Okami Review

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            Okami

Review by SteerpikeNovember 2006

PS2, We Hardly Knew Ye

A console’s twilight days are bittersweet, because even as the next generation beckons, developers have mastered the art of pushing older technology beyond its limits and turn out some awe-inspiring work. Never has this been more evident than with the PlayStation 2, a technological dinosaur so mind-bogglingly underpowered compared to its successor that it wouldn’t be unfair, when juxtaposing the two, to equate its Precambrian workings with hamsters running on wheels. Yet from this Methuselah we have seen God of War, Shadow of the Colossus, Final Fantasy XII and now Okami—games that share almost nothing in common save one unifying trait: that none of them have any right to exist on a platform so ancient it’s been outstripped by cellphones.

Clover Studio’s Okami, powered by hamsters, will leave you breathless in an assortment of ways. It is so stunning to look at that even if there weren’t a good game underneath I’d confidently recommend it. But there is. There’s an intoxicating, unforgettable platform adventure that combines the very best of Zelda, Rygar, Castlevania, Dragon Quest and a dozen other golden age classics in a wholly unique and immeasurably wonderful new treasure. Here now at the end of PS2’s long life, when all eyes are pointed toward the future, Okami shows us power in the past.

God = Dog

Long ago in feudal Japan, the eight-headed creature Orochi terrorized the village of Kamiki. Every year a maiden was sacrificed to the monster’s hideous appetite. Its evil was so potent that it poisoned all of Nippon. When the beautiful Nami was chosen as Orochi’s next meal, her lover Nagi swore to defeat it. But his mighty sword couldn’t harm the beast, who savaged the warrior with teeth and claws. Just as Nagi was about to succumb to death, a white wolf appeared in the cave. This apparition had been seen in town earlier; villagers called it Shiranui and thought it was a servant of Orochi. But the wolf attacked the monster and held it at bay. Finally, blood from a hundred wounds matting its white fur, Shiranui collapsed, having bought Nagi enough time to recover. Moonlight bathed his sword, imbuing it with the magic needed to sever Orochi’s heads. Burying that sword in a rock at the cave entrance to bind any lingering evil inside, Nagi carried the wolf’s corpse back to Kamiki.

The villagers erected a shrine to the lupine hero, and for a hundred years all was well. But now the sword has been removed from the stone, and Orochi has risen. Nippon’s natural beauty is again tainted by evil, and monsters ravage the landscape. Sakuya, the wood sprite patron of Kamiki Village, uses the last of her dwindling life force to call for help from long-absent gods and so gains the attention of Okami Amaterasu, the sun goddess, the mother of us all. Amaterasu chooses to manifest as a certain white wolf, and your adventure begins.

For all the glurping melodrama of the above, Okami isn’t some ponderous Dunsan-Asian romance. It’s actually rather goofy.  There’s pie and fireworks and silly dances and trapezoidal love affairs and booze. An extraordinarily disrespectful little bouncing bug man named Issun serves as Amaterasu’s tagalong mascot and advisor, referring to her as “Ammy” or, more often, “furball.”  Said Furball has the habit of dozing off when a conversation gets too boring. In many ways, the game is a contrast to the oh-so-serious storylines and characters we usually see in plot-driven adventures.  Our canine protagonist is unique too—you’re a dog, yes, but in most video games you’re also an underdog, and that’s not exactly the case here.

Amaterasu is a god, and pains are taken to ensure that you never forget it. Flowers spring up wherever those white paws land.  Wild animals tumble over each other in an effort to get near. Night and day exist at her whim. She can literally paint and unpaint the foundations of reality, create and destroy with a celestial ink brush. The very stars themselves are drawn down from the heavens by the awesome grace of Amaterasu’s divine magic.

And yet for all this power, she is fragile. Deities gain strength through the reverence of mortals, and mortals have abandoned gods … because gods have apparently abandoned them—hiding, doing nothing while monsters lay waste to the realm. Amaterasu has been gone even longer than many of her divine cohorts. There is precious little worship going on when the game begins. No one is sure how to deal with the sudden appearance of an enormous white wolf that carries the sun on its back. Sakuya believes in you, but Sakuya is desperately weak—dying, in fact—and the creature Orochi’s sinister hold over Nippon is dramatically stronger and farther-reaching than the power of a single invalid wood sprite or forgotten sun goddess.

