"Asura's Wrath" or "QTE: The Game"
 

So anyway the demo for Asura's Wrath is out on PS3 and 360. Now, before today I was just vaguely aware of this game, thinking "oh hey another beat 'em up game loosely (like, hotdog in a hallway loose) based on mythology."

And then I played the demo. And now I'm seriously contemplating purchasing this game when it's out. Despite the excessive amount of QTEs in the game (and there are a lot of them, probably over half the time you're hitting QTE prompts) I was having a blast playing the demo. The game is just so over the top, and a great cinematic experience, and then there's the music that brings it all together in a grand show of Awesome.

For those who don't know, to give you an idea of how over the top this game is, in the demo you have two "chapters" that you can play. One has you fighting a god the size of a mountain, who half-way through the fight becomes bigger than the fucking planet. And the other chapter has you fighting your ex-master on the moon.

Now I would like to clarify about the QTEs. These aren't your standard cliche "you have half a second to push this random button or else you're doing the whole sequence from scratch" QTEs. These make sense, and focus more on timing. And by timing I mean it will show you the Y button on screen, with a large white circle shrinking down to meet the Y button displayed, and you need to time your button press for when the circle overlaps with the button. Other's have you mashing the B button as Asura unleashes a flurry of punches, or flicking the analogue stick to have Asura dodge in that direction. Like I said, these make sense for what you're doing, and thus they aren't the massive pain in the ass that regular QTEs are.

Honestly, this could be the game to redeem QTEs from their state of universal hatred (though granted I never found QTEs to be as terrible as so many people claim them to be, so I might be biased).

And anyway I realize I've made this post much longer than I intended to, so I will just end this by saying try the damn demo because 1) it's free 2) you have nothing to lose 3) it's pretty damn fun.

Telltale's Jurassic Park game that came out this past November did something similar as well in addition to the point and click adventure elements, although I think the inspiration there was more drawn from Heavy Rain.