Final Thoughts: Okami

Okami has been hyped to hell and back for the past 2 years. A Capcom game developed by Clover, directed by Kamiya – the head honcho for DMC, RE2, and Viewtiful Joe; that sounds like a recipe for success. An action-adventure title that throws in a couple of Zelda gameplay concepts with a new and innovative drawing gameplay mechanic? Nice.

 

For what it is, Okami is a breath of fresh air. It is unique not only visually, but also in concept. The graphics sport a traditional Japanese painting look that feels straight out of a novel from an old Japanese time period. In fact, the graphics in this game make it quite possibly one of (if not the) most beautiful games ever developed. The music is rich in quality, boasting a classic Japanese (and sometimes Chinese) beat and rhythm. It’s really majestic and has to be seen and heard to truly appreciate.

The story, while definitely cliche’ and not anything new, is still extremely likable and entertaining. In fact, I’d say the story is the best part of the game. Be forewarned however, that detractors of cutscene heavy games should stay away. This game features a hefty load of text. More so than I expected from an action adventure title such as this. The characters all feature likable and creative dialogue which keeps the conversations interesting, but you will often find yourself getting itchy fingers, longing to skip a couple of lines. One of the problems with Okami’s dialog is that npc’s often, more than not, say extraneous information that doesn’t really feel necessary or even relevant. It can be quite annoying when someone rabbles on, when this said character could have easily finished up what they were saying on the second or third line of text. Still, this charming dialogue is actually on par with some of the greats.

The characters, depending on the type, are completely forgettable or come off as striking, but by far the most memorable character is the main character Amaterasu. Amaterasu is full of life. From her mannerisms, to the abilities she eventually gains through the game’s story, Ammy — the nick name her annoying comrade Issun gave her — definitely comes off as one of the more fun and original characters in awhile. The great thing is that despite being a Goddess, she still acts like the wolf that manifests her physical body. When Ammy falls asleep when talking to someone extremely important, you’ll laugh. Quirks like this make Amaterasu definitely one of the highlights of the game and I applaud Clover for making such an original, funny, and best of all – likable – main character. When you consider that the main character is a wolf, you begin to appreciate what Capcom has done here: they made a silent character that has more charm than the majority of most talking characters that have appeared in recent games.

From there, Okami’s gameplay comes up and it’s by far my biggest niggle with the game. The gameplay in Okami is mediocre at best. While I did say the concept is extremely creative, the mechanics and drive behind the development of these said concepts is done so spotty, it actually makes the game feel premature and gimmicky. I think as we all know now that the basis of Okami’s gameplay is the Celestial Brush. The Brush, which allows you to draw objects into the game world, is utilized by simply holding the R1 button and drawing the object in question with either square or triangle. This is used to solve puzzles, interact with the environment, and even fight. The concept feels right out of a DS or Wii game, actually, and amazingly enough the Brush’s controls are extremely intuitive and done extremely well with merely an analog stick. Just after learning how to draw with the brush it’ll click like that, and you’ll be drawing tons of stuff. The controls in this game are to be praised highly. They really out did themselves with the controls in this one. Nothing feels uncomfortable, everything feels natural, and it’s easy to pick up and play.

The whole point of the game is for Amaterasu, the Sun God, to heal the land from curses and evil. Using your brush you can heal trees and bring them back to life, mend areas that are broken, slash enemies by drawing a single line stroke, and a myriad of other abilities. Throughout the game, Amaterasu and her comrade Issun encounter much danger and peril. It’s your job to heal the land and rid the country of Nippon (Japan) of evil. In a Zelda like fashion the two embark on a journey that takes them through multiple dungeons, locations, and areas. This is where Okami’s designs start to fail.

Okami is an easy game. A really easy game. Easy usually is not a problem because even the easiest games can be fun and a blast to play, Okami however replaces fun with brain dead puzzles, linearity, and boring tasks. The game is set up in a linear fashion. You go from one town, curing the area while doing dungeons, and then move on to the next area. The game is extremely linear and offers little to do, which is a shame because the world is pretty decent in size to pull of some nifty tricks. What’s more, in order for you to enter most “dungeons” (I will use that term lightly and you will understand why later on) you are often asked to do tedious and menial tasks you really don’t want to do. For all the hate Wind Waker got for it’s Tri-Force quest, Okami does a couple of these quests ten times as bad. It’s not that the tasks are hard, they’re actually pretty easy, it’s just that the game uses these quests as padding to prolong the game time, and they often made me question why I was doing them in the first place.

