Okami (PlayStation 2)

Reviewed by Greg Kasavin
Review date: 09/18/06
Release date: 09/19/06

It's only fitting that a game about a god should have an awe-inspiring presentation such as this. Okami is based on the Japanese legend of the sun god, Amaterasu, whom you control throughout the game in the form of a white wolf. A truly epic journey awaits this wolf, who wields divine power quite literally as an artist wields a brush. Despite its unusual premise and other unique qualities, Okami is in many ways a textbook action adventure game. It takes its cues from the Legend of Zelda series in particular and achieves similarly outstanding results. Much like in those games, in Okami you'll traverse a vast countryside filled with intrigue, meet a variety of interesting characters, delve into dungeons chock-full of various traps and fearsome-looking creatures, and become more and more powerful as you go. All the while, Okami's stunning good looks give it the appearance of a cross between a cartoon and a traditional Japanese ink-and-watercolor painting, and perhaps best of all, the game keeps going and going for much longer than most other games like it.

Okami boasts an extraordinary visual style, but there's much more to it than all the pretty graphics.

Though Okami's premise and characters are steeped in Japanese folklore, you don't need to be familiar with the source material to appreciate this game--you just need a bit of an open mind. The story plays out like a modernized anime version of a myth, except with a far more original visual style than what most anime brings to bear. The story is simple: Amaterasu, reborn as a white wolf, has a mission to rid medieval Japan of a demonic curse that's swept across the nation. Apparently, it's all the doing of a massive eight-headed serpent that was killed 100 years ago and has been reborn. Will history repeat itself, or is there an even more sinister plot at work here? At the beginning of the game, Amaterasu is joined by a pint-sized creature named Issun, a bold and smart-alecky little guy who does all the talking for the both of them. Their journey begins by purging the evil from a small village but expands to encompass all corners of Japan, and beyond. The story unfolds mostly through frequent, nicely animated cutscenes. There's a lot of dialogue throughout the game, which makes for plenty of reading since all the characters speak in gibberish that sounds just vaguely Japanese.

The story boils down to a conventional battle of good against evil but effectively sets up a series of remarkable, self-contained subplots that are all seamlessly interconnected. During your quest to purify Japan, you won't just battle that eight-headed serpent--you'll unearth the cause of a deadly plague threatening a huge city, help villagers in danger of freezing to death from a relentless blizzard, come face-to-face with an enormous water dragon that's terrorizing Japan's coastline, and more. While the game is a little dense with exposition, overall you'll feel like you've gone on an incredible and long journey once all is said and done. It helps that Okami will take you at least 30 hours to finish the first time through, and that's not due to any sources of frustration during the gameplay, either. Okami is very long for an action adventure game, especially for one that has so much beautiful scenery in it. If anything, the game probably could have shed a couple of hours for a slightly quicker, tighter pace, since the experience can start to drag in a few spots, such as an obligatory fight-all-the-bosses-again sequence near the end. The game's scarce shortcomings are all this minor.

You're no ordinary wolf in Okami, thanks mostly to your ability to paint miracles using the celestial brush.

Just running around in the world can be exciting, which is fortunate, because there's a lot of running around to be done. Amaterasu, or "Ammy" as her companion likes to call her, can run very quickly and jump quite high, and when engaged in battle, she fights with a divine instrument on her back that acts like a sword. Since she's a wolf, she can also bark and dig holes, but that's not all. The most unusual aspect of Okami's gameplay is in the brush techniques you'll frequently have to use to defeat foes and reach places no man or wolf could go, and these represent her divine powers.

You'll learn more than a dozen different brush techniques over the course of the game, each gifted to Ammy by one of her fellow animal gods. These let her harness the power of the elements, slash clean through solid stone and other objects, rejuvenate plants, blow things up, and much more. To start using brush techniques, you just press and hold R1 to make the scene instantly switch to look like an ink painting on parchment while a large brush (that appears to be Ammy's tail) comes down from offscreen. Then you can draw these simple shapes and lines, corresponding to your different brush techniques, and miracles happen. For example, Ammy can change night into day if you paint a circle in the sky, or she can cleave an enemy in two if you paint a line straight across that foe. She can create large lily pads that serve as floating platforms in the water, and then summon gusts of wind that will push this makeshift boat along, among a variety of other uses. It's exciting to gain each new brush technique, as well as to discover new ways of putting together everything you've learned.