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Okami: The Best Game in the World You
Never Bought
Posted by: Powderbucket on Apr 20, 2010
Okay, so I have been going on a bit about this frightfully unsuccessful game, but I can't help but gloat it's greatness for it.
 Despite having incredibly poor sales, selling only 200 000 in America and even less in Europe, this game would go on to win IGN's Game of the Year 2006 award and received similar awards from Game Trailers, Official Playstation Magazine, Electronic Gaming Monthly, Edge Magazine and a range of others . It, therefore, is no surprise that it received the "least commercially successful winner of a game of the year award" in the 2010 version of the Guinness World Record's Gamer's Edition.
The game revolves around the story of Amaterasu, the sun goddess of Japanese mythology, who is in the form of a dog. Darkness has taken over Japan and, once again, it is time for Amaterasu to bring the sunshine back. While the story seems fairly simple at first, it is extremely well executed and you will find yourself not wanting to turn the console off, wanting to know what is going happen next. It involves a lot of Japanese legend, a lot of hairy men with swords and your run of the mill boy-saves-girl in some points, not to mention some generally scary moments owing to the creepy atmosphere and creepy audio the game churns out after a rather nice flutter through a field. A good thing about this epic story is that it is filled with a lot of GOOD humour. A lot of the it comes from the fact that Amatersu remains mostly silent, apart from the odd bark, and is accompanied by the smooth-talking back-chatting "Issun," who is about a twentieth of Amaterasu's size. When talking to other character's Amaterasu will yawn, fall asleep or look generally disinterested while your companion bounces around the screen getting wound up by demanding villagers or scantily glad tree goddesses. Your sun-goddess is often referred to as furball, fleabag, snowy and doggy by the world's characters, and all this puts a rather nice light-hearted edge on the overall epicness of the game's storyline.
Gameplay is a mixture of platforming-adventure, role playing and action. Platforming comes into play because the game involves a variety of jumping puzzles and such, and a lot of exploriing of open fields and villages. The role playing aspect is more deep as you have to upgrade Amaterasu's abilities using "praise" you receive from doing good tasks to humans, animals and even plants. There are also a variety of villages with villagers to talk to and gain missions from. Of course, the game contains quite a bit of fighting. On the game map you will often encounter strange floating scrolls that, when touched, surround Amaterasu in a red fighting room that fills up with a number of hair-raising 'imps'. It is here where the game's audio really shines, having you turn cringe slightly as the imps scream in high pitched tone as they dance around the screen lobbing bombs at you. There are a number of epic boss battles as well, usually involving a mixture of puzzle solving as well as all-out hacking and slashing. It's a fairly simple fighting mechanic, but requires speedy fingers.
One of the best gameplay features comes in the form of the "celestial brush." At any time, unless the area happens to be very cursed, the player can hold down R1 to twitch the screen to what looks like a painting board. By holding the square or triangle buttons, the player can draw patterns across the game screen. When the player releases R1, the brush stroke manifests into something or other in the game world. For example, a broken bridge is no problem for Amatersu. One just needs to draw a whole lot of strokes from one end of the bridge to the other and the bridge is rebuilt. A dot on the game map with result in a tree sprouting from its place. A stroke along grass with result in a row of flowers. At any time, the player can control game time by drawing either a sun or a moon in the sky, changing the time of day as a result. There are a variety of other techniques unlocked throughout the game and they add amazing depth to an otherwise dense game.
There is not much to say about the graphics really. It was a game meant to be designed for the Playstation 3 but they went ahead and gave it to the Playstation 2, so the graphics are immediately spectacular. The entire game is presenting in a stylized cel-shaded Japanese artwork manner and it never gets boring to look at the screen. The faster Amaterasu runs, the more grass and flowers sprout up from under her steps. Lily pads form whenever she touches water and leaves fly off from her when she jumps. There is some amazing attention to detail in this game that seem incredibly lacking form the games of today. In terms of audio, there is no voice acting per se; each character has a rather mumbled jumbled way of talking but the game kindly provides a lot of text for you as translation. This might irritate some, but I saw it as being original and it provided the game with it's own individuality and only added to the atmosphere.
Before I finish, I want to add one last remark as to why this game is ranked with Final Fantasy VII, Grand Theft Auto San Andreas and Shadow of the Colossus as one of my favourite. 15 Hours into the game, the game completely insults the otherwise tried and tested formula of saving the epic battle for last and ending the game. Having fought the biggest boss in one of the funniest and most epic ways, the narrator takes over the game's storyline and I start assuming that, well, looks like this is the end. However, Issun interrupts him by piping up, "Oh no Furball, this isn't the end yet. It's only the beginning!" and the story continues with a whole range of new abilities, side-quests, towns and landscapes are unlocked for me to continue the game with. I'm not sure how long the story is going to last, but I have read it should last at least 30 hours... a mean feat compared to the 8 hour average play time that games are giving gamers today. Even games receiving the highest amount of praise, such as God of War 3, only last about 6 hours. And to think I paid R150 for this game... |
