Asura's Wrath
The trailer for Asura's Wrath has got to be one of the most awesomely weird announcement videos of all time. Developed in collaboration with Capcom's newest partner, CyberConnect 2 - famous in Japan for the .hack games and Naruto fighters and in the West for, well, nothing in particular - the game is a bizarre and ambitious hack-and-slasher. It's seeking to redefine the action genre, though it's leaving us guessing as to exactly how. Take a peek at the video for a clue.
Producer Kazuhiro Tsuchiya was at Capcom's recent press event in Tokyo to answer questions about the title. He was joined by CyberConnect 2's enthusiastic president Hiroshi Matsuyama and game director Seiji Shimoda, who gave an excitable insight into what it's been like working in partnership with the publisher so far. They refused to give us any more details on the actual gameplay, but were keen to talk about the creative process.
[Everyone laughs.] Excellent. That's exactly what we want.
First off, we came up with the concept of wrath, which is a very core part of the game, by thinking about what can we could make that people all over the world would enjoy.
We felt that wrath was a good thing to focus on in an action game, because it's a deep, core human emotion that everyone feels – it's not rooted to culture. Japanese, Europeans and Americans all understand wrath. We felt like if we could communicate that energy in a fun way, it would be a good concept to go for.
In Japanese entertainment and comics, and in games as well, there are a lot of interesting depictions of wrath already – things like Dragonball and Naruto – and we love those kinds of comics and games. So we thought, what can we do if we really, really focus on that? How interesting can we make it? That was our challenge to ourselves.
Mm – not quite. The theme isn't so much about the size of the things you fight, or how many of them there are. It's more about the bizarre, the ridiculous – it's something that's beyond belief. Exceptional. Something you've never seen before. That kind of feeling.
We actually have been working together for quite some time – about three years – on this project, and we've really gotten to know each other over that time. It's been a warm environment. Over that long period of time we have had a lot of really fruitful and interesting discussions about a lot of things, particularly action games.
Capcom is obviously famous for its action games, and at first when we brought out initial designs to [Capcom head of R&D Keiji] Inafune, which were what we thought a Capcom action game should be, he said "No no no, you don't get it, that's not it at all."
After talking it out and having loads of fights amongst ourselves at CyberConnect 2 – creative and constructive fights, though – we've come to this new idea of what an action game should be. So it's been very rewarding.
Every day is exciting. We have really energetic arguments with Capcom sometimes, but it's good for the creative process. It's something that we haven't experienced with any other creative partners up to this point.