@Dixavd said:
@Steve_C said:
@TooWalrus said:
I've got a thousand games I need to play... but for some reason I just want to play "Okamiden"... was that even worth playing? I guess it reviewed well. Meh, it's only $20.
Noooooooooooo. The game is junk. It's inferior to Okami in every way. There's platform limitations to begin with. They did what they can to bring the visuals to the DS, but the screen size and visual fidelity just doesn't do it justice. The controls are more fiddly.
The real problem though is that the game is just a boring mash of recycled content with forgettable story and characters. Some of the same areas, and even moments that i'm sure were taken straight out of the original. It just tries to pander to fans of the original with hardly anything new of note. The original had lots of cool and clever ties in to Japanese folklore with characters, but I don't think they bothered at all to try and do the same thing (fuck "chibiterasu"), so for me it cheapened the fiction of that whole world. The music is cool.... because outside of one new song(?) I noticed and thought was cool it's all just from the original.
Now i've gone on a rant. I was so disappointed with that game, though I felt that way when it was first unveiled, let alone when I actually got to play it.
I have to tak the entire opposite view. While I agree it is nowhere near as good as Okami - I still think Okamiden is fantastic and is one of my top 10 games of last year. I seriously think it is worth it. The gameplay is vastly improved with the stylus truly making the brush strokes intuitive, the writing in my opinion is on par with Okami. The music is stellar again and actually most of it is new. I found the story engaging with the chibbi-gods much better written than in Okami. Plus while I belived it doesn't have the highs that Okami does, it definitely does not have the lows which Okami had making it a much more consistent experience with (in my opinion) a much better ending than Okami's.
I wholeheartedly reccommend Okamiden, especially if the trailers excite you. My question to you Steve_C is why did you bother buying it when you were already unimpressed by it - and why do you think your take on the game will be anywhere the same as someone who went into it while enjoying the trailers and ideas of it which TooWalrus obviously has? Maybe you shouldn't buy a game which you already didn't like the unveiling of in the first place.
Still it is just my opinion though, I just hate seeing a game I think is still worth the time of someone going in with the right frame of mind being ranted on.
P.S. Don't take this as me attacking you Steve_C I'm really not, I just don't see why you are trying to persuade someone not to buy a game which they have interest in which you didn't like even though you had already been turned off by it before its release.
That's fine. I don't mind having a conversation. As for why I bought it, I waited for it to get cheap, but Okami was one of my favourite games of all time back in the day. I needed to see what it was like, and if maybe it was actually decent. I didn't want to disregard it without actually giving it a chance, especially considering the good reviews.
To begin with, a question was asked of is it worth playing and from my experience it is not. Years after the original game came out, I don't think it offers anything above what Okami did. Milage may vary with the controls then. Obviously stylus control sounds ideal but in practice I found it more fiddly and harder to reliably get things out, bombs in particular.
The majority of the new characters are just kid versions of old ones. There are gameplay moments taken straight of Okami, like cutting at the same time as Kuni, just like you cut at the same time as Susano. So boring. One of the big copy moments I remember is around Hana Valley, and I actually checked this yesterday. Doing the same "puzzle" in bothgames at the same location, and then later doing the same thing of pushing the glass orb awkwardly back on to the same pedestal. Hardly a revelation in gameplay. It was a bit tedious back then, but repeating the same stuff, let alone in a game that's targeted at fans of the original. Unforgivable.
There are 2 new brush strokes. 1 is completely dungeon specific and doesn't really have any real use out in the world, and the other one to guide your partner didn't really add much for me. There aren't any challenging puzzles, and it just slowed the pace down even more. Lots of the locations are old ones. Technically there may be more new music that maybe gets played at some specific moment, but i'm going on what stood out to me. The majority of stuff I seemed to hear most often was just old remixed tracks. The only song that stood out to me and recognised as new with its own identity was this.
Again, from memory, I don't remember much story wise from Okamiden, so I can't have a discussion about the narrative devices or whatever. One of the coolest things about Okami though was how they took characters and aspects of the story from real folklore and religion. Amaterasu, Issun, Orochi, Susano, Kushi etc. Even The Tale of the Bamboo Cutter found its way in there. I didn't realise it at the time, but to discover this after having just played it was really cool, and to see how they realised aspects of certain characters and old stories. This became a fundamental part of that universe for me. So for them to make a sequel to this revered game and fiction "for the fans", but then completely not bother to do this at all really annoyed me.
For me, the overall experience was pretty bland. A lot just felt like filler, while not really expanding the universe or gameplay mechanics in any interesting way. It really was some Okami gaiden, which may be some excuse for characters with no real background. The only consolation to me was that they could be using the money to finance a proper sequel and to raise interest, but it always could have been accomplished more easily with this HD version.
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