Idle Thoughts

As demons fall, grass grows back anew, the mountain looms (★★★★★)

“To celebrate the first time Kunitsu-Gami: Path of the Goddess goes on sale, here’s our interview with a dessert chef and images of the sweets we digitized into the game” How can you not buy a game that tells you stuff like this? Before that it was: “Here’s a video of us playing the taiko drums in the woods to get the sound just right” and “Here’s a video of us making physical miniatures of mountain villages that will be the game’s stages”. Damn that earnest enthusiasm!

Half of Japanese culture seems to be about giant robots and stuff that goes pew pew in space. The other half is about a self-effacing and stoical reverence for nature. The passing of seasons. Haikus. Zen. Talk about those two halves being yin and yang, huh? Kunitsu-Gami comes from that second half. And it is delightful.

The plot is that humanity is corrupt (isn’t it just?), so your little mountain diorama got contaminated as a result. It’s your job to help your priestess buddy retake the mountain, bit by bit. By dancing. To the beat of taiko drums. Finally a game about banishing evil through the power of interpretative dance!

Well okay, you do need to kick some demon butt before that. I say demon, but it’s the Eastern kind of evil. Hungry ghosts with big mouths and big bellies. Greedy Buddhist monks. That kind of stuff. The corruption in this game is purple, the traditional color for video game corruption to be cleansed from the world. But here evil is also dark red, yellow, brown, blue and black, like a weird bruise you got by playing in a dumpster. Corruption creates weird eyestalk bulbs, pseudo-heads and claws grasping at the countryside. Ew. It’s the kind of stuff you want to clean up as soon as possible. So in that sense it does its job very well.

On the other hand, the forces of good are bucolic. It is made up of farmers, little people, good people. The villagers are your military units, but they’re not anonymous. They’re not faceless… well, ok, they’re faceless, almost everyone in the game wears a mask at all times. That being said, every single person comes with a name and a description. Each has a loveable quirk that can only be described as “folksy”. They demilitarize as soon as the crisis passes and go back to working the rice paddies or just lounging, appreciating life.

Once purified, you can visit most stages again to appreciate the result of your work, but also for the rebuilding phase. It’s busy work, really: assign workers, return after the next level, claim reward. However, it helps with the theme of restoring the world. It can’t all be dancing and murdering demons. Some elbow grease has to go into it. People got the world in this state, people have to work to get it out of it.

Restoring the world is a relatively common theme and overarching goal in video games. One of my favorites was Soul Blazer, where every enemy nest destroyed would release a villager, an animal or an entire house back in town. Soul Blazer was even part of an entire series of games in that same vein. Kunitsu-Gami is also like this. It’s a world where Evil is obvious and waits patiently to be snuffed out at your leisure. It’s perhaps facile as a way to portray conflict, but I can’t say it’s not satisfying.

The attention to detail in Kunitsu-gami is exceptional. As I mentioned, the areas of the game are actual miniatures that have been digitized. Some special effects, like fireworks, have also been filmed and are not computer-generated. This isn’t obvious at first sight, but it does give the game a more tangible feel. No menu is just a menu either. Menus unfurl on scrolls or hand fans. In fact, your character menu is your campaign tent, your mobile command center. It is presented to you by the priestess as a series of physical objects while she nibbles on her 3D-scanned desserts. The dessert plates themselves are beautiful; presentation is everything! As far as useless arbitrary collectibles go, you can do much worse than dessert. Even your artifacts sit on little cushions, their color determined by the type of artifact.

The sound design is also phenomenal. At dusk, you can hear the demons literally thumping at the (Torii) gates of hell, roaring to get out. When the time for combat comes, the villagers dance and chant at the beat of the drums while fighting the good fight. The demon bosses also get their own music, but it’s unnatural music made with unnatural instruments, i.e. jazz music.

Even then, I’m sure that as a horrible gaijin a lot of the nuances in the game are going way over my head. In the naming conventions, for example. I’m sure those are as intricate as everything else.

That’s all nice and good, but what kind of game is it?

Tower Defense?

Uhhh, okay.

I admit, it’s not a genre I particularly like. Here, it’s the kind where you directly control a character as well. You’re basically a one-man army. The villagers act as your mobile defense towers. They’re here to pick up the slack. During the day, you scramble to obtain resources and the monsters come out during the night.

Combat is kind of floaty, which I suppose is okay since your sword fighting is described as a dance. Everything is about dancing, remember? I do like that different combo finishers have different effects, i.e. one targets enemies in the air and another attacks in a wide arc horizontally.

As a tower defense game, Kunitsu-Gami has to answer questions like: “What’s stopping me from bunching all my little dudes together?” The game doesn’t have much of an answer to this. It would reply: “Look at all this stuff I have!” It keeps the player engaged by introducing new things at a quick pace: new masks (villager roles or “towers”), new enemies that present extra complications, different stage hazards, solo stages, stages with villagers only, etc.

You also have lots of balls to juggle at once: dividing you time between controlling your character and looking up on the villagers, managing special attack cooldowns, choosing what fixed defenses to repair, collecting bonus items while still winning the battle, etc. That being said, it’s not a particularly hard game, even if you’re aiming for the extra side objectives.

The attention to detail doesn’t stop at sound and graphics, either. The game is also a joy to play from a practical perspective. The stage select screen is a view of the entire mountain and makes it easy to see what collectibles you’re missing. You can’t really “miss” anything either. You’re even allowed to get a refund on your skill points. Side objectives are noted with a little square of origami paper. If the objective is failed, the paper burns. If it is completed, it turns into a paper crane. Cute. And useful. New Game+ isn’t just the same thing all over again: it’s a whole new game based on the fact that this time around you already start with all the toys.

The game doesn’t nag you into micro-managing your experience. It is what it is, but there are dozens of items integrated into the game itself to make it easier or harder. It’s the kind of game where you can just choose “Start Game” with confidence, except that the menu option isn’t called “Start Game”. It’s called “Walk the Path”. Because it’s also the kind of game that even thinks about what to call the first menu option you’ll choose and makes it encapsulate the entire game, literally and figuratively.

So many games want to be Art. I think Kunitsu-Gami makes a case that perhaps what some should aim for is Craftsmanship. An understated kind of meticulousness that balances both practicality and beauty. Kunitsu-Gami is precious, in every sense of the word.