mDuo13

I finally, today, finished Okami (for Wii) after almost 37 hours of game-time. Now, compared to some other games like Tales of Vesperia (Current playtime: 74 hours, 27 minutes, and that's not even finished), that may not seem like much, but Okami was deceptively, perhaps even unpleasantly long. On one hand, I can't say that it's a bad game - it has a host of qualities aside from its unique art style that are quite commendable - but nonetheless, I can't unequivocally say that I liked it, either.

My main problem with Okami is that, far too often, it frustrates me. It is a game that is both too easy and too hard. I beat the game without dying even a single time. In fact, except for maybe one relatively early story battle, I didn't even really come close to dying. I thought the battle system was pretty fun (resembling an action RPG in a fair number of ways) but the enemies tended to spend too much time being invincible-except-to-their-gimmick and they weren't often formiddable after you knew what that gimmick was. The rather harsh grading system for battles gives something of an impression of difficulty, but it's not actual difficulty. (I got graded very poorly in several battles despite not coming even close to dying once, and with my Astral Pouch full to level 2, dying once isn't much.) Meanwhile, the minigames and sidequests tended to be fist-poundingly, teeth-grindingly, profanity-inducingly frustrating, and occasionally borderline impossible (I'm looking at you, Blockhead Grande). They also suffer from the problem of not providing you enough information - for example, the direction (left-to-right or the opposite) of slashing in certain sequences matters, but there's no hint that you're doing it wrong aside from the fact that it simply doesn't recognize your slash stroke. And given how picky the thing is about things being straight lines, that's easy to dismiss.

Then there's the storytelling. It seemed like a fairly simple, but likable story at first, about restoring the world bit by bit before taking on the Big Bad, but it throws some twists at you out of nowhere, and some twists that are so heavily hinted at that when they're finally "revealed" it's just a relief to have the hinting over with. By the end there are a lot of things that seem rather loosely resolved (such as how everything works normally underwater). And as for why Ammy - a female wolf god - stares lecherously at female women, that's apparently a translation issue (Amaterasu is genderless in Japanese). I'm willing to write off some of the quirks as just fanciful or humorous, but the plot didn't feel nearly as strongly coherent in the second half or so. That said, it ended in a nice, if cliche, way, and the final boss had some really cool forms and attacks.

To an extent, my frustration at the game may have been influenced by my anticipation of whatever else I'm going to do next, but it just didn't feel like a pleasant surprise when it turned out there was more game to go. I'll argue that my frustration was more a result of the abominably slow text speed during some story sequences (in many parts, you can hold A to make it display faster, but not all the time), where the unnecessary amounts of dialogue were downright onerous.

So needless to say, the game has its flaws, including ones I haven't mentioned here, but it was pretty fun to play when I wasn't frustrated at them. I also can't discount the eerie number of similarities with Twilght Princess, which make it hard to think the Nintendo creative team wasn't borrowing from it or vice-versa (though they came out around the same time). In any case, I've now paid my dues to the game and am free to move onward and upward to my next challenge, whatever that may be. (I'm currently undecided.)