El Shaddai: Ascension of the Metatron
(XBox 360, PS3) Third-person action game from Konami based on the story of the biblical figure Enoch as described in the Book of Enoch, a Jewish religious text dating to the 4th or 3rd century BC that influenced the development of Judaism and early Christianity but is no longer considered canonical by most sects of those religions.
You know, if I had to select the one sentence on this blog that I had least expected to ever write, that's probably it. It is sort of an intriguing premise, though; At the risk of jumping the gun, this may well turn out to be the best video game based on an obscure Biblical figure to come out this year. (Though we'll have to wait until the release of Apocalyptic Scorpion-Locusts vs. Capcom in November to know for sure, of course.)
Enoch got only a brief, cryptic mention as one of the ancestors of Noah in the book of Genesis, but became a much more developed figure in the later Book of Enoch- or Furious SkyGod Versus Hyper-Serpent: Gaiden, as it is known in the Japanese market- and the rabbinical literature of subsequent centuries. He's sort of the religious version of Mork from Mork and Mindy, who was originally a one-off character in an episode of Happy Days but was so popular that he got his own spin-off series. (The Fonz is Jehovah in this analogy, obviously.)
It's a bizarre-sounding premise for a game, but it makes a sort of sense- actually, you could probably turn the Book of Enoch into an action game while remaining far truer to the original premise than a game like Dante's Inferno, and there was still someone nuts enough to actually make that. Admittedly, that's not a terribly high bar- you could probably make an action game out of Sense and Sensibility or a trigonometry textbook or Johnny Got His Gun and still remain far truer to the original than Dante's Inferno- but the Book of Enoch does have a lot of stuff that might translate well.
You know, if I had to select the one sentence on this blog that I had least expected to ever write, that's probably it. It is sort of an intriguing premise, though; At the risk of jumping the gun, this may well turn out to be the best video game based on an obscure Biblical figure to come out this year. (Though we'll have to wait until the release of Apocalyptic Scorpion-Locusts vs. Capcom in November to know for sure, of course.)
Enoch got only a brief, cryptic mention as one of the ancestors of Noah in the book of Genesis, but became a much more developed figure in the later Book of Enoch- or Furious SkyGod Versus Hyper-Serpent: Gaiden, as it is known in the Japanese market- and the rabbinical literature of subsequent centuries. He's sort of the religious version of Mork from Mork and Mindy, who was originally a one-off character in an episode of Happy Days but was so popular that he got his own spin-off series. (The Fonz is Jehovah in this analogy, obviously.)
It's a bizarre-sounding premise for a game, but it makes a sort of sense- actually, you could probably turn the Book of Enoch into an action game while remaining far truer to the original premise than a game like Dante's Inferno, and there was still someone nuts enough to actually make that. Admittedly, that's not a terribly high bar- you could probably make an action game out of Sense and Sensibility or a trigonometry textbook or Johnny Got His Gun and still remain far truer to the original than Dante's Inferno- but the Book of Enoch does have a lot of stuff that might translate well.
You've got fallen angels corrupting mankind with their forbidden arts, monstrous hybrid offspring of fallen angels and human women that grow to massive size and rampage across the earth devouring everything and everyone in their path, Enoch traveling through different planes of existence, a dark setting on the brink of unimaginable catastrophe... everything a game could ask for, really. Plus, it would probably be the first of the thousands of video games to reference the term “nephilim” that would actually have nephilim in it. Just throw in some badass quicktime events, a guy who smokes two packs of Marlboros a day to be the voice of Enoch, and some sort of spooky chick connected to Enoch's backstory to make cryptic remarks and you're ready to go.
No comments:
Post a Comment