Okami

Okami is one of the PS2 games I bought in Brunei, in the astonishing pirate-tastic store right there in the middle of one of Bandar Seri Baguwan’s main shopping malls – one, indeed, of quite a few like that. It’s been a looong time since then – and plenty of other games from back then remain as-yet unplayed – and I thought it would be a quick and simple game to play through before I started to play something else. I’d seen screenshots and liked the stylised cel-shaded graphics, halfway between anime and traditional brush art, and the apparent RPG elements.

In the end, Okami was both more and less than I had expected. It has plenty going for it, and well deserves its excellent reputation, but its main flaw is that it is just too long. It’s more or less on rails, barring backtracking possibilities for minor hidden goodies, the combat is repetitive and only bosses really provide any sort of challenge. This length makes some of the things that were fun and silly at the start of the game grow tedious, like the mixed-up voices and the way talking animation is heads pulsating away. Some of the character designs are great, but one problem with the nice brush-based aesthetic is that it’s often hard to actually make it out. And I felt a bit put-out that through a good two thirds of the game, I thought Issun was some oily middle-aged pervert, rather than an adorable teenage-looking pervert. Which really does make a lot of difference to how appealing he was!

The story is quite simple: in feudal Japan, the evil snake Orochi has risen again 100 years after his defeat. The mother goddess Amaterasu, in the form of a wolf, must defeat this evil force, and perhaps trace the power back to its source to prevent his return once and for all. Orochi’s defeat this time causes chaos all over ‘Nippon’, resulting in several other demons awakening, leading Amaterasu and her tiny Poncle companion Issun up to the frozen north. It’s very traditional stuff, suiting the brush-like art, but there is some zany humour and an anything-goes mood, including sci-fi elements, anachronistic technology and Carry-On-style smuttiness that makes for an entertaining experience.

Some of the bosses are fantastic in design. My favourites were Lechku and Nechku, the mechanical owls, with hats and little stubby arms at the top of their wings. On the other hand, if anything was repetitive, it was the final dungeon. By then, I think most of the quality testers had given up checking through the translation, and there was a fair bit of confusion between ‘its’ and ‘it’s’, and that sort of error, which struck me as oddly unprofessional for this sort of title. It was doubly frustrating because by that point, I really just wanted to get to the end. Thankfully I’d saved up all my big explosive things, so even the last boss went down easily enough when I got the hang of what was going on.

Overlong and with an unsatisfying climax, it was nevertheless a game full of charm and invention, and well worth playing!