Battles are not random. You either see the enemy in the field and can often avoid them (similar to Persona games) unless they are literally blocking your passage. or they are scripted events.
The Switch version has direct touch-to-brush. Its a large game and that is a pretty nice upgrade. I think its worth getting it again, on sale.
I got a skill that allowed me to add color to the world.
The example has me painting trees to bring them into bloom.
After the turtorial I returned to the hub. I see a bare, leafless tr-HEY MAYBE YOU CAN USE YOUR NEW SKILL ON THOSE TREES.
I eject the disc across the room.
Years later I tried playing Okamiden which was a very faithful sequel. Right down to the tutorializing so I never have to think. It’s like sliding across the ground but constantly being stopped to let a car pass. Don’t want to be hit by car! Attacks swing wide so you don’t have to aim (I am not saying this is bad I am saying this is symptomiatic of the whole design.)
For all the aesthetic design I have to deal with endless tutorials and unfunny jokes and no one shuts up. Hearing I am supposed to be in the company of these characters I do not like sucks. That they prevent me from even having the chance to think sucks. The combat made me think about what I had in my fridge.
But I’m getting older and only making this post because you asked. I don’t like being mean to video games anymore. Have fun.
Need more Okamiden feedback, not sure if I should do that instead of a 3rd 100% of Okami (now pc pretty)
Oh yeah absolutely play Okamiden person that loves Okami.
Okami is reputed to be a project that was listless until its last year of development, when they decided to ‘just make it like Zelda’ and race to finish. And I think it shows as a first draft project.
It needs editing. Normally, scenarios are plotted and levels are built in concert with the scenario and new abilities coming online; these are under periodic review and are trimmed, revised. And often cut; a good third of planned content usually gets cut from games as they run out of time and the poorer parts are removed.
Okami plays like a game where nothing was cut, a team who had gained enough confidence making b-rung Zelda games (the Oracle series) believed they were ready to templatize Zelda and hsip it in the brief time they had. And it plays out as a near endless repetition of: new area, clear the demons, clear the smoke, talk to an NPC, clear the dungeon, return to smoke, clear, clear. The formula quickly becomes bare and the game keeps stalling.
It’s gorgeous! And nothing is particularly bad. But I think you could make an excellent 20-30-hour game out of this, what, 80-hour Zelda-like?
I’m hardly one to talk as I’ll stand for Terranigma (and any of Quintet) any day, but here we’re in another trap of the times: 3D games just inherently drag out three times longer than 2D, so I can feel comfortable telling people to push through Terranigma’s 10 hours of filler in the back half to get to the end, but I can’t in good conscience advise people to do anything but duck out of Okami when they’ve seen enough.
Rudie, I have a name.
(that the closing credits showed me from drawing it on the Imp Mask earlier, like an ukiyo-e sig)
I remember Okami being a game I really wanted to like, but the never being allowed to think for myself combined with someone telling me how long it was made me re-evaluate my enthusiasm.
It’s cool that people like it enough for it to have reached that level of Capcom game that gets ported to everything though.
Wild that Okami-den hasn’t been ported even once.
Much as I love it I was worn out by the end. Being long-winded and somewhat rote-arduous is critically a fat to chew, but in a certain respect (I do think it would have been best shortened about 20% maybe) this does support an overall impressive grandeur and scope.
I can appreciate length for pacing reasons; I think to take advantage of it you have to up the stakes and change the world. Okami keeps doling out one environment at a time so its revelations of ‘more’ don’t come across as earth-shattering to me. If I use Terranigma as comparison again, shifting between resurrections and world-states is a meaningful reframing of the stakes that makes ‘stop the recurring apocalypse’ feel different from ‘begin the resurrection’ and ‘return life’.
sorry is okami 80 hours long
that’s where I was when I realized I needed to quit
Indeed, Okami is not some top tier game in terms of story script. And it certainly has an overarching formula. A lot of games do. Especially from the PS2 era. Okami probably hides it a little less than some.
But, the journey is much more than the destination. The game is filled with fun, funny, goofy, ethereal, out there characters, places, and moments. Those places are also perfectly transposed into a most beautiful interpretation of watercolor painting style. I wasn’t playing so much that I wanted to revive the next tree, purge the plague, and reveal the next detailed bits of plot. I was playing because I wanted to see where we were gonna go next. What it looked and felt like. and who was gonna be there.
Once the game gets rollin’, I never once thought “they should have cut that area/quest/character.” It may not, after a certain point, do a whole lot to up the stakes on your tasks. But it does continuously try to outdo, outweird, or at least continuously match itself, for the areas you visit and the characters within.
Hell nah generally but could be granted playstyle, 40-50 is a high average
I get how sweet you are on Terranigma and it’s a cut from one of my favorite cloths (those Quintet triplets in general) for the dozen hours it took though, I was surprised to find gameplay largely a chore, when I can pick up many from the era and not feel so off put. I adored the spiritual tone/plot and will probably never return from everything else. Like I get where you’re coming from (heavily!) but evaluating Terranigma in a critical contrast some places, especially Okami’s entire aim doesn’t hold much form.
I can’t deal with that little change over dozens of hours, I get very aware of my mortality. Or, I can deal with it if I have a complex subtext to reflect everything into, but Okami prefers to play everything as comedy sitcom.
I would love 80 hours of comedy sitcom action RPG if it were actually funny
If you were to see it through, you’d find amusement, probably just not enough. Of course it’s not a thoroughly dumb uncharming 40+ hours (no way it takes double that unless you meander)
but did you like the game
Yeah I was somewhere in the early 60’s for play time. But, I did every last quest that I could find.
never a more true post