Practically speaking, your job is to save the realm by driving off the evil taint that’s ruining its rural splendor, to tie Orochi’s eight necks into knots and thus save Nippon. Thematically, Okami is about restoring human faith in the divine, and Clover’s greatest accomplishment is how adroitly it realizes this somber theme in such a silly, sweet-natured game.

Okami is very, very Japanese, to such a degree that the manual takes an almost apologetic tone in warning players that they might not get everything that’s going on. It is steeped in Japanese culture and mythology. The characters, plotlines and locations are a who’s who of Asian folklore, the eastern equivalent of a Hans Christian Andersen video game. Yet despite the highly Asian sensibility, to me it felt less … off-puttingly Japanese than, say, Final Fantasy. At last count, Okami had moved about 237,000 units worldwide, 150,000 of which were in Japan. These numbers aren’t huge but aren’t too bad either, and it’ll sell more as its legend grows (and oh, it is, you should hear what some people are saying about it—the Play review closed with “I love you Link, and I always will, but my new best friend is a breed apart”).

So … Pretty …

Fear of the Uncanny Valley effect in modern “realistic” game engines has led to a strong Dragon’s Lair graphical backlash, especially on consoles and generally in the form of cel-shaded or anime-inspired graphics.  Dragon Quest VIII, Zelda: Wind Waker, Trace Memory, Xenosaga and others have all gone this way. Even Clover’s own Viewtiful Joe games are cel-shaded. The effect is pretty and somewhat unique, but to my eyes it looks a lot better in still screencaps than in actual gameplay.

Okami is not cel-shaded, and its still screencaps cannot in any way do justice to the magnificent splendor of the actual gameplay. The whole thing is done in a style known mostly to Asian art historians and people who overuse Photoshop filters: as a sumi-e painting on a rice paper canvas.

Sumi-e is an acquired taste, but in perfect fluid motion it is an unforgettably delicious visual feast. Seeing the wind as wisping swirls of black ink on a far horizon, seeing rich blue mountains fade into view in dawn sunlight, perceiving for the first time the true meaning of the phrase “riot of color” when Amaterasu restores one of the magical Guardian Sapling trees that protect Nippon’s natural beauty. … Okami is so mouth-watering that I am seriously considering buying a gigantic TV just to fully appreciate it.

The game’s traditional-sounding Asian score fits elegantly with the visual triumph. The only sonic mistake Okami commits is the decision to subtitle all the speech against a vaguely Japanese-sounding babbletrack, an effect that worked far better in Shadow of the Colossus than it does here. It gets repetitive and a little grating, which wouldn’t have happened if they’d included a few more phonemes. I’m fine with the subtitling in general (English voice actors would have been a disaster), but hearing “ooglooboogloobooglooboo” over and over while you read dialogue gets irritating. Plus the type is small, and as I mentioned, so is my TV.

You Got Chocolate in My Peanut Butter

Your quest to save Nippon is characterized by a series of elegantly interconnected adventures and stories dealing not only with Orochi’s curse but a variety of other troubles that only Amaterasu and Issun can possibly solve. There’s a nasty sea monster, the mother of all snowstorms, a haunted forest and many other subplots great and small, usually requiring some combination of good reflexes and clever problem-solving to sort out.

Okami has elements of many genres—platforming, adventure, RPG and action all apply. But there’s more to it than that. There’s something so … joyous about it, in Amaterasu’s happy barks, in her running, her jumping, her digging of holes. I found myself ignoring the game for stretches, just doing these things. I don’t know if it’s the way the controls handle, or the graphics, or what, but it’s there. Okami is the video game version of Professor Dumbledore, managing somehow to be both gleeful and august.

