken from Buddhist and Hindu mythology that are adapted into this mishmash of futuristic science fiction. That said, a lot of times the spaces you are in are very limited, so tremendously and obviously marked so as to "not lose the player" and keep them within the boundaries that is funnily absurd.

The game is at odds with himself over whether it wants to make the player feel empowered or to offer a hard and challenging experience, and it struggles over this the entire game. This particularly being obvious in the contrast between cut scenes and game play, where a strong ludo-narrative dissonance is present. On cut scenes Asura can beat regular enemies in absurdly easy ways, while when we use him it takes several tens of seconds to minutes, depending on the enemy, to defeat them. This just gives a strange sensation, I see the cinematics and my brain tells me to feel strong, full of rage, but then I go and actually play it (not pressing buttons in QTEs to feel powerful) and all I have is a lame shooting attack, which does virtually no damage sometimes (square), a strong attack which needs to load after every use and it takes its time to do so (triangle) and a regular attack which does okay damage and it is fast, but which ultimately makes it boring because you basically only get to do that, and there are no combination of attacks that you can mix. If they would have wanted to make the player feel strong, it would have been a much better idea add combos, à la God of War, which create some stunning visual while you kill enemies; add more enemies and make them easier to defeat, since anyway they hardly have a logical or puzzle aspect to them, and also that as the story progresses, that you should be able to defeat previous enemies that used to be hard in super easy ways, which would give an ego boos and feeling of empowerment.

Gameplay aspects are a boring mess, that basically give little coherence to the whole experience, I'm sure this was done with a lot of love because you can tell it wasn't simply some copy paste ultra mass produced product, but it seems there just wasn't a concrete direction to where to take things. I'm sure they must have had some budget limitation or something, but at the end of the day, what's published is what it'll be for the rest of existence, and this is what we have.

This clearly has a lot of cinematic influence, specifically from anime, the story being a shonen-ification of a Buddhist myth. The chapters even contain some visuals at the middle of them like some anime do, and they have bits at the end of them that tell you about the next chapter without actually spoiling you. This transpires into the game play as QTE sweat that's all stickied unto your body. It is understandably one of the easiest way to adapt heavy cinematic video games to a way where you can actually play them. Shenmue and Fahrenheit or Heavy Rain are good examples, and it's not that it's necessarily a bad decision, there are cases where it is perfectly applied (for example MGS4 microwave scene) but here it is done even in moments where it's not necessary or where at least they could have let you control the character in some way. Hell people criticise MGS4 for that scene where they give you control, you get off an elevator and then go to a cut scene again, but they do that here multiple times. I mean, for fucks sake, Gone Home has a better gameplay loop and knows how to adapt its gameplay to its narrative in a much better way, sure, it's a calm game with no action, but still.

I didn't dislike the game, I liked it, I think there are valorous things here and it is worth playing, in my opinion this work just speaks about the people who play videogames in general. They don't actually pay attention to game play and how it is used or could be used to narrate its story, and they are okay consuming something horrendous and they even might like it, but when they do get some other aspect (like inclusion of some minority kind of thing, or some game play decision which goes against what's trending) they all agree on whats good and bad.

I just finished playing this, I will probably edit this review at some point and make it less sentimental and more objective, with more fancy words. Oh, did I mention that the true ending is a DLC and that PSN is dead on PS3 so you basically can't play it without resorting to piracy?