Ōkami

Okami is quite possible the most unique and beautiful looking game to grace the video game industry in decades. Aside from it's incredibly stylish and aesthetic appeal, it is a really fun game to play with a very unique approach to how you play the game.

You take the roll of the sun god, Okami Amaterasu, and with the aide of a little bouncing bug-sized friend, Issun, roam the land of Nippon trying to restore humanities faith in the gods in order to eventually confront the demons face to face to put an end to their terror. While, the premise may seem cliche just like any other adventure or RPG, the story and the dialog is actually quite compelling.

Much of the game is actually very humorous to sit back and watch and I have to admit that I laughed out loud at several parts with all of the cheesy anime-like motions, gestures and sound effects.

Fun is the most important thing in any video game, and not only is Okami fun to watch, but it's really fun to play. Okami's formula is a mixture of adventure, exploration and puzzle-solving which resembles that of the Zelda series.

You start off as a broken down wolf with virtually no special powers whatsoever. As your adventure progresses and you discover the various constellations, you end up learning the 13 celestial brush techniques, that allow you to perform special abilities. A brush technique is simply a new painting style you learn that allows you to paint a particular pattern on screen in order to yield a specific affect.

So, as the adventure progresses so too does your ability to roam in new places you were recently unable to visit due to lacking a skill that would provide you with access to the area. Instead of having lots of tools and utilities like in many adventure games where you would have bombs, hook-shots and what not, Okami instead relies solely on the brush techniques you acquire. Once you learn the cherry bomb technique you can simply paint a bomb on screen, and the bomb will appear. If there is a plant that you are capable of swinging too, you can draw a vine connecting yourself to it as opposed to having to equip various items to perform the tasks.

Using the brush techniques is accomplished by holding down the R1 button and then pressing or holding the square button when you want to draw. While in the painting mode, the action and movement of the world around you is froze still, which is actually very helpful during parts of the game. Though, you cannot paint endlessly or else the game would be even easier than it is, so instead you have an ink level that depletes every time you use a brush technique. Fortunately, the ink regenerates fairly quickly so you don't need to worry about how often you can paint too much.

The game play is very solid and obviously has been molded after very tries and tested formulas of just the right amount of puzzle-solving mixed with the right amount of exploration. While many of the puzzles are thought-provoking, they are at least not to the point of being overly difficult or stressful. Most puzzles are solved simply by realizing which of your brush techniques would be helpful to the situation you are currently in. Sometimes this may pose a challenge for a reason none other than the fact that you may need to use a technique you may not have been using in a while and simply forgot you had.

Graphically the game is a wonder! It is incredibly beautiful to look at and feels like an animated painting. The style is unmatched by any other game to date and has a very unique and artistic appeal. Even in today's age of next-gen consoles like the Xbox 360 and PS3, the graphics of Okami hold up incredibly well for their lushness and beautiful style. I cannot over emphasize just how awesome the game looks. Even as you run, flowers and plants spring up from the path you are running. If you jump leaves float in the sky. When you restore life to dead and withered trees life springs forth from all around. The game is very stunningly beautiful looking and is definitely a marvel of the gaming industry. The only problem with the graphics is an incredibly small one which can be easily overlooked because of it's rarity and the simply fact that it isn't that bad. Very rarely the camera can become irritating, which is usually just in battles with very large bosses. Aside from that, the graphics are not only nearly flawless but soothing to look at.

The sound of Okami is also topnotch, with one minor exception: the "voice overs". Instead of using real voice overs for all of the dialog, Okami consists of a distorted voices which sounds like repetitive gibberish. While, it does work in a way to go with the unique style Okami is trying to portray, you can't help but think it is annoying from time to time. Actually, when I first began to play Okami I swore there was something wrong with the game playing emulated on the PS3 because I couldn't believe that the developers would intentionally use such annoying and repetitive voice effects. The most frustrating part of it all was that you could faintly hear that a real person's voice was originally recorded and that they had used a sound distortion technique to synthesize their own language of gibberish. This was likely done because of the large amount of dialog that exists in the game, but nonetheless it can still be annoying at times. If it they had only managed to find a way to achieve the same desired gibberish language without making it sound so repetitive, it could have worked much better than it did.

With the complaint of the "voices" aside, Okami also sounds great. The music is all above average and contains some catchy Japanese rhythms. The style of the music also aims to be very cultural and pulls it off quite well. The music does its job at keeping the pace and feel of what is going on with the game.

One thing you don't want in an adventure game is a short adventure. Fortunately, Okami delivers on this end as well with a lengthy adventure that will take you at least 40 hours to complete. There are also lots of side quests and extra skills and weapons you can spend many more hours obtaining as well. Secrets are scattered everywhere and can consist of finding treasures that will make you money or plants to blossom to earn the divine praise that allows you to increase your stats. The more brush techniques you possess the more secrets are available to you.

Okami comes at a much needed time in the gaming industry because it offers reassurance to a field flooded and dominated by games unwilling to step apart by doing something different. The unique style of game play in Okami and the beautiful graphics stand alone at a time when more games rip each other off than creating something new. Okami creates and creates very well.




Overall Score: 9.8

Gameplay: (10) Superb. One of the best adventure games ever.

Graphics: (10) Absolutely beautiful style, environment and characters. As close to perfection as it gets.

Sound: (9) Soothing sounds and pace-setting tempos to keep the game right on track. The only fault are the repepetitve "voice overs", which fortunately can be overlooked in light of all the other excellent sounds.

Lasting Appeal: (10) Very long and compelling quest, with lots of side quests, secrets, items and skills to obtain.