Last year, Ignition Tokyo’s Bible-inspired action game El Shaddai: Ascension of the Metatron got a Steam port. And today, in a video broadcast shared by the game’s director Sawaki Takeyasu – who famously designed monsters and characters for Okami and Infinite Space – he revealed that the game will be on its way to Switch.
In the video above, Takeyasu says we’ll get more information on April 28, which is the 11th anniversary of El Shaddai’s PS3 and Xbox 360 release. No matter how long we have to wait, this is great news for fans who have longed to play the game on a modern console.
El Shaddai gained attention back in 2011 for his captivating art style and visuals, which were inspired by Studio Ghibli. The game follows Enoch – a man brought to heaven to act as a scribe for God – who must descend to Earth to retrieve God’s secrets from seven fallen angels who have fallen in love with humans. Our sister site Push Square was quite fond of the game at the time and called it “imaginative and fearless”:
Here is an overview of this unique game, directly from its Steam page:
El Shaddai: Ascension of the Metatron, originally released in 2011, is a unique third-person action adventure filled with a deeply artistic world-building, unique aesthetic and exciting battles. Experience an incredible mix of 2D-like platform game action and a colorful 3D world in unique surroundings.
An eternally changeable endless visual experience
El Shaddai’s artistic setting aims to provide a canvas-like world that changes in an organic way as long as you develop your adventure. The world is constantly changing in the most creative and innovative ways, perhaps even nostalgic.Easy to play, hard to master
You only have four buttons: jump, attack, guard and weapon theft. But this simple way of going forward is deeper than one might expect. There is no need for manuals or reviews to get into the game, but if anyone is ready to delve deeper into the mechanics, the game will offer a deep, accurate and rewarding timing-based action experience. The motto of El Shaddai’s gameplay was always to be “easy but profound”. Many of the game’s mechanics, such as the attack defense systems, were carefully created to give the best possible game feel.
The game received the “Future Game of the Show” award at the Tokyo Game Show 2010, and the script, which noted some of the character’s lines, also received a gold medal at the 2010 Internet Buzzword Awards. being ahead of its time (2011) was widely discussed in the international media.
Back in 2017, El Shaddai got an RPG follow-up in the form of The Lost Child, which unfortunately lacked the magic and unique character of its predecessor. We were less than positive about it in our review of the game, saying that “its dungeon crawling underpinnings are just too boring and repetitive, and its narrative approach too stilted to attract other than avid fans of the genre.”
El Shaddai certainly looks to be a lot more polished and we will definitely be keeping an eye out for more news on April 28th. Tell us if you played the original release or the Steam version in the comments.