My journey ends and I feel a bit melancholic. Sometimes games make for a significant enough experience that I feel a slight emptiness after completing them, an absence that is difficult to fill and leaves me wistful. It's always at that point that I find it very hard to find something to fill that absence because nothing quite compares to the power of a fond experience that lingers on the mind. It's not a wholly unpleasant feeling, and in fact the space that lingers after such a game is done is often filled with warm memories and little smiles. But it's not without its heartache over leaving the experience behind, the ephemera of the first time you play a game something that can never be recaptured.
Kunitsu-Gami: Path of the Goddess feels like something that will leave a lasting mark, a beautifully haunting experience that pulls from the tradition of Kagura, a form of Shinto ritual dance, to construct something that truly is like no other game I've played. While it's true that it pulls from other genres, strategy, tower-defence, isometric hack n' slash, Kunitsu-Gami treats the player to a form of performance that merges dance with interactivity. Dance permeates every aspect of the game. The maiden's trance-like processional, Soh's Oka and Shinden dance attacks, the villagers' fluid movements that prepare for the approaching Seethe, and the way that the maiden, Soh and the villagers dance to purge each village of defilement are all a means to translate Kagura into play.
While I enjoy a wide range of artistic forms of expression, I’m particularly fond of the performative arts, and especially dance. There is a particular affecting quality of dance that moves me in ways that I find profound. As a result, I’ve always found it fascinating when game studios attempt to translate performance-based expression like dance into gameplay. It’s a difficult project. Bound is probably one that comes to most people’s mind when thinking about the intersection of dance as performativity with gameplay. I’m quite fond of Bound for its attempt, even if it’s sometimes less than perfectly executed.
Perhaps a valid question is “can any form of dance perfectly map to video game action?” The answer is likely not straightforward, nor do I think that a perfect mapping is really an important criterion for judging games that adapt forms of performativity. As such, I’m not here to argue that Kunitsu-Gami is a perfect translation of dance as performance to dance as interaction within the confines of a video game. I am willing to argue that there are three key elements that contribute to, or inform, Capcom’s success with Kunitsu-Gami:
- Kunitsu-Gami’s representation of dance is directly modelled on a real form of Shinto ritual dance procession in Japan, Kagura.
- Both dance and certain forms of ritual combat forms share commonalities as performance.
- Kunitsu-Gami leans on an existing discourse that compares action combat, especially boss fights with well defined patterns, with dance which predisposes games to think of complex combat routines and learning of patterns as a form of “dance.”
Kagura
Kunitsu-Gami fascinates me because it is quite literally an adaptation of the Shinto processional ritual, Kagura. To (shamefully) borrow from Wikipedia as a shortcut method to share some general information:
Kagura (神楽(かぐら), "god-entertainment") is a type of Shinto ritual ceremonial dance. The term is a contraction of the phrase kami no kura ("seat of god"), indicating the presence of gods (kami) in the practice.
One major function of kagura is chinkon (purifying and shaking the spirit), involving a procession-trance process. Usually a female shaman will perform the dance and obtain the oracle from the god—in the setting, the dancer herself turns into the god during the performance.[1] Once strictly a ceremonial art derived from kamigakari (神懸, "oracular divinification"), kagura has evolved in many directions over the span of more than a millennium. Today, it is very much a living tradition, with rituals tied to the rhythms of the agricultural calendar.
Kunitsu-Gami does a remarkable job reproducing Kagura, providing a setup wherein the primary focus of the game’s day cycle is that of the procession. You (Soh) carve a spirit path that the shaman (Yorshiro) then performs her dance procession. Once night falls, Yorshiro begins a trance like dance on her spot. Both the daytime procession and the nighttime dance are directly modeled on the dance of the shaman during ritual Kagura:
Leaning back on Wikipedia again, there are two forms of dance in Kagura, mai, and odori:
Mai consists of slow circular movement, stressing quiet and elegance, while odori consists of quick leaping and jumping, stressing activation and energy. The two types can be understood as two phases of kagura: mai is a preparation process for trance and odori is the unconscious trance stage.
During mai, the female shaman, surrounded by a group of priests, holds a gohei (a ceremonial wand used to cleanse or purify) as well as sound-producing instruments and engages with circling movement to summon deities. Once the female shaman enters a possessed state, she switches into the spontaneous leaping movements of odori.
