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dkirschner's Okami (PS2)
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| [November 26, 2011 09:00:04 PM]
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I can't believe I haven't written about Okami yet. I've meant to do it a couple times. In Okami, you play as a reincarnated god, in the form of a white wolf, on a quest to save the world from evil. The story is rooted in Japanese mythology, which is such a cool inspiration. The one thing I knew about Okami beforehand was that you get to paint with a brush, and that different brush strokes do various things, like attacks or whatever. So basically, you go around learning different brush strokes from different 'brush gods,' and I assume these are part of the Japanese mythology. I recognized one, which is the rabbit in the moon pounding rice cakes. Most of the brush gods are hidden, captured, lost, and you get them during or at the end of quest/exploration segments. There's really no pattern to when you learn brush strokes, which I like. I've learned 3 in pretty rapid succession, and then gone for hours without learning one. The game is linear, but it's not predictably so, and there's a lot of exploration to be done, including backtracking to use newly acquired brush strokes to unlock things you couldn't unlock the first time around. One other thing I really like about it is that the locations all seamlessly blend into one another. What I mean is that in most adventure games or RPGs or whatever, there's the overland map, then towns, then dungeons, and they're all delineated. In Okami, they flow into one another, and half the time you don't realize you're in a dungeon or even doing a quest until you're halfway through it. The quests are like that too, seamlessly integrated into the story and the exploration that you'd do anyway. There's no one with a yellow exclamation mark over his head.
Speaking of exploration, the game's art style is beautiful. I can't describe it to do it justice. Just go watch a video or two. The music and sounds as well, very cool. Characters talk in this weird gibberish. My roommates keep asking me if it's Japanese, because it's obviously a Japanese game. I keep saying no, it's just gibberish and you're supposed to read the subtitles, and they keep saying how weird it is. I like it though! It's somehow charming, like the other 99% of the game.
The 'celestial brush' is your main tool in the game to defeat enemies, solve puzzles, and do neat platforming tricks. I've no idea how far along I am in the game, but I've still got 3 brush techniques to go. Some of the ones I've learned so far are slash (which lets you cut enemies in half or just attack them, and basically...cut stuff in half), bomb (which lets you blow holes in walls and is really effective to attack enemies), vine (which lets you draw a vine connecting your character to these pink flowers, pulling your character to the flower in the air to reach high places and things), slow time (which lets you get past fast enemies, confuses guards, and so on), and more. There are also regular skills you can buy like double-jump, super dig (the main character, being a wolf, can dig up treasure in the ground -- super dig lets you dig in hard surfaces like rocks), and dodge. Each brush move has a specific brush stroke. So like the vine, you drawn a connecting line. The bomb, you draw a circle with a line through it like a fuse. The slash, you just draw a slash through whatever it is you want to slash. To make the sun come out, draw a circle in the sky. To make the moon come out, draw a crescent in the sky. It's all very intuitive and the game is thankfully not too harsh on how specific you draw. It really helps artistically challenged folks like myself. Apparently there is a Wii version now too where you use the Wiimote as the brush! Sounds awesome.
I can't say enough about how amazing this game is. The story is excellent, the characters are fun and unique, everything about the gameplay is fantastic, the bosses are epic. The only only only little thing I can complain about is that there is too much dialogue fluff, especially from Issun, a 'traveling artist' who rides on your back and serves as your voice since wolves can't talk. Issun is chatty and likes to comment on women's breasts, which gets old fast. On the other hand, NPCs all have two sets of dialogue, so you can talk to everyone twice and it'll be different, or elaborate on the first thing they said, most of the time. That's cool. I never like it when NPCs say one thing over and over, or when most of them say 1 thing, and then a few of them say a whole lot of things and give you a quest, and you end up talking to everyone 10 times hoping to exhaust them and find secrets and things. Okami is good about NPC dialogue! I'll finish the game this week, very much looking forward to it.
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dkirschner's Okami (PS2)
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Current Status: Finished playing
GameLog started on: Thursday 27 October, 2011
GameLog closed on: Monday 2 January, 2012 |
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