Okami
So very, very worth the wait.
Published: October 2, 2006
Because you are a goddess, though, you're granted a certain amount of interactive bad-assery. The addition of Issun, a little impish tag-along mushroom-lookin' sprite, also gives you the ability to wield the game's best feature: the Celestial Brush. If you've seen footage of the game, or even just read about it in passing, chances are the Brush was mentioned. At any time, you can pause the game by holding down R1, which turns the screen into a paintable canvas. By using simple line and circle shapes, you can then interact with the world itself; chop down trees with a painted horizontal line, bring trees back into bloom with a circle around the leafless branches, create wind, meld fire and water, and so on. There are 13 powers in all, and the game spoon feeds them to you just fast enough that you don't feel like you're stuck with the same moves for too long, yet slowly enough that you're not overwhelmed with memorization of the new strokes.
Simply put, the Celestial Brush is a brilliant addition, one that never really gets old, and keeps the rather simplistic combat deep enough to last until the end of the game. Because certain enemies will cough up valuable items that can be traded with merchants when finished off in a certain way, the game encourages you to play around with racking up combos, dodging enemy attacks (both will give you bonuses at the end of every fight), and discovering enemy-specific ways of killing them off.
The whole Metroidvania approach of giving you near-full run of the world but locking off areas until you've gained new abilities is a tried-and-true formula, and yet again, it works here quite wonderfully. There are little side quests and quick objectives that challenge you to use your powers in less obvious ways (right at the start of the game, you'll dry clothes, restore a water wheel, and dig up veggies). These give you instant rewards in the form of Spirit -- essentially faith that humans have in the gods, which in turn allows you to upgrade your health, inkwells (so you can do more Celestial Brush moves/attacks), coin purse and astral pouch (which brings you back to life if happen to die.
There are other means to upgrade Amaterasu's base abilities. Finding heart container-like pieces of a stone will give you another hit point, and feeding the animals all over the world certain types of food that they like will give you more Spirit. Vendors sell better primary and sub-weapons if you've got the cash, and a dojo will offer training with new moves. All of these things are optional, but of course they'll help immensely.
It's probably possible to make it through the whole game without any significant upgrades, as Okami is a rather easy game. Rather than it hurting the game, though, it actually makes the 30 or so hours you'll spend -- during which there is a difficulty curve, however slight -- that much more entertaining. The story, characters and setting are the stars here, not puzzles that are head scratchers or dungeons that are a pain to navigate. That doesn't mean there isn't some challenge here, but most of the objectives have refreshingly logical solutions.
Of course, it's entirely possible that you won't even notice a lot of the puzzles in the game, or will move through them without much thought because the visuals will be stealing your attention away most of the time. It's been said before, but Clover Studios' living rice paper painting effect is unlike anything see in video games thus far. It is, without a doubt one of the crowning graphical achievements on the PlayStation 2. That hardware over half a decade old can still manage to wow like the PS2 does is both a testament to the developers and, yes, Sony themselves for crafting hardware like this.
Okami's look isn't absolutely perfect; framerate issues are can be a bit of a concern when too much of the world is on the screen or too many effects are piled on at once, but for the most part it is very solid indeed. Thanks to the art style, texture detail tends to take a bit of a back seat to the animation, which is absolutely stunning, but there really are few moments where the textures come up short. The sort of watercolor look is absolutely fitting with the subject matter, and with the exception of some parts of the game that get consumed by massive chunks of inky darkness, it's pulled off nigh-flawlessly.
The same sort of minimalist approach works to the advantage of the audio too. Packed with plucked strings and simple percussion, the soundtrack is a sort of languid, soothing backdrop to what's happening on screen. It's all wonderful stuff, and even a little familiar at times (Issun's theme is a dead ringer for some of Nobuo Uematsu's work in Final Fantasy IV). When combat does kick in -- moving seamlessly from free-roaming to a more enclosed, arena-style brawl -- taiko drums move to the fore, but on the whole it's as infectiously underplayed as the dialogue, which is really just a bunch of gibberish, and again, fits the style of the game as a conscious decision rather than something that's lacking in any way.
It took 1500 words to arrive at one very simple message: Okami is, unquestionably, one of the finest games ever made, on any system, at any point in the rather short history of the video game industry. Taking the best parts of Nintendo's classic adventure series and infusing it with something that is uniquely Clover Studios, Okami couldn't be any more of a must-play experience.
