When Kunitsu-Gami: The Path of the Goddess debuted during Capcom’s Summer Digital Showcase last year, I didn’t pay much attention to it. It looked like a high-concept action RPG based on Japanese mythology that took some of the art elements from another highly stylized Capcom game, Okami. And while I have nothing but love for action RPGs and Japanese folklore, nothing in this initial trailer, or any that followed, showed me enough of what the game was going to be like.
It wasn’t until I tried the game’s demo at this year’s Summer Game Fest, and later got my hands on a copy, that I finally I understood. And damn, this game is definitely worth a try.
In Kunitsu-Gami: The Path of the GoddessYou play as Soh, the guardian of the priestess Yoshiro whom you must protect and guide through the land, helping her purge it of evil demons. In an email to The edge, Art and game director Shuichi Kawata wrote that it was not intentional that the marketing surrounding Kunitsu-Gami I didn’t clearly understand what kind of game it was.
“This title is a mix of several genres,” Kawata wrote. “And we imagined the possibility that people could have a range of different impressions.”
I challenge you to guess what kind of game this is from this launch trailer.
Kawata describes Kunitsu-Gami The game is divided into three parts: day, night, and a base-building cycle. During the day, Soh travels through mountain villages ravaged by demonic corruption. He cleanses the corruption and rescues villagers who will aid him in the upcoming night cycle. At night, demons attack, hoping to make their way to Yoshiro to kill her. To stop them, Soh assigns villagers different tasks, each with their own abilities, strengths, and weaknesses, and positions them throughout the village to prevent the demons from reaching Yoshiro. Once Yoshiro reaches the end of a village, it is permanently cleansed, making it a new Soh base, and the villagers must repair before moving on to the next location.
I like how Kunitsu-Gami The game takes clever inspiration from tower defense games. You assign villagers to roles with crystals, a resource gained by defeating demons at night and clearing a village during the day. Not all villagers can play all roles, and some roles aren’t viable in combat, though they have other benefits. During a day cycle, I might assign a few of my characters to the role of thief, sending them out to dig up more crystals or rations that act as health potions for Soh and the villagers. But thieves are useless at night, forcing me to waste precious time and crystals reassigning and redeploying them. Sometimes I might not have enough crystals, after using them all to buy the expensive Sumo Wrestler role (which draws the attention of demons to them and away from Yoshiro) or the Acetic which uses its power to freeze demons in their place, making them easy prey for the Archer’s Bow or the Woodcutter’s Axe.
Kunitsu-Gami offered the kind of challenge that makes my puzzle- and strategy-obsessed brain quiver with excitement.
In addition to simply completing a stage, each village battle also comes with a set of special parameters that, if met, will grant you additional gifts. One of the parameters required me to use no more than 1,900 crystals. While this initially seemed trivial, this goal became much more difficult to achieve as this stage Also I had to give Yoshiro 1,500 crystals to complete it. That left me with only 400 crystals for my villagers, an extremely tight budget when basic roles like the archer and lumberjack cost 50 crystals each, while more powerful roles cost between 150 and 300.
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The Lumberjack is one of your basic villager roles, specializing in melee attacks.
Image: Capcom
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The Lumberjack is one of your basic villager roles, specializing in melee attacks.
Image: Capcom
I really enjoyed this tension between strategic allocation and deployment. Should I spend crystals to get the most powerful roles, leaving me with fewer defenders? Or should I risk having my larger but weaker army overrun? Kunitsu-Gami is also special in that it never fell into the trap of being too trivial. In other tower defense games, you can set your defenses so well that you can sit back and watch the game unfold. This never happened to me. No matter how much I had an overabundance of resources and well-placed villagers, I always had to stay on alert, often coming to Yoshiro’s aid with one of Soh’s ultimate attacks. In each level, Kunitsu-Gami offered the kind of challenge that makes my puzzle- and strategy-obsessed brain quiver with excitement.
While it’s not a major feature, the game also has an interesting narrative element. Each villager you save has a name and a biography, and I enjoyed reading their stories and how they intertwined. These people became more than just anonymous units to throw against a demonic horde, but members of a living, breathing community of married couples, family, and friends. It made for a beautiful message that reminded me of the aphorism “we have all we have.”
In Kunitsu-GamiSoh is the only one with martial arts training, while everyone else is a farmer, fisherman, and housewife. Rather than wait for outside help or succumb to the relentless demons, these ordinary people took up the small weapons they had to defend their homes and families. In a political climate that seems determined to roll back protections for women, queer people, and people of color, it’s refreshing to see this message. Help isn’t coming—we’re the ones helping. It’s a sentiment reinforced by what Kawata shared as Kunitsu-Gami Main theme.
“Challenge is the essence of this sport,” he wrote. “We face various situations seriously and move forward without fear.”
Kunitsu-Gami: The Path of the Goddess is now available on PlayStation, PC, Xbox, and Xbox Game Pass.
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