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.
