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Okami
CAPCOM, PS2 (2007)
The boy who cried wolf must’ve played this.
Clover Studio closed down,
didn’t it? Boo-bloody-hoo!
If there’s one lesson we
can learn from this corporate
fiasco, it’s that creativity is never
rewarded. Okami sold 150,000
copies on the PS2, which is even
less than Folklore on the PS3! It
was the mother of all failures, in
many ways, and that’s the exact
fate it deserved.
Okami is plagued by irritating
issues, such as a ten-hour
tutorial, repeating bosses and
some dreadful combat. This
is a game that wanted to be
Zelda, but it didn’t even get as
close as Alundra on the PSone,
or any other Nintendo-rivalling
contemporaries. Okami is linear,
gimmicky and frustrating – the
Celestial Brush is far too game
breaking to make sense in combat,
but that’s hardly the only problem
with Okami’s battles. Amaterasu
can’t fight properly, for example,
so encounters are reduced to
inane button bashing, and messy
inaccuracies with the brush.
More annoyingly, Issun, the
little bastard who sits on your
shoulder, spends the entire game
making noises that sound like a
hamster having orgasms in binary
code. In a similar fashion, all of the
characters in Okami make equally
moronic noises such as, “Mi-moomah-
mi-moo-mi!” Sod off, you
yobbish shits! After throwing your
pad at your mum and praying for
the death of all animals, there’s still
a whole lot more left to despise.
The visual style is appealing,
at first, but only in the sense that
everything feels like a drug-addled
vortex of paint, foolish animals
and Disney villains. Admittedly,
it’s hard to fault the visual style, so
we’ll leave this bit alone – it’s not
appearances that let Okami down,
but rather the gameplay beneath
it. The world is a mundane plain to
explore. Some activities like picking
veg, hitting moles and chatting
to cretinous Frenchmen, were
crowbarred in to needlessly extend
the game’s life span.
Likewise, the boss battles suffer
from that age-old Capcom problem
of repetition. For no good reason,
every previous boss battle is
foisted on the player at the end of
the game, which is a tremendously
barbaric way to add a few hours to
the ongoing slog. Okami could have
been around ten hours shorter
than it is, and it would’ve saved
us all from drowning in its twee,
one-note structure. Unfortunately,
Clover Studio wasn’t quite savvy
enough to spot the problems with
Okami’s life span.
To be fair, though, Okami isn’t
dreadful. We just feel that a few
changes, here and there, could’ve
saved it from bombing like a fatty.
Okami was Clover’s raison d’être,
in that it did show a developer who
valued creativity, yet its game
design was actually quite lacking.
Instead of imitating the deep,
engaging nature of the 3D Zelda
titles, Okami feels like a throwaway
adventure with a few satisfying
gimmicks. The 95% score was,
quite frankly, a ludicrous, vain
grading that suggests a lack of
perception in the reviewer. Never
mind, though: with Okami flopping
in the way it did, it’s pretty much
guaranteed that we’ll never see a
game of this nature again. Granted,
Okami had the graphical styling of
a classic game, but the gameplay
wasn’t substantial enough to give it
momentum beyond cult-hit status.
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