In this day and age, there’s an endless supply of games with new and innovative ideas, but I’ve never really played a game as unique as Gion: Path of the Goddess, and that’s really exciting. It combines action-strategy and tower defence, and is set in a mythical ‘wabi-sabi’ world. But while it may be this unique combination that catches the eye at first, Gion: Path of the Goddess’ actual execution of these ideas is also excellent, ultimately presenting an attractive and interesting game.
Gion: The Path of the Goddess has almost no dialogue, but still effectively tells its plot. Mount Bufu is polluted by ‘filth’ and ‘fearful cries’ (a.k.a. all sorts of demons and monsters), and as the guardian of the mountain’s witch, Seiyo, the main character, Sou, must escort her to her destination to complete her mission. While travelling along the mountain path, you will also have to save villages and villagers along the way. In addition, you must defeat some particularly powerful dread cries and retrieve the ‘masks’ that hold the power of the goddess so that you can allow the villagers to transform into different professions and help you.
The story isn’t complicated, but the few plot animations, as well as small, seemingly unimportant but intimate details (such as watching her enjoy the traditional Japanese snacks she gets after fixing the village), made me feel concerned for Generations. In fact, while the character you control is Sou, it seems a bit odd to call him the protagonist — he’s basically got no personality to speak of, and is more of an extension of the real protagonist, Seiyo.
But no matter who is the real protagonist, the plot is not the main focus of Gion: Path of the Goddess. The real highlights are the intricate and subtle enemy designs, the beautiful scenery, and the clever combination of tower defence gameplay and action strategy gameplay.
Each level is divided into two stages: day and night. During the day, your goal is to collect ‘crystals’ by purifying filth, rescuing villagers who have been corrupted by filth, and then using the crystals to open up ‘spirit paths’ in the level so that generations can reach the torii at the end of the path and purify it. And at night, Dread Cry will appear from those filth-covered torii and wreak havoc on the mountain, destroying villages.
Seiyo won’t be able to reach the end of the level in a day, so you must be prepared to protect Seiyo from the Awe-Cry’s attacks with Sou’s swords and other abilities. The good thing is, you don’t have to fight off hordes of Dread Cries alone, as you can best protect Seiyo by placing the villagers you rescued during the day next to the road. You can even change their stations in real time during the battle.
As you progress through the game, you’ll acquire new ‘masquerades’, each of which unlocks new villager professions, such as the Sumo Wrestler, who can draw the attention of the enemy, the Long Range Attack Archer, or my favourite, the Ascetic (who can lay down a boundary to slow down the speed of the Fearful Cry). You can also collect a resource called a ‘spawning spirit,’ which can be used to strengthen villager professions, and you can undo the strengthening and return the resource at any time, so there’s no need to worry about picking the wrong one, which turns what could have been an anxiety-inducing choice into a number of fun experiments.
At first, these days and nights were fairly simple, making me worry that the experience would become too repetitive, but after getting bogged down in the third boss battle, I immediately changed my mind.
After that, new elements appear regularly, thus keeping the game interesting, such as mechanisms that provide extra protection for generations, new objectives (other than getting generations from point A to point B), and a greater variety of enemies. I felt like each level featured new dread cries with different attack patterns and characteristics, which not only avoids monotony, but also effectively increases the difficulty. This encourages players to broaden their strategic thinking, from which villagers to strengthen to which organs to fix, players need to be more flexible.
The entirety of Gion: Path of the Goddess is a hands-on exercise in resource management skills, which encourages players to think fully and comprehensively, but doesn’t overload their brains or mentally exhaust them. The crystals you collect are used both to open up spiritual paths for generations and to give professions to villagers, so you have to weigh the pros and cons: whether to get more powerful villagers or to try to complete levels in less time.
You have a limited amount of time each day, and it takes time to repair defence organs, so you can only repair some of them. If you choose the wrong ones to repair, or if you hesitate, you may end up in a situation where there are no organs available. Just deciding where to have Generations stop can also greatly affect the difficulty of the night portion of the game.
Cumbersome stronghold building
Completing a level unlocks strongholds located within the level’s scenario, where you can manage fortifications, manually archive, recycle payouts, or repair village buildings for extra rewards. At first, I thought these strongholds would be a nice break from the intense levels and boss battles to relax and unwind. After all, there’s a wide variety of cute critters to interact with, a soft piano soundtrack, and happy villagers coming and going.
