I recently beat this game, so I thought I’d give it a little review since it seems to be something of an unsung hero in videogame circles. The game I have on the Wii is in fact a port of the PS2 version, so I can only speak of this Wiified port.

Okami is a game about saving the world, indeed, but you are a god, but alas, a god that’s down on her luck, since you had died and lost your powers, but have been ressurected. I’m not entirely sure how a being (a sprite in this case) able to ressurect a god of any kind doesn’t have the power to go off and save the world herself, but whatever. You are a god, in the sort of greek way, one that isn’t necessarily all powerful or all knowing. If this was a game about the christian god trying to save the world, presumably the game would congratulate you and say Game Complete after first pressing the start button.

The first thing one notices about this game is the artistic style. It is sort of cell-shaded, like Zelda: Wind Waker (oh, and the zelda comparaisons won’t end there alas). But in the way that Wind Waker looked like a cartoon, Okami looks like Japanese art on scrolls, which is handy since that’s what it’s trying to reflect. The cutscenes look great, and you think, “The game can’t possibly look like this the whole way through”, but it does.

The second thing one might notice is the plot is quite deep and, er, verbose. You notice this right away unfortunately, since the opening cutscenes last about 20 minutes, if you read as slow as I do and choose not to skip them outright. There are other portions of the game that have similarly long cutscenes, but it really does help flesh out the story. The game was trying to be Epic, it is both a strength, and a weakness.

In the game, there are two ways of interacting with the world. The first way is through the normal physicality that one might expect from a free-ranging adventure game. At this point, people might be reminded of Zelda: Twilight Princess, since, well, both have heavily to do with Wolves. Oh well. As Amaterasu (the wolf) you can run around, jump, hit things with your head, etc. In battle, you can use one of three classes of weapons (each class has 5 versions of these weapons, with increasing strength).

The first is a Reflector, which is a mirror that sits on your back, you can whip it out and swing it around. Much later you get what they call Glaives which are basically swords that you similarly whip around from your back. The third type is the usable type, Rosaries, which you whip about. Why do I say “usable”? Well, I’ve found that Reflectors and Glaives were pretty hard to use at first (I’ve gotten a bit better).

See, you start with a single weapon, the weakest reflector. When in battle, you naturally do what Twilight Princess taught you to do, which is waggle the wiimote like mad. The attack cycle would fire, animate and then as it stopped, it would see that you’re waggling, and do another attack cycle. But not the reflector. The only way to chain attacks, is to waggle at the right time. If you don’t, you sit around like an idiot, unable to attack for about 5 seconds wondering what the hell is happening. I didn’t even know this was the problem until I was in an ingame dojo and bought an extra chain to the combo. It took me 10 minutes to properly do it to be released from the training session. The problem is that, on the PS2, the attack control was, of course, a button. Hitting a button with rhythm is relatively easy. But when the attack control is wagging a wiimote, you get no feedback that it actually understood what you did, and it makes it infuriating. Further, as far as I can tell, it never told me that this chaining combo thing was going on, only the dojo upgrade cleared that one up.

Glaives, gotten much later in the game, I never really figured out. You’re supposed to raise the wiimote to charge it, then swing down to attack. In practice, it seemed to do whatever the hell it wanted on it’s own.

So I stuck with rosaries, which are unfortunately the weakest weapon type in the game, but at least you can waggle like mad and it will work. I’ll probably try the reflectors again at some point, since the second way of interacting with the environment had it’s problems, but once learned, was much easier.

The second way of interacting with the environment, and the main ‘gimmick’ of the game, is the Celestial Brush. At basically any point in the game, and in battle, you can press a button and the world freezes and the camera pulls back and shows the world as if it was on a paper scroll. You can then paint using the brush (in actuality your own tail) onto the world and cause various effects. You can cause the sun to appear by drawing a circle in the sky, or slash your enemies by drawing a straight slash mark over them. The slash was one of the first brush techniques you learn in the game, and boy, is it infuriating.