Although the devs take some minor liberties with the two stages, it seems that they have attempted to match mai to the game’s day cycle, and odori to the night cycle. Yorshiro’s procession is slow, with a circular movement as she gradually moves toward her goal. The various villagers that Soh rescues in each day also enact a dance along with Yorshiro, particularly as the day cycle gives way to night, representing priests that accompany the shaman in the traditional Kagura. When the night cycle begins, Yoshiro begins a more trance-like dance on her fixed spot. The one aspect that is not typically performed by Yoshiro in-game is the energetic leaps that represents a possessed state.
This is likely for a few key reasons: the object of the game is to protect Yorshiro from defilement, so possession is mechanically being thwarted by the player; there are key stages when Yorshiro is possessed and she does begin to flail about to a greater degree; and I think it was the goal of the devs to displace the action of odori onto Soh whose combat movements are the stand in for the “quick leaping and jumping, stressing activation and energy. While introduces some changes to the dev’s adaptation of Kagura, there is a compelling argument that can be made that Soh is actually a spiritual extension of Yoshiro, and thus both Yoshiro and Soh’s actions combine to represent those of the traditional shaman.
The result is a wonderful attempt to take a Japanese spiritual practice and to represent it in a combined strategy and action-based game with a great deal of respect and reverence. The beauty, rhythm and performative expression of the dance is manifested in a context that literalizes the idea that the Kagura cleanses defilement from the bodies, minds and spaces of the people of The Mountain.
Combat as dance / dance as combat
A second aspect that makes Kunitsu-Gami a compelling translation from dance to gameplay is arguably due to the close connection between traditional forms of dance with traditional forms of martial arts. While I cannot claim I know that Capcom’s devs were directly mapping their combat onto Shinto practices other than Kagura, Tenshin Shōden Katori Shintō-ryū is a form of Shinto martial arts that involves several combat styles such as Kenjutsu (swordsmanship) and Sōjutsu (spearmanship). While there are considerably more roles in the game than those two, and some that don’t map directly onto the weapon forms in Tenshin Shōden Katori Shintō-ryū , it does potentially indicate a dotted line that Capcom established to the martial arts form. It also maps well onto the player character, Soh, who wields a sword, for the purposes of this discussion.
A common form of martial arts expression in Japan is the kata, and katas are part of Tenshin Shōden Katori Shintō-ryū. Katas are a predefined set of movements that illustrate combat stances and movements. They have often been referred to as a form of martial arts dance, and that the underpinning of martial arts is so keyed to stances and movements that it’s hard to argue they are not a form of dance. Katas are very much a form of performative expression that allows us to frame an understanding of Soh’s movements. All of Soh’s skills and combat styles are rooted in stance and movement, and the following video does a great job illustrating that fact:
As noted in the video, several of Soh’s actual combat are specifically labled dances in a direct acknowledgement of combat as dance. They evoke the stance and movement of katas and highlight a connection between the dance forms of something like Tenshin Shōden Katori Shintō-ryū and the ritual dance of Kagura.
Boss fights as dance
Spend enough time around games and you’ve probably heard them call a boss fight a dance. Or more specifically, that they need to learn the dance of a particular difficult boss. Linguistically, the term dance has come to mean the patterns and movements executed by either the player or an enemy, patterns and movements that are so well defined that they can be learned and interacted with as if learning to dance with a partner.
This predisposition of thinking of complex fight sequences as dances means Kunitsu-Gami has a shortcut path to being appreciated for it’s attempt to bring representations of dance and performance to key game mechanics. If a boss fight is already a dance in the mind of the player, it’s not a stretch to then to think that players would be receptive to the adaptation of dance from real performative styles (Kagura, katas) to mechanical gameplay elements. If we are already primed to dance with a boss, why not dance throughout the whole level.
Whether consciously or not, Kunitsu-Gami’s devs lean on the fact that players might already be receptive to the idea of game play as dance to successfully engage players with dance from start to finish throughout their entire game. Although it probably wasn’t without risks, I think that some elements of video game culture are potentially primed to accept dance as an element Is already part of the games they love, and that contributed to the fact that Kunitsu-Gami is as compelling as it turned out to be.
I rarely have one favourite game in a given year, rarely does anything make such a mark on me that it stands head-and-shoulders above everything else I’ve played in a given year. But I already feel a huge absence in my heart because I am no longer participating in Kunitsu-Gami’s dance. I know I could keep replaying it, but that only postpone that eventual longing that I will feel when I do put it down.
It is bold attempt to take something that ostensibly is not video game material and turn it into a game, but to do so and create what I think is successfully one of the most powerful games I’ve played in some time is astounding. It is a game tells an almost purely mechanical story, one that leans on a strong sense of mechanical design to turn dance and performativity into a deeply affecting interactive experience.
