Okami, exhibit A in the case for video games as high art, stands alone atop the artistic achievements made in the medium, a document destined for a future filing in the Library of Congress, is a stunningly well realized collaborative project between true artists.

It has visuals, audio, interactivity, and narrative that out paces nearly everything else in the gaming world, and it is loads of fun. First released over year ago for the PS2, Okami has found a new home on the Nintendo Wii, where it fits right in among a plethora of Wii games that stress original art design and wider appeal. This game has that wow factor that makes it irresistible to even total non-gamers, if only as a thing to sit down and watch for a moment or two.

Okami is about a blighted Japan, cursed by the powers of Orochi, an eight-headed serpent of evil. It is up to Amaterasu, a deity in the form of a sleek white wolf, and his friend, Issun, a talkative glowing bug, to restore vitality to the land.

You travel far and wide using y our magical powers to turn dark to light, death to life. You expel the evil from the land with a flash of a brush, literally painting the world anew, freeing it from the pestilential miasma that has blanketed it for years. It is a wondrous tale tale of good versus evil, a battle betwixt the gods of another land that has the future of the world at stake.

The most striking component of this game is the art design. It is bursting with unique character renderings, landscapes, and interfaces. You meet chatty humans, dangerous monsters, and others along your journey through a gigantic game world of both great beauty and grim desolation.

There are mountains ranges, coastal towns, rivers, forests, bogs, and more. The great variation in terrain gives the game world a feeling of immense size and complexity. All of this is pretty standard in the best games of today, but no other game have the magic of Okami.

With every gallop of the white wolf, you leave a trail of vegetation, blooming flowers, grass, and a spray of loose petals. With a wave of the Wiimote you can restore life to a whithered tree and return it to the splendor of nature’s potential, turn whole areas of sedge and decaying matter to a fertile meadow bustling with life.

It is a refreshing experience to rejuvenate the land when so many other games simply focus on laying waste to one’s surroundings. The exquisite grandeur of the whole enterprise is astoundingly satisfying.

As much as I could say about the visuals, the audio is nearly as impressive. The variations in setting and action are perfectly paralleled by the score, which includes vast arrays of musical instruments performing appropriate musical pieces for the given circumstances.

At times it is almost Peter and the Wolf-esque with the voicing of certain melodies and instruments for characters in the narrative. It never comes across as gimmicky or unnatural, but the very opposite. The music has an organic feel the entire time, even when segueing between tense battles with demonic hordes and the care free romping through the countryside.

Aesthetics aside, Okami plays great. It is easy to pick up and never gets frustratingly difficult. The battles are relatively easy and can mainly be avoided, the puzzles are fun and logical, you never feel as if you have to stumble upon the solution to advance, and the innovative use of the central game mechanic, which is the ability to paint symbols with a “celestial brush” on the screen that execute some kind of action, adds a lot depth to both the battles and the puzzles.

You get over a dozen symbols that you can pint over the course of the game, and they all come in handy at some point or another. Some you will use again and again, like the ability to draw a line through an object to cut it in two, or the sun symbol that turns night to day.

It is almost surprising that this game did not debut on the Wii since the painting seems specifically made for the Wiimote. It is exactly the kind of innovative and functional game mechanic that best benefits the Wii.

With the kind of curb appeal that Okami has, it would have been easy for the game designers to offer up a bit of eye candy, a nice score, and a new game mechanic, then call it a day. People would still pay for it and be impressed with the package enough to not regret their purchase, but Okami delivers far more.

Okami is a very long game that rarely drags. The main story line lasts over 30, and playtime could easily extend much longer if all the secrets and extra side missions were completed. It is the length of serious action RPGs that have stood the test of time, those that sell for a small ransom on Ebay a decade or so after release. Okami is that sort of game.

If you did not get a chance to get Okami for the PS2 when it originally hit the shelves, do yourself a favor, please, and pick up this title for the Wii. It may even be worth getting for the Wii even if you have it on the PS2 thanks to how well the Wiimote works with the celestial brush and the wide screen support. Okami will age slowly and gracefully, and will always be relevant to serious gamers for its innovative visuals and game play.

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Publisher: Capcom
Developer: Ready at Dawn
Release Date: April 15, 2008
Genre: Action/Adventure
ESRB Rating: Teen

Okami is one of the more unique games you’ll ever come across, a broad mix of genres and innovative play mechanics with a stunning graphical style and setting unlike anything yet seen.

Okami takes place in a mythical feudal Japan, a world that is slowly being consumed by the demon Orochi. The lands have been reduced to wastelands, the sky has turned perpetually dark, rivers have dried up, and plants and trees have withered away.

The only hope for this dead world is the Sun Goddess Amaterasu, reincarnated as a white wolf and accompanied by her zany sidekick Issun. Ama has a relatively straight forward task ahead of her. Use her celestial brush to restore the Guardian Saplings to life.

You’ll travel the lands speaking to the denizens of the world and taking on quests on their behalf, restoring landscapes to life, feeding wild animals and stomping on Orochi’s minions, all in an effort to curry favour with the inhabitants of this surreal world, and further your goal of reaching the Saplings.

Ama’s brush has uses beyond just the ability to heal the environment, including being a powerful tool of destruction in battle. By calling up the parchment, Ama can draw a variety of symbols that will have effects on her enemy, such as slashing them in half, blasting them with winds, drenching them in water, and much more.

To power her brush though, Ama needs celestial ink, which is where the favour currying comes in. For every deed performed or citizen aided, Ama will receive an amount of praise points that can be used to power up her stats and make her stronger, including giving her the ability to hold more ink.

Ama can also engage enemies in standard combat when running low on ink or for a change of pace. She can be outfitted with a large arsenal of weaponry, from giant swords to magical whips, and many weapons have two different attacks. She also has a number of spells at her disposal.

The game world is large, with numerous places to see, people to talk to, quests to complete and things to restore. You have relatively free reign over where you wish to travel, though you’ll be promptly trounced if venturing too far off the beaten path before Ama is upgraded enough through stat building.

Okami is a beautiful game, a graceful and elegant mix of cel-shading and a water colour look similar to Saga Frontier 2. This beauty and tranquility is brilliantly displayed in the many landscapes, especially after their restoration, as colours spring forth in vibrant hues, blossoms swirl and dance around the screen, and water flows gently onward to some distant point.

Areas not yet blessed by Amaterasu’s brush are desolate and barren, with muted and dark tones and an overall sense of foreboding. Amaterasu herself moves with the grace and fluidity of a wolf, both literally and figuratively.

The music further enhances the beauty and setting, with subtle strings accompanying you on long treks, and thumping drums get your blood pumping for battle. Okami has its own version of Simlish, as characters talk and carry on with garbled, incoherent gibberish that is both amusing and somehow fitting.

The Wii controls are hit and miss. As might be expected, drawing on the parchment with the Wii-mote is fast and intuitive, much more so than it was on the PS2 with the analog stick. Standard combat on the other hand can cause difficulties and headaches, with Ama performing the wrong action, or doing nothing at all. As the difficulty is rather low these flaws can be somewhat forgiven, but the learning curve for combat is much steeper than the PS2 version’s was, with no option to swich to the classic controller.

Okami is a wonderful experience that fans of good gaming will surely enjoy. If you didn’t catch it on PS2, you shouldn’t pass up this second opportunity to be transported to its world.

News: After the closure of Clover Studios, developer of the PS2 version of Okami, the reigns for the revamped Wii version were handed to Ready at Dawn, makers of the recent PSP game Gods of War 2. Many of Clover’s former employees are not at Platinum Games, which has just inked a 4 game deal with Sega to develop games across multiple platforms.

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