Asura's Wrath Lost Episode 2 (DLC)

With the release of Lost Episode 2, Capcom has reached the end of their announced DLC schedule for Asura's Wrath. While this may be a short review, as with Lost Episode 1, I'd still like to share my thoughts on this well done piece of content.

The episode picks up immediately where the previous episode left off, with Asura and Ryu on the moon and the arrival of a new challenger. The challenger displays his strength by punching Ryu so hard that he gets sent back to the Street Fighter universe, as well as sending Asura against a wall. He then reveals himself as Akuma after acknowledging Asura's strength, challenging the god of wrath to satisfy his hunger for battle. While the first half uses the Street Fighter IV engine, it's still awesome and satisfying to play against an opponent like Akuma, who provides an even greater challenge than Ryu. While this isn't as evident in this portion of the fight, the transition to fighting in the third dimension, which is also when Akuma transforms into his dark counterpart Oni, has him prove to be a most worthy opponent for Asura indeed. Admittedly though, there were times when the battle felt a little too close to the battle with Augus in the vanilla game, like having Asura perform a barehanded blade block (or arm in the case of Oni) and then throwing the attack to the side to cause part of the moon to rise up. In addition, certain attack patterns and strategies felt very close to the Augus fight, which almost made me feel as though they almost made a copy of the fight at times. Thankfully however a lot of creativity is displayed in mixing in Oni's own attacks and tactics (seen in Super Street Fighter IV: Arcade Edition) to make the fight feel much more unique and challenging in its own right, as well as placing in an epic amount of concentrated awesome as the episode draws to a close.

As with before, I praise how they managed to create a genuine combination of the two universes beyond the inclusion of the SFIV engine. For example, the opening hit on Ryu is made much more satisfying by also using Street Fighter's sound effects. The dialogue only being in Japanese also wasn't much of an issue either, since it felt like quite a bit of effort was put into this DLC. The inclusion of the Mission Mode again also increases the replay value, though I'll admit that some of the missions can get a little frustrating in their difficulty, especially the Perfect K.O. challenge.

At only $2 for at least 15 minutes of gameplay, Asura's Wrath Lost Episode 2 is a great piece of content worth downloading. The amount of work that must have been put into its creation is amazing and the end result is, again, incredibly awesome to fans like me. Even if all you want is more content for a game like Asura's Wrath, you're still going to have a very good time.