The Celestial Brush system is getting much attention in the press; it’s a unique mechanism for affecting the game world that fits right in with the whole you-play-an-omnipotent-goddess thing. Hold R1 and the world becomes your canvas, to be literally painted with a giant ink brush. You’ll master more than a dozen brush powers: fix or destroy objects, summon dawn, slice enemies and so forth.  Most puzzles involve the Celestial Brush to some degree or another.  Amaterasu has forgotten many of the techniques (and Issun’s only along to steal them), so one of your objectives throughout is to relearn. Thankfully, Okami is very forgiving of poor calligraphy (hey, it’s hard to draw a circle with a thumbstick), so as long as you generally paint the shape you’re trying to, it lets you go.

As you restore Guardian Saplings, defeat enemies, feed wildlife and generally do your furry best to beat back the monster incursion and improve humanity’s faith in the gods, you gain faith points you can spend to improve Amaterasu’s capabilities. Individual capabilities can be adjusted to suit the player’s overall style. It’s a limited system: you can’t buy one Brush technique and forego another, for example, but this is not really a stat-based game so that’s okay.

Okami is dialogue-heavy and spends a good portion of its time in expository mode; if you have a problem with reading backstory or conversing with characters, it’s not for you. There is plenty of action as well. Combat can be sought out or avoided, and aside from a handful of required encounters you can choose to dodge most foes if you desire. These enemies are portrayed in the game world as “monster scrolls”—evil-looking green carpets that patrol the landscape and hone in on Amaterasu as she runs. Combat itself occurs in a separate gamespace, a sort of monsterdome, where you employ your celestial brush and a variety of upgradeable weapons to teach these demons who their daddy is.

One of the complaints we’re hearing about Okami is that it’s an extremely easy game, particularly the combat. Even a non-console guy like me encountered very little difficulty. As I get older, though, I care more that my games are fun and less that they’re hard, so the fact that Okami’s combat and action are pretty simple don’t really bother me. Plus, with 30 to 50 hours worth of play, not to mention several replay and find-more-secret opportunities, you really do get your money’s worth from this product.

The game can drag a bit when you’re facing some puzzle or challenge that you can’t quite figure out. In many cases, you must turn to Issun or one of the other characters for help, but Okami is not always sufficiently forthcoming about that. It can be hard to see the icon indicating that a character “still has more to say,” as it were, so you may spend some time just sort of wandering trying to figure out what you’re supposed to do. Fortunately, none of the challenges are particularly hair-tearing, though many do require a lot of thought and sometimes a good deal of running around.  It’s the worst thing I can say about a game that’s otherwise a tour de force.

I Got Your Four Leaves Right Here

By now the news is all over the wire (and FFC forums): publisher Capcom shut down Clover Studio a few weeks ago. Some more eager folks have speculated that “Capcom closed Clover” is a fancy way of saying “Clover wanted to go independent;” while that would be nice, the fact is that’s not the way the video games industry (or any industry) works.

Capcom owned Clover, lock, stock and barrel, and in fact started the studio using Capcom employees. Clover’s mandate was pretty simple: make games like Okami. Strange, unique, innovative, challenging, artistic, creative, unusual games that pushed the boundaries of what we’ve seen in the medium. Clover delivered big time, and not just with Okami either: Viewtiful Joe and God Hand both revitalized their respective genres. But, like it or not, the studio posted a loss of four hundred million yen, and Capcom is above all other things a business that’s in the business of staying in business. The decision, sad as it was, had to be made.

In a way I applaud Capcom, not for shutting Clover down but for starting it up in the first place. Only one other company—Sony—has a studio like that, a studio whose job is to create proof that games can transcend what they are right now, more or less regardless of the financials. The vast majority of video game executives at the publisher level don’t play games and don’t care about them. So it’s really great to see big, wealthy companies willing to essentially burn their profits in the interest of improving the human condition.  It could be equated with the Emperor Augustus commissioning Virgil to write the Aeneid, or the Church paying Michelangelo to paint its ceiling.

Okami is something really special. It blends jubilant gameplay, potent theme and rich artistry in an utterly seamless package. It has received universal acclaim from the gaming press, and hopefully it heralds a new era of platforming, a new set of heady days the likes of which we’ve not seen since Sonic 2. That its studio is gone, that it hasn’t sold a bazillion copies—these things are somewhat irrelevant. Okami is with us, and that’s what matters.

