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dkirschner's Kunitsu-Gami: Path of the Goddess (PC)
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| [July 29, 2024 09:09:45 AM]
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Another interesting and stylish game that I am retiring because (a) it's repetitive; (b) it's easy; (c) there's hardly any narrative; and (d) the UI sucks.
Why is it interesting? What do I like about it? It's a novel take on tower defense wherein, aside from placing "towers," you also control a character as in an action-RPG. I read a lot of reviews talking about how brand new this is, but it seems no one has played Sanctum! Granted, that is more traditional tower defense, and it's merged with FPS instead of action-RPG, but it's the same basic idea. You set up your defenses and then get your hands dirty killing enemies alongside your towers as they come in waves. Except the "towers" in Kunitsu-Gami are villagers whom you rescue. Villagers can be assigned different roles (e.g., woodcutter, archer, sumo wrestler, shaman, etc.), and each has strengths and weaknesses for your defense. For example, woodcutters are basic melee units that can be upgraded to chase demons; archers are basic ranged units; sumo wrestlers are like tanks; shamans are healers; etc.
Back up. Here's the set-up. You are a spirit guardian of a priestly type woman. Some demonic presence has defiled a holy mountain and all the villages along the path to its summit. You go from village to village rescuing the villagers and cleansing the corruption. To cleanse the corruption, there are two "phases" in each village: day and night (or, preparation and combat). In the day phase, you search the village, purge defilement (which provides currency that you need to assign roles to villagers and to cleanse torii gates), free villagers (whom you can then assign combat roles or building tasks), clear obstructions on the path, and ultimately carve a path through the corruption for the woman to follow to destroy corrupted torii gates. In the day phase, you'll also want to pay attention to where the corrupted torii gates are, because that's where demons will come from, where the woman is along the path (can the demons flank her? what paths do you need to defend?), and you need to set up your villager defenses. During the nighttime, you defend against waves of demons who are trying to kill the woman. Rinse and repeat until the woman gets past all the torii gates.
Once you have freed a village of the corruption, you often gain access to a boss battle. Boss battles let you use the villagers from the previous village, assign them roles, and tackle a unique challenge. They usually aren't that hard, but they are each different, require some special strategies, and reward you with a new mask (villager role). My favorite was the centipede boss, which requires you to assign villagers to light torches around the arena. Once all the torches are lit, the boss's weak spots are exposed and you can assign everyone to attack. He'll eventually get away and extinguish all the flames, plunging the level in dangerous darkness so he can prowl around. He'll also call down a bunch of worm minions, who make a beeline for the woman. So, you have to balance defending her with lighting the torches. Rinse and repeat until boss is dead.
Upon freeing a village, it also becomes a "base" and you can visit daily to assign villagers to repair things, and you can visit the woman and change equipment and upgrade villager combat roles. All bases are basically the same, and after every battle, you can revisit every liberated village for rewards. This means that the farther along you go, the more time you will spend just going from liberated village to liberated village collecting money, rations, and checking on building progress. I think this could have been handled better via menus instead of requiring you to actually go to 10 different villages after EVERY fight to check on things. Anyway, that's how the game works.
(a) and (b). Tower defense is an inherently repetitive genre. You defend against waves of enemies. But the excitement comes as the waves get longer/faster/harder, new enemies are introduced, you get new units, you must devise new strategies, and so on. If the game is too easy, then new enemies don't present a challenge, you don't need to devise new strategies, and your new units may not seem to matter much. Such is the case here. I played about half the game, and never even came close to dying during the village purges. I did die on a couple of the boss fights, but once you figure out a trick for them, they're easy. Your character is very powerful and can effectively hold down more than one lane of enemies alone. Pretty much every level could be solved by moving the woman to a place free of too many junctions, then just completely surrounding her with the most powerful units, then running around killing most everything myself. The "village repair" part, as I've said, is also monotonous.
And although the third-person combat is smooth and has a satisfying feel, it's also simple. There are a few different combos, one of note that lets you attack airborne enemies, and the other two or three are just variations on the same thing. You can also block and dodge, which you will rarely need to do. I pretty much went left click, left click, left click, right click (the most powerful combo) all level every level to win. As the hours went by, and I hit the halfway mark, I decided I did not need to keep doing this!
(c). Believe it or not, I've already described the extent of the narrative. There are a bunch of collectibles you can get that basically serve as encyclopedia entries about Japanese culture, if that counts as narrative for you, and other collectibles that give you the slightest perks and that I found mostly useless. So the narrative is not a compelling reason to play.
(d). Ah, the UI! So many questions about UI elements. First of all, several things are frustrating because the game is quite stylish and goes for style over substance and functionality.
Example: When placing villagers on the map, you cannot scroll the map outside of where your character is. Why? I have no idea. This means that you have to physically run to where you want to place villagers. Then, you have to call the villagers to you. Then, you can place them where you are. If you decide you want to place some of them elsewhere, you have to run over there, call them there, then place them.
Example: When assigning roles to villagers, you can only assign roles to those who are right next to you. You can cycle through villagers, but it will only show those right next to you. And I mean RIGHT next to you. If there is a villager like 3 feet away from you, you need to exit the management screen, move 3 feet to your left, open it, and then assign the role. The same thing applies to healing villagers, which is especially frustrating during combat when there are a lot of things that will highlight and you are trying to mouse over the specific villager you want to heal, or you have to keep moving around opening the management window trying to get close enough to that one villager so that they appear as healable.
Given that the day cycle is on a timer, these two oversights are especially frustrating. All the extra actions you have to take to manage villagers is a waste of time and makes it so you will have to fight through extra night cycles. These functions could have all been handled on the map. Open the map, select villagers to move and move them from there. You should also be able to move from the map or villager movement menu to the role assignment menu. You should also be able to "group" villagers by proximity or role type. Like, if I've set up a defense around the woman, but I want to move those villagers together, I should be able to select and move them all together instead of having to run to where I want them, open the management screen, tab to each one, taking care not to select any villager who isn't in that group (because it's easy to select the wrong one!), and move them to where I am.
Final example of bad UI: Equipping mazo talismans is a pain in the ass. These trinkets provide miniscule buffs and are not even worth messing with in the first place. There are about 100 of them. They are listed in numerical order on a scroll, but you do not find them in numerical order, and it shows you ALL of them instead of just the ones you own. If you find talisman #54, you have to literally scroll through 54 pages to equip it. You can "jump sections" but that requires knowing which section it's in and then still scrolling through all the talismans in that section. I finally realized that you can "favorite" talismans and then sort by favorites. But why is there no option to sort by "owned" so you can just see the ones you actually have? This drove me crazy. Like, I actually did have like talismans #3, 30, 50, and 80 or something. Scroll scroll scroll...
There are several other annoying UI things. Alongside the fact that the game became repetitive and is not that hard, the UI issues are harder to overlook.
It's still a fun game with great art and music. The enemy models are sick to look at. There are some cool ideas here. It knows what it is trying to do and focuses on those elements of the game. But man, I think the UI stuff was the most frustrating and is what killed it. I can handle repetition if it's still fun, but trying to manage villagers with the UI kept making me wonder why they didn't implement this or that little feature. Maybe they will make a sequel with improvements.
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dkirschner's Kunitsu-Gami: Path of the Goddess (PC)
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Current Status: Stopped playing - Got Bored
GameLog started on: Friday 26 July, 2024
GameLog closed on: Sunday 28 July, 2024 |
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This is the only GameLog for Kunitsu-Gami: Path of the Goddess. |
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