Or, technically, I guess I should call it
Okami HD? I mean, whatever, it's
Okami.
I thought I might have written a post about this game back when the original version came out, or when the Wii version came out, but if I did, I'm not able to find them at the moment, so I'll write one about it here, now, since I just finished the Steam version.
So... yeah, it's basically a
Zelda-style game, in which you traverse the land, meeting quirky characters, fighting monsters, and looking for new abilities that you can use to open up traversal options to get farther in the game. Not to be confused with a Metroidvania. (Though, really, what actually
is the difference between a
Zelda-style game and a Metroidvania? I mean, I could try to list similarities and differences [and there
are differences], but that's beyond the scope of this particular post. Maybe later, though the subject honestly doesn't interest me all
that much.)
The art style is the whole cel-shaded thing, and it still looks amazing even now, and not just because of the whole "HD" thing.
Okami was always a very beautiful game, even with the original PS2 release. (Though, apparently, at one point it had a rather different style of graphics, as can be seen in
a video you can unlock after finishing the game. And I think if they'd gone that route, the graphics would be way more dated today than the current version.)
The music is amazing. The sound... for the most part, it's great, too, but the "voices" can get a little annoying after a while (fortunately, the game lets you turn those off, though I never did, since I just considered it to be part of the experience).
I don't know if it's because I was playing with keyboard and mouse, but for some reason, the game actually seemed
easier than I remember it being, on the whole. The combat, even against bosses, was not nearly as potentially annoying as I recall. Maybe it was because I tended to remember most of the enemy weaknesses, or was more willing to experiment with brush techniques when I didn't, this time around, rather than just blindly attacking or whatever. And speaking of the brush techniques, I had far,
far fewer misfires with that this time through than I remember having when playing on the PS2 and even on the Wii. All that said, however, racing Kai in Yoshpet and fishing (EDIT) and Blockhead Grande and rolling those fucking balls up that fucking hill to that fucking bear (/EDIT) were exactly as annoying as I recalled them being. The only thing truly annoying about the controls, at least on keyboard and mouse, is that when you enter the menu, for some reason, selection and cancel keys are mapped to backspace and enter, which means you have to take your hand off the mouse to press them, and as far as I could tell, there was no way to remap those particular keys. I'd have remapped them to left and right mouse clicks, if I could have done so. Or, at least, if it
was possible to remap them, I was too dumb to figure it out.
One thing that really didn't age well was Issun's behavior. On many occasions, I found myself wishing that I had access to a "for the love of god, Issun, please shut the fuck up and quit being so belligerently idiotic for once in your life" command. Especially whenever any adult, non-elderly (non-god-wolf) female character was around. I don't recall it bothering me so much when I played it originally (or again when I played it on the Wii years later), and it certainly wasn't a dealbreaker this time either, but his casual sexism was way more grating this time around. And his aggressive stupidity was more annoying as well. E.g. him getting basically all of the plot of the Ryoshima Coast arc almost completely backwards as far as who the bad guys and good guys were, not to mention every encounter with Waka... though, to be fair, if you've never played it before, you wouldn't know for sure, either, which would make it a "twist" when things turn out to actually be different, but still. Spoiler alert for a 14 year old game, and all, I guess?
Anyway, aside from minor quibbles like that, I have to say that
Okami is still probably one of my top five favorite
The Legend of Zelda games.
I've never played
Okamiden, and if I did want to play it now, I'd have to hunt up a rom and a DS emulator, I guess. I heard it wasn't nearly as good as
Okami, though, and kind of just rehashed the first game. If they ever make a
proper sequel to the first game, I'd be all over that (as long as it's not weighed down with shit like
Denuvo or whatever).