The PS2 version used the analog stick to control the brush, and so the straight line move was very easy. On the wii, using the wiimote pointing at the screen, it is quite a bit harder. There is a secondary button you can press at this point to ‘lock’ the brush to create straight lines, but even then, this is hard. You may get a line, but at an angle you’d prefer not having. This was incredibly frustrating for the first few sessions of play, but after 30 hours, I can usually manage all the brush techniques, even the slash without the straightness-lock.

One facet I enjoy about the game is that it’s not about killing things (well, you kills lots of demons and such), but about restoring the land. And some of the nicest cutscenes are when you bloom one of the guardian saplings and uncurse an area.

Another interesting aspect of the enemy battles is that they aren’t forced on you most of the time. Boss battles are, and some introductory battles, but the rest of the time, the enemy ‘encounters’ wander the areas as evil scrolls. When you run into them (or get close enough that they chase and touch you) you get trapped in an evil fenced off area and battle them. The introduction cutscenes are pretty neat, one of my favorites is for the yellow drum imp.

Xenophones need not apply. The game is filled with Japanese myth references, and untranslated text. Like the ‘praise’ bubbles that power you up are inscribed with the word for ‘Happiness’ or so the manual would tell me. The brush gods you encounter give have spheres with their names on them as well. The evil-fencing that encloses enemy arenas seems to be made entirely of japanese characters, probably unfriendly ones at that. When you slash at an enemy that is blocking such attacks, the japanese for Useless appears. Now that one, I wish I had known earlier. The sound effect seems to give the correct indication, but even then, if the text “Useless” had appears, I might have caught on sooner.

Even with the motion control flaws and annoying weapons, I still rate this game fairly high. I think I might have enjoyed it a teeny bit more on PS2, but watching speedruns, the brushwork is accurate, but really quite slow. Now that I’ve caught on, I think that aspect is much better on the Wii. The game is actually pretty easy, I died once and that was during the first semi-boss fight, when I was still struggling with the controls. It’s actually laughably easy if you use all the tools available. You can aquire what work as ‘extra lives’ effectively, and there are fairly inexpensive attack and defense boosters. There are also exorcism slips that you can spam (use in quick succession) that can take down bosses in less than a minute. A lot of these you get just through opening treasure chests, and even then you get quite a lot of money and can buy them. If you ignore using them (as I did) you can make the game a little more challenging. The dungeons were more puzzle based, with few enemies, but the dungeons were far less jarring with the rest of the overworld than in zelda. In zelda, you knew when you left the overworld and entered a dungeon. In Okami, it’s far less distinct, which makes it flow a lot better.

A couple more annoyances, but this time specifically with the port. There are a couple of bonus games missing from the wii version that could be done on the loading screens, but apparently Wii loads so quickly that they just took them out. I wish they could have left them in, maybe with a smaller requirement to ‘win’, since they give you fangs, a side-currency that you really can’t get enough of in the game, at least at first. Any source is a good source. More galling is the removal of the credit and epilogue sequence. Sure, without them, you don’t sense anything is missing, but knowing that such materials exist that you don’t have (other than seeing them on youtube or similar) is irritating.

But all in all, 9 thumbs up.

Addendum: One big addendum I have to make to this entry. One funny think about Okami on the wii is that it was hit by some controversy when the box art featured an IGN watermark that looked partially edited out, but still quite visible.

Oh, that’s photoshopped.. the shadows are all wrong…

For me, the irony (if it’s irony, I don’t know anymore) is that the controversy was what I first heard about the game. Then I had heard about how amusing it was that a game that prided itself on being artistic would have a problem like this. And so that’s how I found out about vague details about the game. Then I spotted it in a nearby shop when travelling with Curtis and Alicia. One thing about Alicia is that whenever you show interest in anything, she’ll take note of it for a future christmas or birthday gift (note to self: never feign interest in anything I don’t actually want). So thanks to her as well.