The game flow in Okami is really off. One moment you’re trying to get into a dungeon, the next minute you’re collecting ingredients for a dinner. Most of these things appear to be thinly veiled sidequests at first, but it always turns out that they’re actually apart of the main story. So when you’re finished with these tasks the world ends up feeling barren, lifeless, and devoid of any side things to do. Most side quests or side things you encounter are actually rehashed versions of what you already experience in the main story, so it gets redundant. And the worst part is that you don’t have dungeons or puzzles to fall back on. Once you finish these fetch quests and tasks, unlock their assigned dungeons, and finally get inside them you realize that there’s nothing all that great in the first place. Most dungeons in Okami can be completed in just a few minutes, and that is no exaggeration.

I brought up the brush before, and as I said, the concept is fantastic but the delivery lacks creativity and an overall fun factor. Most puzzles in this game utilize the brush, but they are often so simple that they require literally no train of thought. Making wind to blow windmills. Slashing things with one stroke cutting them in half. While the games feature is definitely admirable, it gets boring and old fast. One of the reasons for this is the lack of variety in the things you draw. Since they all are of the circle or line variety, when you learn new abilities sometimes you’ll blink twice questioning yourself if you’ve seen that ability before: drawing a line from the water to the enemy, drenching the monster with it; drawing a line from a fire to the enemy, causing them to catch fire. Things like that pop up but rarely, making most of the fights play out the same way. While the idea is great, these abilities are rarely ever used and the game never gives you any excuse to use them creatively because it’s so easy. They come off as forced and gimmicky. The brush leaves little room to explore, due to the fact once you get a new ability you’ll probably never ever use it again. The game, unlike Capcom titles in the past, does not force you to get fully accustomed to the abilities you obtain to make due. The best thing about Capcom games is that they force the player to learn the ropes and if you don’t, usually you’re out of luck. In the end, you have a colossal amount of brush techniques but you use only maybe a few of them. The rest end up as filler.

Still, for what it does, the brush works. It’s a very charming idea. My problem is the use of it. You find yourself drawing circles around trees and making simplistic dots to make stars rather than anything truly creative and memorable. Of course, this could be because the developers wanted to make the mechanic accessible to all users, it still could have been evolved more. If the brush were more interesting to use past the first few hours, I would have enjoyed the game a lot more, but for what it is, the brush is only as a good premise rather than a good game mechanic.

Furthermore, the puzzles could have been done much better. The “puzzles” in this game are not only laughable, they insult the player’s intelligence. Okami really makes you wonder if you’re playing a kids game. Perhaps the most unsettling thing about the dungeons, puzzles, and the game in general is the amount of hand holding the game does.

Your comrade Issun is an extremely opinionated little fellow. He is Okami’s version of Navi. A more talkative, annoying, and ear grating version of Navi. He often goes out of his way not only to solve the puzzles in the game for you, but he constantly interrupts the flow of the gameplay by talking in general. If you want to open a door he’ll often blurt out something like, “You sure you want to continue? I don’t know about that..this is scary!” and it is beyond annoying. The thing is that the game is so brain dead in difficulty that it’s rather insulting to have some guy always breathing down your neck telling you what to do. In one dungeon where you receive the wind brush technique Issun will go into detail how to use the brush ability, asking you to try out the brush on a windmill. You know Issun, I think I’m smart enough to figure out I need to use a wind ability on a windmill. This whole hand holding segment was bearable in the introduction because it could have served as a tutorial, but this continues throughout the entire game. He even interrupts boss battles. This is a very sad thing indeed because the fun of the entire genre is figuring out the puzzles, exploring, doing sidequests, and the dungeons. Okami lacks high marks in all of these.

Okami features a level progression system, one quite similar to many rpgs on the market, but a little different. Praise is acquired after doing good deeds, whether it is healing the cursed land that surrounds the area, feeding animals food, doing quests for people in town, and many other things. Due to lack of belief in gods by the people at this point in the story (something which is reflected many times in the plot extremely well without coming off as preachy), Ammy needs to show the people of Nippon that gods truly do exist and look out for them. Praise is required to level up the amount of Ink bottles you can carry, how much life Ammy has, the amount of money she can receive in her pouch, and so forth. It’s a fun system, but unfortunately getting most of the praise in the game is received by doing the side quests, which honestly did not interest me much in this game. Near the end of the game, Praise is needed in mass amounts. This means that at every present opportunity your goal at the end should be to acquire some praise, in order to level up your stats. It eventually gets dull and quite frankly, it does not feel very rewarding due to the fact the difficulty still ranges low at that point in time.

If I was to improve the Praise system in any way would be something that is the complete opposite of what’s presented in Okami. Since Praise raises the belief people have in the gods, it would be fun if there was a system in place that lowers that said belief, making a certain element of risk vs reward. Depending on your praise level, you could invest in certain abilities, participate in certain quests, and it would definitely make the game a lot less linear than it already is. Much like Knights of the Old Republic in principle, but I truly feel that would lend a more realistic and interesting take on Okami’s concept.