However, I soon realised that in order to obtain the villagers’ reinforcement material “spawning spirit”, I basically had to go back to each stronghold to repair the village after each level, and it could take several trips to one stronghold.
Each stronghold has a number of buildings that need to be repaired, and each building requires a certain number of villagers, but there are only a limited number of villagers and the repair work takes a certain amount of time. In order to get paid instantly and give new orders, I sometimes needed to rush to three or four strongholds between levels. Despite the charm of these strongholds, I eventually grew tired of running back and forth like this. This was just a minor issue that annoyed me a bit, though, and overall I enjoyed the pacing of the game.
Gion: Path of the Goddess is also highly replayable. Each level has a hidden treasure chest and three challenge objectives, and completing them earns you the Blade Eagle, which comes with a special ability, the Demon Statue, which provides a passive Buff, and the highly important enhancement material, the Spawning Spirit. Since you can skip plot animations, fast-forward through the daytime preparation sessions, and use villagers in battle without having to rescuing them again, you can avoid a lot of troublesome chores when replaying a level.
My only complaint is that the night portions of the early levels can be a bit boring, as they become very easy after gaining new powers. You can get out of your chair to do something else though, and the villagers are more than enough to protect Generations — if she really needs help, she’ll call out. After clearing about 20 hours of the main story, you can open the second week via ‘New Game +’ in the menu, which inherits everything you’ve already gained (including progress on repairs to the stronghold, thanks to the goddess’s grace), and there are tantalising new rewards for the second week.
Capcom describes Gion: The Path of the Goddess as a ‘Kagura Strategy Living Theatre’ game — a Capcom term of endearment, but one that fits the game’s character. ‘Kagura is a Japanese Shinto ritual dance, and the word kagura literally means ‘the joy of the gods’ or ‘the music of the gods,’ and it’s worth noting that the setting of Capcom’s other game, Ookami, is also rooted in Shinto lore.
I’m not completely unfamiliar with the Shinto elements in Gion: The Path of the Goddess, but they are as richly detailed, well-researched, and well-crafted as I’ve ever seen them.
The attention to detail in this game is amazing, for example, the collection of confectionery items in the game are all made from physical confectionery by the famous Kyoto Wakako shop ‘Tsuruya Yoshinobu’ (which has been around for 220 years), and then 3D scanned to transform them into in-game models. Despite the game’s mythological undertones, it’s clear that the development team has taken great care to be true to Japanese culture, from the fabrics to the objects to the choreography of the dances.
Even the most fantastical parts, the ‘Weeping’ monsters, are amazingly detailed and could have taken me hours just to savour their grotesque and fascinating designs. After unlocking the ‘Eima’ of the Weeping, you can get a closer look at the model of the Weeping, and each Eima contains a short story that reads very much like Midnight Paranormal Inn. The animal and villager Eima are not as interesting, but they are good collectibles, they usually depict generations or villagers interacting with animals and look cute. Why is there so much detail here? I can’t tell you the answer to that, but the level of care the developers have put into it is obvious.
In closing, I have to chat about the colour palette of Gion: the Path of the Goddess – the colours are rich and splashy, but they don’t look cluttered, and everything from the enemies to the environments are in harmony. There’s a wonderful sense of fantasy, but it’s not so gaudy that it loses its realism and doesn’t feel like a make-believe world. Gion: Path of the Goddess isn’t the action game with the best graphics I’ve ever seen, but it’s definitely pleasing to the eye.
Gion: Path of the Goddess is an exciting action/strategy hybrid, and after playing it, I’m eager to learn more about its inspirations and the subtle details that went into them. The day/night structure of the levels is satisfying, easily giving me the urge to ‘do one more thing’ so often that I lost track of time – and while the fiddly manoeuvres in the strongholds occasionally annoyed me, Gion: Path of the Goddesses is still a unique and enjoyable gaming experience overall. It’s not the most challenging action game on the market, but it’s satisfyingly strategic. Interesting and varied enemy designs and a quiet but effective narrative approach kept me coming back for more. It may sound strange, but I’m glad that a game as enigmatic as Gion: Path of the Goddess exists in the world.