“Okami”
Capcom
PLAYSTATION2
(Out of 5)
The Playstation 3 and Nintendo Wii will be released next month
to gamers ready to shell out their hard-earned cash for the latest
interactive wares. These, along with the Xbox 360, will likely
leave old game consoles in the dust, forgotten in a haze of resale
bins and budget pricing. Yet gamers shouldn’t be so quick to
move on, especially if games as astounding as Capcom’s
“Okami” are still being released.
The most immediately noticeable thing about Okami is its
beautiful graphics. The game resembles a watercolor painting, with
flowing, lush colors filling every inch of the screen. The graphics
are like a more artistically inclined version of cel-shading, a
craze which swept gaming a few years ago in games such as
“Jet Grind Radio” and “The Legend of Zelda: The
Wind Waker.”
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A large part of Okami’s gameplay revolves around the use
of a device called the “Celestial Brush,” which you can
access within the game at any time and turns the screen into a
colorless canvas. You then use the joystick to paint things onto
the game world. This can be something as simple as painting a line
through an enemy to damage it or drawing a circle around a wilted
flower to make it grow.
This play mechanic leads to outside-the-box thinking. There are
situations in the game where a player will come across, say, a
broken bridge. Normally, players would have to search a way to fix
the bridge so they could continue adventuring. But in
“Okami,” it’s as simple as drawing in the missing
portion of the bridge. Other uses of the brush include drawing
bombs to blow up weakened portions of walls, drawing the sun or
moon in the sky to change the time of day, or drawing lines from
floating flowers to your character to pull them around like a
grappling hook.
“Okami,” for all its innovation, isn’t
flawless. Enemies are quickly dispatched with minimal difficulty,
and the game makes your next move blatantly obvious at all times
through hints like highlighted text when characters speak. Some
players may also be turned off by the fact that “Okami”
is extremely Japanese, for lack of a better term, with a heavy
emphasis on Japanese mythology and culture.
Yet it’s refreshing to play a game so inherently clever
and creative. It’s lengthy, clocking in at around 30-40 hours
of gameplay for thorough players. There are constantly new things
to find and new brush techniques to discover, and finding new uses
for the Celestial Brush is nearly as fun as the game’s main
quest.
The Nintendo Wii’s big launch title, “The Legend of
Zelda: Twilight Princess,” is a similar game that many
players will probably play instead of “Okami.”
Yet it would be a shame if a game as creatively magnificent as
“Okami” got lost in the shuffle.