Kunitsu-Gami: Path of the Goddess Review (Xbox Series X|S)

Is it just us, or has Capcom been on some sort of record-breaking streak of fantastic form since around about 2016? The Resident Evil 2 Remake upped the game for revamps in general, Street Fighter 6 is the best the series has been since Street Fighter 2 Turbo (fact) and the likes of Monster Hunter and Devil May Cry are enjoying more mainstream appeal than ever before.

This dev team has got a slick system in place with the highly flexible Resi Engine, and is riding high on a seemingly endless wave of remasters, remakes and brand-new hits. So why, in the midst of all this revelling and enjoyment of the stone cold classics, are they hitting out with a "Kugura Action Strategy Game"? That doesn't sound even remotely as interesting as Leon Kennedy getting all hot and dirty in his wee tight shirt fighting naughty Ganados.

But wait. What's this? Kagura is actually a really cool traditional form of Japanese dancing where people dress up in demonic costumes and...well...we don't know the moves exactly, but it's like doing a jig for a good harvest, we guess, or like doing a really big moonwalk so that the evil demon who lives in the local postbox is released back to the nearby forest. Something like that. Look we're not really sure, but it looks and sounds incredible, we do know that, and the Resi Engine has once again proven that it's a powerhouse when it comes to serving up highly detailed graphics with very nice performance, even when switching to the game's quality visual mode.

So, what do you actually do in this Kagura strategy effort, anyway? Well, you play the role of Soh, a sort of cool ninja who looks like he's on a break from the set of Metal Gear Rising: Revengeance, and your job is to travel down Mount Kafuku, which is currently absolutely covered in defilement we're afraid, slicing up Seethe - the game's genuinely unsettling enemies - as you protect a dancing Goddess. As levels commence you'll need to gather orbs from fallen foes and use them to carve a magic path for your ward, a path she will then VERY SLOWLY dance along, giving you lots of time to sweat, plan and think about your mistakes in life.

All of this takes place against a timer that passes through the stages of the day. In the light hours you plan and coordinate, using local villagers and folk you've rescued from the defilement as violent Pikmin of sorts. You get to direct differing sizes of motley crews depending on the location you are at, and they can be trained to fight or provide aid in various ways. You've got your archers and axe-wielding woodsmen, obviously, and your entire entourage can be switched to defence/offense to tackle bosses or run to the Goddess's aid with a button push. Then, as things progress the unit types get more interesting, allowing you to freeze enemies in place or slow them down, heal your team as they go, transform simple farmers into sumo wrestlers, and a whole lot more fun and kooky stuff that would be kinda be ruining the game a little to reveal.

Everything your units do, whether it be collecting an item, repairing a bridge or route forward, costs you orbs, and so the crux of the core loop here is gathering enough of them to keep carving the Goddess a path, whilst ensuring your minions are in the right role and busy working on fixing and fighting. Your units can be upgraded through several levels, adding power, health and special effects (twin-shot arrows, anyone?) and there's loads to think about and keep you busy once a mission actually kicks off. Time can be sped up during the day if you're in a rush, but we found ourselves picking around the gorgeous scenery for as long as possible, reading the terrain, watching for forks in the road, using our thief to nab treasures, and entering the game's strategic view to carefully place our warriors in order to stop the flow of Seethe.

Once darkness takes hold and the defiled portals set around stages start to spew out your enemies, things get much more intense. Luckily, Soh also has a bunch of skills to unlock too, allowing you to power-up your team, concentrate your attacks or even teleport instantly back to the Goddess's position when she's under stress. He's also just very good with a sword in general, and one of the main things this game gets right is that it gives you the strategy element without shorting out on the action feel. Combat here looks and feels genuinely great, Soh has some nice combos to pull off, and you'll need to use them properly to be effective against grounded and airborne targets.

Early levels do a reasonable job of introducing everything you need to know slowly, letting you get a feel for how the Goddess manoeuvres along her path, and how you need to deal with threats in an organised manner, ensuring there isn't a path you've missed that a bunch of goblins are using to flank or attack from the rear. This maybe makes them sound more clever than they are - for the most part enemies here simply charge forth - but it works because of the timer, the sheer number of baddies, and the constant feeling that you're just about to get completely overwhelmed.

And so we make our way down the defiled Mount Kafuku, and as we go the game introduces split paths for the Goddess that enable you to choose from multiple routes through an area, bigger foes, special standing spots that give you various power boosts for archers etc, and safe zones where our special lady has some buffed up defences. On top of this you've also got a boss battle to contend with once you've cleared every stage of a particular mission, and you'll need to fix and repair each stage once you've completed it to use as a base. Nice!

The base-building stuff (and this writer really gets turned off by base-building stuff, in all honesty) manages to find a nice balance between giving you something meaningful to do between missions and providing useful rewards for repairing everything without becoming anything remotely like a chore. However, the boss battle elements fare less well, we reckon. It's not a huge issue, and some of them are fun, but it just feels like an added bump in the road, a checkpoint of your skills that's occasionally a little unbalanced.

We had a spot of trouble with the third boss in the game - perhaps just us being bad gamers - but it does feel like it goes too hard all of a sudden in this mission, then drops off again, which is never ideal because it leaves subsequent sorties feeling a bit less tense, innit. Don't worry, it's still challenging, and the difficulty builds again towards the end, but this is the one aspect of Kunitsu-Gami: Path of the Goddess that bothered us ever-so-slightly during our review period.

Away from this one personal niggle, though, and we've been thoroughly enjoying every other aspect of what Capcom has served up here. This is a unique and highly charming strategy game, a real breath of fresh air that gives you tight and rewarding loops to dig into. It's perfect to play in bite-sized chunks too, a mission at a time and a boss on top running you maybe 30 minutes (unless it's that third one), and the level of detail, the music, the animations in dancing and combat, all of it adds up to one of the most memorable strategy games we've played in some time. Another very nice addition to Xbox Game Pass, then, and an off-kilter diversion that manages to keep Capcom's hot streak alive and well.