I may have said that there are only a few truly weird games at E3. Asura’s Wrath sits astride them all.

A bizarre action game from .hack creator CyberConnect2 and published by Capcom, Asura’s Wrath is a playful take on Hindu mythology, casting the player as the titular god and pitting him against some very, very large enemies.

How large? Try larger-than-Earth large. In the E3 Expo demo, which Wired.com got a sneak preview of in May, Asura goes toe-to-toe with The Great Wyzen, a god whose anger makes him grow larger and larger until he lords over the planet, threatening to crush Asura (and several continents) with a poke of his mighty index finger.

How does Asura get out of it? And how exactly does this game play? Many, many ways.

Things begin with Wyzen standing in front of you, looking like a normal human. In the opening melee brawl, you can attack Wyzen with ground attacks as you both run around a small courtyard. He’ll fire missiles at you, and the Triangle button will show on-screen to tell you when to press it so you can hurl them back. (We played the PlayStation 3 version; the game will be available on Xbox 360, too.)

Once you’ve done enough damage to Wyzen, your Burst gauge will fill up. At this point, you can press R2 to initiate a cinematic action sequence in which Asura throws Wyzen off a cliff. The point of each of these bits of gameplay is to do enough damage to Wyzen to fill up the Burst gauge, then press R2 to move the game on to the next gameplay segment. It’s not about defeating each and every enemy or deflecting each and every bullet, it’s about doing more damage than you take, performing well enough that the game lets you move on.

In this case, the game now becomes a flying shooter. Wyzen grows tall as a skyscraper and fires more missiles at you, which you must shoot down as you fly toward him. Again, you do this until you press R2 and Burst him, at which point things change into a ground run-and-shoot game on the order of Sin and Punishment. You’re brawling with enemies on the ground while you shoot down fire from above.

Wyzen becomes so frickin’ huge that he stares down at you from the cosmos.

Eventually, Wyzen becomes so frickin’ huge that he stares down at you from the cosmos, and lowers his finger to Earth in an attempt to smish you. At this point, the game becomes more of a quick time event, and you simply mash the on-screen buttons in order to push his massive digit back into his face. A few more button-presses, and Asura will rid the universe of Wyzen.

All the while, especially during the cinematic sequences that serve as buffers between these snippets of unusual gameplay, Wyzen is taunting Asura, who apparently doesn’t remember why he fell out of favor with the gods and was demoted to somewhat-human form.

“You are nothing more than a traitor,” he says. “You had slumbered for 12,000 years and bestowed on us my priestess, your daughter Mithra. She suffers to atone for your sins and to bring about the great rebirth.”

Intriguing stuff! Asura’s Wrath is right up my alley, a quirky game made by people who are talented at interesting, offbeat writing, integrating story into gameplay and offering lots of varied things to do.