Above all else, it has a sweet temperament and gentle demeanor that makes it almost impossible to dislike. There aren’t many games out there that have made me just feel happy, and this is one of them. The End

The Verdict

The Lowdown

Developer: Clover Studio Publisher: Capcom Release Date: September 19, 2006

Available for: PlayStation 2

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16 Responses to Screw the Internet

  • Matt "Steerpike" Sakey

    God damn, Scout, I’d never heard of this Lanier fellow, but that’s pretty profound.

    Information is not a manufacturable item… as you said, we are making less and less. This is either indicative of a larger-scale societal transformation, or a bad thing. I’m afraid I’m inclined to assumed the latter.

    Thanks!

  • Mike "Scout" Gust

    Steerpike, that was exactly the argument Lanier was having with callers on the BBC. Lanier was all fatalistic about society’s drop in real productivity while his opponents claimed that this was a huge transformation and that he was just too old to grasp the coolness of it all. If you notice, the web address of that first Lanier link is well.com. I mean, that is old! The Well?

    Lanier’s thoughts were pretty much echoed by David Simon, one of the creators of The Wire. Here he speaks with Bill Moyers about the fate of paid journalism in the face of the web.

  • Spike

    I’ve read many criticisms of Facebook et. al.  I’ve also read contradictions of those criticisms, namely, that social sites are making people more connected than ever.  I think that that connectedness is an illusion.

    For several months at the end of 2008 and the beginning of 2009 my daughter badgered me to join FB.  I could connect with her and some of her friends that I know as well as renew old acquaintances with some of her friend’s mothers.  I finally signed up so she’d quit the badgering. I used to check in every day to see what daughter and friends were saying because if I didn’t she’d ask if I saw her post, or a friend’s post. 

    What I’ve learned is this:

    1.  “Karen Likes John’s photo (or post)” IS NOT communication.

    2.  The reason I lost contact with some of these “friends” in the first place is that we no longer had anything in common.

    3.  I am bombarded with so many ads in so many places that I can do without more.  My policy is to never click on ads on FB or on many other sites. 

    4.  While FB’s original mission was connectedness/communication, I think it has become “Let’s make as much money from these fools as we can.”  “Wanna have gobs of fun playing a free game on FB?”  That game is gonna cost ya big, folks. 

    5.  Social sites are just more places where your personal info can be stolen.  There’s enough risk out there as it is.  Additional risk is not providing any valuable payoff for me.

    6.  Why do I want to “friend” a certain handbag manufacturer?  Why do I want to take a quiz that tells me what my personality is?  FB content providers tell you up front that if you click the link to take their quiz (goes for other types of content as well) you are giving them permission to access your profile info.  That’s ok.  I’ll also give you my SSN, bank account number and the key to my front door.  Not.

    7.  Don’t even get me started on the number of people who start an account in a pet’s name, and even have the pets making friends and posting.

    “…he was just too old to grasp the coolness of it all.”

    No, it’s just that most of us get to the age when we demand a bit of wheat with our chaff.

    At 38 my daughter is older than the average demographic of social sites although I know that that demographic is skewing up.  She seems to be cooling on FB.  Some of her 221 friends are as well.  Many of them do want some wheat.  When more cooling has taken place I will unjoin.

    I wonder, though, what new fad will come along when FB, Twitter and others run their course?  MySpace, anyone?

  • Mike "Scout" Gust

    My favorite line from the BBC interview was when Lanier was comparing MySpace and Facebook. He admitted that MySpace had some eye gougingly bad pages but said that he liked the “strangeness” of personalities that you get with it. With Facebook, he claimed that it was like looking at a tax form. A boring, watered down, bland presentation of people.

    I joined Facebook almost exactly a year ago. Apart from sparking up a new friendship with a very dear buddy, I’ve gotten about zero back from it. I sort of read with bemusement the activities of people I hardly know and could care less about. And when you consider how much information the devs harvest there…it’s scary. Lanier claims that the information is so far worthless to the investors and that the whole thing has become a sort useless ritual serving no purpose. He claimed that Google’s ads on the other hand will probably turn out to be the greatest advertising model ever created. He also thinks Google should stop before it’s too late but says they probably won’t. Just a glance at the side bar reveals about 4 ads for advertising agencies. Heh.

