El Shaddai is an artistic endeavor in the same sense as Cut or Thatgamecompany A journey, taking action genre norms and weaving them into an avant-garde, visual tour de force. Anyone familiar with the ill-fated Clover Studio, the Capcom subsidiary that started out in 2004 developing the GameCube, has likely come across the work of Sawaki Takeyasu; body including Devil May Cry, Okami and Gravity Rush 2. In 2006, Shinji Mikami and Hideki Kamiya left Clover to found Seeds Inc., which would become PlatinumGames through a merger the following year, while Takeyasu founded the freelance studio Crim.
El Shaddai: Ascension of the Metatron actually originated from the head of UTV Ignition Games at the time, Vijay Chadha. Although Ignition was a publisher based in Hammersmith, London, Chadha was a fan of Takeyasu’s work and, aware of his departure from Clover, pitched him an idea for an action game based on the apocryphal Book of Enoch, with parables about the fallen angels expelled from heaven and the ‘Thousand-year reign of the Messiah’. It’s heavy stuff, beautifully imagined by Takeyasu’s team as video game material.
A fickle public, however, unmoved by overt art or unconventional themes, meant the game sold poorly for the PS3/360/PC release in 2011. In retrospect, it’s considered terribly overlooked, and with the advent of this HD remaster, let’s hope not for the second time. El Shaddai, for all intents and purposes, feels boldly unique for a Devil May Cry-style action game. A metaphysical carnival ride of incredible sights and sounds, it ranges from the grimly austere to the enchantingly abstract, always intriguing with its constant evolution.
You play as Enoch, an immortal scribe sent from heaven to retrieve the seven fallen angels. Angels, distributed between the floors of the holy tower, are responsible for creating the Nephilim (or giants) that threaten the world. God, aware of the impending desolation, threatens a great flood if Enoch does not defeat the Nephilim and bring back the fallen angels. What this entails is a 3D fighting game where, like Devil May Cry, a fixed camera pans, tracks and frames the action as you attack your enemies with acrobatic combo strings and flashy pyrotechnics.
Despite the ancient text at its core and its pervasive sense of foreboding, it remains highly stylized in a way only the Japanese know how. The character, Lucifel (shout out to Jason Isaacs), who acts as narrator and Enoch’s husband, looks like he should be recruiting hostesses on the streets of Roppongi. Instead, he has a cell phone line with God and is seen regularly updating the big man on Enoch’s progress. It is somewhat similar to Al from A quantum leap, while looking like a reject from No More Heroes. And Enoch, despite being the flamboyant blond warrior of lore, wears jeans that reveal themselves once his armor is sufficiently decimated.
The fight is expectedly competent. There are no HUD screens to erode the game’s visuals, and the mechanics are reassuringly simple. Enoch can fight bare-handed, but acquiring weapons is where things change. Knock your opponent into a dizzy state and you can steal their weapon by pressing the ‘L’ key. There are three main weapons to grab if the opportunity arises: the melee bow, the long-range storm, and the veil, which offers additional protection. Part of progressing is understanding and experimenting with different weapon steals; there’s no one-size-fits-all gauntlet, and sometimes you have to brutalize one particular enemy while fighting several of them just to use your weapon of choice.
Some weapons are weaker against others as well, adding a welcome layer of strategy. Attacks are controlled by a single button that behaves differently whether pressed or held to charge; whether on the ground or in the air; or in different ranges. You can block with the ‘R’ key, punish nearby opponents into a guard break, or uppercut them skyward for air juggling and special moves like the Catherine-wheel. The damage to Enoch and his opponents is marked by the loss of armor, the gradual removal of their coverings. It’s very much a Ghouls n’ Ghosts method of visual feedback, minus the spotted boxers, and near-death recovery can be done with a quick press of a button.
If it has any flaws, it’s probably in the simplicity of the combat and the repetitive nature. Not that repetition is particularly uncommon in this type of game, but compared to titles like Castlevania: Lords of Shadow (2010) or Bayonetta (2009), has relatively few layers, with no upgrade menus to wade through looking for moves to upgrade. A hack-and-slash enthusiast who wants something on par with the latest great offering may find that it falls short of their expectations in terms of nuance.
And that’s fine. El Shaddai is more of a compelling player through his concepts and programming ingenuity. The game’s platforming difficulty has also been highlighted as a point of frustration, but with Enoch’s ability to slide and the spotlight shadow he casts on surfaces, it’s not a critical issue. We’ll admit to the odd eye roll when isometric cheating results in a crash and restart — sometimes more than once — but it’s certainly not a problem.
While artistic endeavor alone may not be enough to inspire everyone, El Shaddai triumphs in providing experience. Sometimes going into yet another battle with a few elemental entities seems to slow things down, but that’s only because you’re always desperate to see what new tricks lie around the corner. Takeyasu’s artistic vision and the incredible effort that went into the construction of the game cannot be overstated. While the combat is an enjoyable routine of reflexes and fingers, the centerpiece is more of an incredible journey that ties everything together. Climbing the dark tower, level by level, is an enchanting journey; its esoteric landscapes changing part fever dream, part nightmarish biblical parable.
Takeyasu’s flourishes are matched by the game’s fluidity, allowing you to double-jump, run and carve your way through woven vistas with hazy horizons, across blue-tinged onyx paths above vast tribal cities. Sometimes it switches to a 2D side plane, where you rush over huge waves or against the backdrop of incredible stained glass windows. This ongoing invention is a spectacle, moving from underground kingdoms and floating subspaces to giant, articulated futuristic cityscapes where Enoch is thrown into a full motorcycle chase, dodging missiles, pushing up ramps and dodging fireballs.
Being an HD remaster, it’s actually one of the best looking games we’ve seen on the Switch outside of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom, and incredibly well optimized. It doesn’t always maintain its 60 fps, but drops are fleeting at best.
Conclusion
El Shaddai seems genuinely more creative and interesting than many of the titles I would consider bedfellows today. Shares a place with similar ones ICO, No, and the Panzer Dragoon in its mysterious design and historically inspired symbolism. Elsewhere, it borrows from Okami and Mizuguchi’s Reza for its abstract, acid-trip beauty. It’s true that the combat can become routine, the platforming is occasionally frustrating, and some of the boss encounters look a bit samey, but it flows smoothly and safely through 11 visually stunning stages. El Shaddai is, more than anything else, a game of moments, and lots of them. It’s certainly one of the most intriguing titles in the action-adventure, hack-and-slash genre, and this time around it deserves the attention it never got in its original release.
