Between two high-end juggernauts and remasters, Capcom always makes time for more confidential projects and if Exoprimal was of questionable interest, Kunitsu-Gami looks like something more solid, all with a much more atypical proposition. The storyline is quite simple, our world has been invaded by Yokais who, every night, arrive via portals and the priestess is the only one who can seal them. So here we are, going from village to village to slam the doors in the face of the demons, until we are sufficiently equipped to tackle the biggest of the portals.
Advertisement
Day Night ! Day Night !
Barring a huge plot twist, we don't expect the final game to offer anything more complex, but who cares since Kunitsu-Gami is above all a gameplay proposition. If we had to compare it to something, it would be to the fighting/strategy phases that we found in certain Brütal Legend fights, but with additional levels of complexity. During the day, our protagonist will explore the future combat zone, free villagers, harvest resources, prepare defenses and begin to place the aforementioned villagers after giving them a profession in anticipation of the upcoming fight. The resources will be used to give professions to each NPC, from the lumberjack to the archer via the spearman or the shaman, but also to trace the path of the priestess.
Our venerable savior is a big assisted one who cannot advance towards the portal if we do not show her the way, and the latter moves by dancing extremely slowly to avoid that we do the whole way in a single day, since it stops once night falls. Then comes waves of enemies with a very nice design that we will be able to destroy with our character and with the help of our companions placed beforehand. If strategic adjustments must be made, the game will pause while we move our units and this is the only management dimension offered by Kunitsu-gamigiving it almost the appearance of Tower Defense, since our units automatically attack the closest enemy. The goal is to survive through the night and continue advancing to the portal, over several days.
For rural Japan
In addition to its combat phases, Kunitsu-gami offers a whole management aspect since once a village is liberated, we can tackle its reconstruction with the villagers who participated in the fight. Nothing very complex in the structure of the gameplay, the interest of which is above all to give us rewards in the long term, the reconstruction not being instantaneous. And these resources will be vital since there are quite a few things to improve. Each Musubi (name given to the professions/classes in the game) will have its own skill tree to improve maximum life, damage or attack speed, etc… But it will also be necessary to manage its Tsubo guards, a sort of ultimate attack for our protagonist, as well as the Mazo talismans which give it statistical boosts.
Advertisement
In this preview, we made some fairly easy levels in which we don't feel in difficulty and that's the big unknown that we come out with. In the long term, Kunitsu-gami will he offer something more spicy? The bosses we faced were nice, but not necessarily difficult and we will especially remember the last level that we did to conclude. In the latter, it is not a question of closing a portal, but of crossing a lake on small boats which can be sunk by the enemies, instantly killing all our units present on it. Capcom will explain to us in conclusion that the difficulty will increase with maps with multiple paths and several portals to close at the same time, and we can't wait to see the result, especially with slightly larger armies and more professions available, since out of the ten available, we only saw six.