  • lokimotive

    Has anybody read Anti-Oedipus? I’m slogging my way through it (the third attempt I believe), and Deleuze and Gauttari’s ideas seem relevant to this in a way that I’m not sure I can articulate. This probably has something to do with a conversation I was eavesdropping on that, coincidentally, mentioned a lot of Deleuze and Gauttari’s theories. Someone was talking about another theorist (whose name I didn’t catch) who was defending “Generation Y” essentially. The argument went that Generation Y is an example of a “de-Oedipalized” cultural group (that’s Anti-Oedipus jargon, just stay with me). Apparently this meant that they made connections in a different manner than other generations, the idea of bricollage was brought up and things were generally mired in a lot of reasons why I don’t have my Masters in English. What I got from it was this Generation Y shoots out connections everywhere and attempts to make up a whole idea with them as opposed to relying on predefined pathways. In Deleuze and Guattari’s language: the schizo as opposed to Oedipus. In language that probably makes sense: Peer to Peer as opposed to client-server.

    So, of course, no one’s really right. I’m skeptical of the idea that Generation Y (full disclosure: I’m 29 so I’m part of that group) has enacted some sort of paradigm shift in how to operate in social systems, but facebook has changed how I connect with people. Then again, it’s not like I don’t value face to face communication.

    The future is somewhere in between. I’m really not cynical enough to believe that we are at the end times of civilized society because of Web 2.0. Instead society will change and stay the same because that’s what it does. Facebook is not the future; it’s probably a rung up the ladder though.

  • kaythomas

    To me, Facebook and Twitter are 0’s. They are not worth my time.  I do not care what someone I know or don’t know did a half hour ago or will do next.  I have met up with people on facebook I had lost contact with.  But, in truth, the reason I had lost contact was I was not that interested in staying in contact.

    I think for many people the Facebook/Twitter world is great.  For me it has nothing to offer. 
    kay

  • Matt "Steerpike" Sakey

    Tap has an automated device that twits… tweets… whatever whenever someone posts a new article. Just in case it draws some visitors.

    To be honest, though, I’m on Kay’s side of the fence, I don’t understand Twitter and I don’t understand why it’s so popular. I barely care what I’m doing from moment to moment, why should anyone else?

    I don’t get Facebook either, though I’m a member to keep track of all the girls who wouldn’t give me the time of day in high school.

  • Lewis B

    Tweets are great for giving me snippets of news.  If I like what I’ve read in the short paragraph tweets give, then I will visit the main page for that tweet. (Very good for following world news, favourite columnists, etc.)

    However, reading tweets from people such as “Just woke up, Madonna is giving me a massage while I shave my nuts” is not my idea of a good read.

  • Toger

    I use tweets the same way Lewis does. Of the people/things I follow, if the tweet is interesting I’ll follow the link to read the entire article. I follow fairly intelligent people, so I’m not subjected to the idiocy of “Just brushed my teeth while sitting on toilet”.

  • Gregg B

    @loki: I’m afraid I’ve not heard of them. I’m a couple of years below you so that puts me in the same Generation Y as well. I read through a few of those links Scout posted as well as a few more on Lanier’s new book “You Are Not a Gadget” and it took me a fair while to get to the crux of what he is saying and he has a lot to say, most of which I find very confusing.

    As a graphic designer the whole “everything is becoming advertising” thing has been bothering me for years. The incessant barrage of advertising is like fingernails on the chalkboard of my soul, which sort of makes me a hypocrite. After all the years of tuning my art and design skillz my creative abilities have amounted to nothing more than crafting pretty ads that sell things. Non of it speaks any truth or has any sort of ‘beauty’; it’s just stone cold mechanical capitalism. Granted there are ads out there that are beautiful, clever and visionary but the front line stuff is as dull as it gets. I’m sure this isn’t strictly what he’s getting at but it’s definitely something that irks me in relation to Scout’s last remark.

