Okami Review

A sequel to Okami was announced recently, which was as good a reason as any to finally pull the game off the shelf and pop it in my PS2’s disc tray after having left it untouched for likely close to a decade (my backlog of games is extensive and only grows larger). I was not inexperienced with the game, as even longer ago I had seen a Let’s Play of the title, but this is the first time I’ve put hands on it personally.

It’s good.

That goes without saying, right? It’s a classic game, one people remember fondly to this day. The announcement of its sequel led to dozens if not hundreds of screaming reaction videos, so it has to be good.

But I do mean it’s just good.

Don’t get me wrong, parts of the game are mind-blowingly fantastic. The animation and art style are absolutely stunning, and the soundtrack is a wondrous accompaniment, especially in the moments where you heal a Guardian Sapling and the camera pans over the entire field as the land is renewed and the music swells and you truly feel like you’re bringing peace to the land. Breathtaking stuff.

But most of the game isn’t that. I love a unique-looking game as much as the next guy, but as I grow older the things that truly matter to me are a game’s narrative and how it feels to play. Everything else comes second. And Okami, unfortunately, stumbles on these two.

Okami, at its heart, is a Legend of Zelda-esque adventure game where you play as the sun goddess Amaterasu in the form of a non-verbal wolf and her artist companion, mini-Master Roshi Issun. You learn brush techniques that allow you to solve puzzles as you progress in your journey to defeat the reawakened serpent demon Orochi.

Let’s just get this out of the way; I hate Issun. This guy sucks, and every character in every media like him sucks. Issun sucks for the same reason Sanji is the worst Straw Hat. I’m begging creators (especially Japanese creators) to stop writing “lovable perverts”. It doesn’t matter what adjective you stick in front of them, they’re still a pervert. And this sucks, because as I mentioned, Amaterasu herself is entirely silent. You might get a howl out of her now and then, and some fun physical interactions, but at the end of the day, the main character whose text you’re reading for the majority of the game is Issun. This made it incredibly hard to enjoy the game any time I shared the screen with a non-wolf woman.

The game is chock-full of actually interesting and vibrant characters, however, from the oafish but good-natured Susano to the bubbly Kushi and the ever-overwhelmed Priestess Fuse. These characters brighten the dark path towards Orochi, though notably, they have little presence afterwards. You see, Orochi is not the final boss; you can tell this just by the several missing Celestial Brush technique boxes in your menu at the time you’re directed towards his lair. And after his defeat, the game just kind of keeps going, but as you enter the new hub area, Sei-an City, you’ll find very few characters with as much personality as Mr. Orange or as much depth as Susano. In fact, after resolving the first of two major crises affecting the city was when I realized I had no further desire to continue playing, for two reasons. This drop in the narrative and its cast of characters was one.

The other is that the game just doesn’t always feel good to play. When it hits, it hits perfectly. You’re pulling out your brush and doing a quick swoop to change something in the world and hopping right back into the action instantaneously. You can make the wind blow banners to become platforms and immediately jump to them as soon as you put your brush away. It’s fantastic and fluid and engaging and it doesn’t work like that far too often.

The game is simply too finicky sometimes. If you don’t draw a perfect circle, your Bloom won’t go off correctly. If you didn’t draw it on the correct part of the tree, it won’t go off correctly. If your swoop is a bit lopsided in the wrong way, the wind won’t blow. If you fail to connect your infinity sign correctly, fire simply will not be conjured. It starts as a minor inconvenience that, in later areas like Sei-an City, can quickly turn what should be fun little side missions into hair-wrenching infuriations.

Overall, I enjoyed what time I put into Okami. I’ve become much better recently about pinpointing the time in a game at which I know my enjoyment will only diminish going forward, and with Okami, that was about the 20-hour mark. It was well worth the trip to this highly-stylized version of ancient Japan, but I’m also not sad to put this one in the rear-view.