You would think that battles (especially bosses) would suffice. Not in Okami. Fighting is one of the more boring aspects of the game. It starts off fine but it swings into mediocrity due to most lack of weapon variety, moves to pull off, and difficulty (just a little less easy than the puzzles, so I can give the combat that). Battles are either uninspired, tedious, or both. In one boss battle you have to get the boss drunk. Instead of being creative, the game simply has you draw a line from the Sake to the bosses mouth. I don’t know about everyone else, but drawing lines is not my theory of an engaging boss battle. Much like the dungeons, the only particularly good boss battles are the first and last bosses, with a few interesting ones in between. If the battles were in an open field rather than being in field zones surrounded by impassable walls the battles would probably feel a little more involving. The fights, like the rest of the game, had the right idea but they lacked a significant amount of scope. Most battles can be avoided — and in my case I went out of my way to. Battles have little emphasis here, and come off as unnecessary and plain. While the enemy variety is definitely nice, it’s still not enough to save the plain battle system that’s featured in Okami. The battles work, but from the developer that currently makes the best action games on the market, they were simply disappointing.

You’d think with all of these complaints that Okami’s brain dead difficulty would be satisfied for fun, right? At least it has interesting side quests…right? No. If fun to you is doing fetch quests and feeding squirrels nuts then Okami is for you. I personally find it dull, and while I don’t have anything against fetch quests (it honestly depends), Okami’s quests border on unbearable. It’s the ultimate form of “being good is boring” in games I’ve seen. I don’t want to feed squirrels nuts or make trees happy. I don’t want to fetch you vases. I don’t to wake up a sleeping bear balancing on a nut. While there are other types of sidequests, they’re not that engaging either, and the ones that are actually fun rarely pop up – such as fishing. There are monster hunt quests, but as I said before, fighting gets boring so that’s usually out of the question. Many of the sidequests in the game feel unrewarding due to the game’s lack of any difficulty whatsoever. You receive many items to help you out on your quest but you don’t need them because the game is so easy.

Exploration is like this as well. Usually in Okami, I found myself not even bothering to explore areas because I knew I would get something that would make the game even easier. Capcom should have balanced this out more. The world, while big, has a significant lack of side quests and things to do. Actually, there are lots of things to do, but they aren’t particularly fun. You can revive all the trees in the game, which is the result of drawing a circle around them (which gets boring by the second time you’ve done it), feed animals by giving them food you’ve bought, collect beads, do fetch quests for villagers, and that’s about it. The developers said that the game was so huge that they neglected to add any extra stuff, but the game could have used this because the rest of the game is padded. You have a 30 hour adventure in Okami and most of it is spent giving nuts to squirrels or drawing circles around trees; I simply didn’t care so I continued on with the game, but was delayed by even more fetch quests in order to progress the story.

The biggest flaw of this game is the pacing. You spend so much time flailing and wailing and doing meaningless tasks, that by the time you do something interesting you don’t care anymore. The intro itself takes up more than half of the game, which is pretty bad. The game starts out as great, but as you delve more into it, it continuously gets more underwhelming as time goes by.

Okami is definitely a step in the right direction but the delivery is nothing but an extremely flawed adventure. Capcom and Clover can do better than this. If and when a sequel is released, I hope that they toughen the game out, and give the player more choices.

A bit overrated, but unlike other overrated titles I can’t see the appeal of Okami to make people give it 9.0’s, call it GOTY, or even call it a great game. I guess this one was not my thing and while I didn’t come out of it being overly positive, I still praise what was done here and I applaud having the balls to at least try something new. What is here is a pretty decent action adventure game with a new take, it just didn’t pull off these unique features as well as it could have.

Synopsis:

+ Amazing graphics
+ Great music
+ Startling art direction
+ Admirable premise
+ Great story
+ The game has a lot of soul.
+ Excellent controls.
+ Some extremely creative boss fights…just not enough of them.
+ Grade A translation and dialouge.
+ Lengthy game.

- Overly simplistic gameplay
- Gimmicky game mechanics
- While having a good story, the game has WAY TOO MUCH TEXT. I often find myself skipping what a lot of people say due to the extraneous amount of text, most of which is unecessary.
- Issun tells how to do practically every puzzle
- Boring side quests, and for what there is of them, there’s a significant lack of quests as well.
- Pacing is out of whack.
- 30 hour game, and yet most of it is padded and overly long. Could have been easily achieved with 15 hours.
- Dungeons are too short.
- Beyond easy difficulty.
- Dull combat.
- Lack of drive to explore due to brain dead difficulty.
- Too linear.
- Load times.

RATINGS
Gameplay: 6
Graphics: 9
Sound: 8
Value: 7
OVERALL: Suggested only if it can be found cheap.

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