Praise be to HD.
El Shaddai is an artistic endeavour in the same vein as Rez or Thatgamecompany’s Journey, taking action genre norms and weaving them into an avant-garde, visual tour de force. Anyone familiar with the ill-fated Clover Studio, a Capcom subsidiary that started out in 2004 developing for the GameCube, will likely have encountered the work of Sawaki Takeyasu; a body including Devil May Cry, Okami, and Gravity Rush 2. In 2006, Shinji Mikami and Hideki Kamiya left Clover to establish Seeds Inc., which would become PlatinumGames through a merger the following year, while Takeyasu formed the freelance studio, Crim.
El Shaddai: Ascension of the Metatron’s origins actually lie with the then head of UTV Ignition Games, Vijay Chadha. Although Ignition was a publisher based out of 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, featuring parables on fallen angels displaced from heaven and the ‘Thousand Year Reign of the Messiah’. It’s heavy stuff, and beautifully imagined as video game material by Takeyasu’s team.
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