    Anyway, I remember Twitter just exploding in what seemed like the space of a week and I still can’t fathom the allure of it aside from providing a direct stream of consciousness from famous folk to their ravenous fans. I wish I’d thought of it to be honest. I can see the creators sitting around a table staring at Facebook and then saying “I know! We make a website that’s just about status updates! You can even update them with your mobile phone!”.

    With regards to Twitter news snippets, unless it’s for a phone, I don’t see the point because RSS feeds do a great job. At present too great; I simply can’t keep up with my subscriptions. There’s too much information on this super highway.

  • Jen

    Twitter is officially the dumbest thing ever.

    That said, it looks like I will have to be the official “tweeter” for my day job before too long. I can’t wait! (roll eyes)

  • xtal

    I’m with everyone else here. I’m glad to say I’ve never signed up for Facebook; I fear that if I ever had I would have long ago died from loss of brain cells due to reading moronic status updates. It’s as Kay said: ninety-five per cent of people with whom you lose contact are probably no longer in your life because you have nothing left in common. And echoing Steerpike’s comment, me eating toast and jam on a Sunday morning watching Fawlty Towers is not interesting, not to me. Why the hell would anyone else give a shit?

    Twitter I signed up for about a year ago, not really understanding what it was. I now understand it…but don’t care to use it often. I have made 58 tweets over that year. I suspect for some that is a daily or weekly average. It’s just Facebook status updates without all the drunken photographs. I admit it can be mildly useful for following, say, a news site. Usually when I hop on my twitter (once every two weeks??) it reminds me that I should read The Onion more often. That’s about it.

    Let’s see… looking at the actual humans I follow, um… Wil Wheaton is happy that the LA Kings have won 9 games in a row, my sister-in-law thought our dinner tonight was “delicious,” and Kevin Smith’s batteries are recharged … or something.

    Wow, my life is already getting better!

    p.s.  <—– Gen Y'er (can we call ourselves that?) and proud that when I Google my own name a real estate company pops up.

  • Fraser

    Twitter is exactly as useless as the person who’s writing it. If someone is telling you boring shit over Twitter, it’s the person wasting your time, not the delivery channel.

    MySpace is the same, but it seems more intrinsically garbage because for some reason almost everyone who used it was an intellectual embryo with a fetish for unreadable hyperneon text on top of garish uninteresting photos. Facebook’s great trick is that it prevents you from realising that most of your friends would make a brutally hideous homepage for themselves if they could.

    That’s the argument against the whole of this post: the internet isn’t evil, but the people who use it might be. It’s people who make business models successful; people who make money flow to advertisers instead of artists, by buying into the advertising.

    This has been a pretty didactic post, so let me compensate by saying VIDEOGAMES WOOOOOOO!!!

  • Gregg B

    Good point about not blaming the delivery channel Fraser. I seem to recall Lanier saying that he preferred the personality that MySpace has over Facebook despite its Craptastic Pages of Illegibility. I’m trying to think of something intelligent to follow that up with but my brain is failing me at the moment, so…

    VIDEOGAMES WOOOOOO!!!

  • Jason Venter

    Fraser, I really loved your following comment:

    “Facebook’s great trick is that it prevents you from realising that most of your friends would make a brutally hideous homepage for themselves if they could.”

    I think that may just be one of the most hilariously true comments I’ve read in a comments area on any video game web site ever.  That sounds overly dramatic, I know, but I actually mean it.  Kudos to you!

  • Mike "Scout" Gust

    Yeah but don’t you miss all the ugliness of MySpace? All those hideous pages at least had personality or what Lanier called the “strangeness of the person” to them.

    I actually don’t agree with a lot of what Lanier says esp “the hive mind must die” stuff. But I do think he is right about the spirit shriveling blandness of Facebook.

    I also suspect that Twitter is going to be around for a while. It will be more and more influential. People are simply not as willing to ingest huge amounts of information in the form of pages of text anymore. The delivery systems that succeed will be those that can communicate a lot of information in a short amount of time. Most days we want “glimpses” or “snapshots” not total immersion. Lewis, Toger and Fraser are correct in that you get out of it what you decide to follow.

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