Inky black lines envelop geometric edges across the world bleeding out across the image. A textured paper effect is applied to the scene lending the game a sense of texture as if it were being drawn before the player. Objects such as trees and grass consist of beautiful, flat paintings carefully placed into each scene. This is combined with a soft glow applied across the game world. It’s hauntingly beautiful on original hardware with a look quite unlike any other game on the market - even now. In its original form, Okami runs at a 512x448 resolution, which looks great on a nice CRT, but blown up on a large flat panel, it does start to show its age.
When it was released, HexaDrive posted this blog detailing some of the improvements and techniques used to build the HD version of the game, suggesting a native rendering resolution of 4K. However, further on into the blog, the suggestion is we’re looking at 1080p with 4x MSAA. As a result, arguments have persisted for years - is the game really rendering at a higher resolution internally? Does Okami use SSAA? Our best guess is that it is indeed full HD with MSAA, but what is beyond doubt is that image quality on the PS3 version is simply exceptional - and possibly the best on the system. Okami was bolstered still further with higher resolution assets, algorithmically generated by Hexadrive. They look superb. And this brings us onto the third and final conversion effort for Xbox One, PC, PlayStation 4 and the new Switch version. It is undoubtedly the best version yet. Based on HexaDrive’s PS3 port, this new conversion seems to have been handled by Buzz and Vingt et un Systems. All the benefits of the PS3 version are present and accounted for - improved textures, exceptional image quality and, perhaps the greatest feature of all, the option to skip through lengthy dialogue sequences. There’s a lot of text in Okami and it can become tiresome at points, so this new feature is highly desirable. While this function was initially made available on Wii, it was not present in the PS3 port, so it’s nice to see it return in the latest edition.
Looking back, there’s a wide range of excellent Okami HD ports and I can recommend all of them - with the possible exception of the Wii version, which lacks some of the original’s visual effects. The PS3 version is perhaps the most technically impressive, delivering native 1080p with 4x MSAA and 16x anisotropic filtering on a PlayStation 3 - which is quite a feat. It’s only let down by noticeable screen-tearing in some scenes and the lack of dialogue skipping, but otherwise it’s a very close match for the PS4 and Xbox One renditions of the game. While the 4K console twins offer the best console experience overall, image quality is good enough across the board that any one of them are worth a shot.
Excerpts from Okami HD's Switch release is a nigh-on flawless port | Eurogamer.net