Okami

There is a game out there known as Okami, though I’m not really sure what the title has to do with the game. Basically, the whole game is about a wolf who somehow has to paint things with a brush. By painting things you can change the world. With paint. Yeah, the game is pretty lame. See, a wolf can’t hold a brush. They don’t have the thumbs, or the hands, or the telekinetic psychokinesisness to hold one and draw a picture man. Do these games not want us to think and instead just assume everything can happen ever? Well, guess what? I won’t.

So in this game there’s also a story thing, like this. There’s a sun goddess from some Japanese Native American legend or something, and in this game she has to possess a wolf and come to life from a statue. If this isn’t making any sense, now you know what the game is like. Why does she come to Earth (or this place called Nippon or something) as a wolf if wolfies howl at the moon and like night time but don’t always like the day as much? Wolves don’t like the sun. The game doesn’t make sense.

The basic plot of the game involves this cute wolfie wolf using her magic brush of fun to get rid of this dragon demon guy named Orochi. As you do this you also fight lame things and do cliche things like go inside somebody’s body and lame fetch quests where you have to feed dogs. The really dumb part of the game is that you don’t have a real plot to watch, cause the plot keeps changing. You do one thing and it says “Yay, now do this!” The game’s plot is really repetitive also, since you have to keep doing things like fighting this Wakka guy or convincing a guy that he can cut things down by cutting them down for him.

While doing all this there’s also a bug guy on your face called Issun, and he’s like Navi except Navi was less annoying because he was Navi. Issun keeps talking to you all the time. He’s a perverted lame man who hates things and is rude to people, and he doesn’t even have a voice. In fact, none of the people, not even the wolf, have voices. There’s just a ton of text everywhere. They made this game like a book, but I don’t like books, and the text moves slowly so you can’t even skip it. Couldn’t they have people talk and didn’t people have those voices in Nippon or Japapan or wherever the place with not-sense-making wolves this game was set in? They just didn’t want to put work into this game.

So let’s play the game. After a ton of text at the lame start you get to draw things by holding R1 and moving the stickly stick. You first have to draw a river, but why do you do this and how? If you can draw water, couldn’t you like drown the world? No, you can’t, because this game is way too linear and doesn’t let you have fun. You can draw lilly pads in water, but they don’t let you have fun by drawing them in the air and making a staircase of lilly pads. That would have been fun. Why don’t the makers of this game want me to have fun? That happens a lot in this thing. See, you can do things like plant a tree, but it just dies in a few short amounts of time and then it turns invisible. Why not plant things and watch them grow while raising cows and giving eggs to girls so you can get married? Why can you only draw lines from things to other things to use water or fire or lightning bolts of lightning until way late in the game when you can do lame sidequest things? If you’re the goddess man, do some fun things, don’t be a lame person, but she is, as is this game, which isn’t fun.

The really horrible part of this game is that it could have just been called “The Legend Of Zelda: Brush of Ink and you play as a wolf.” The game is so much like a Zelda game. There are dungeons with keys and you get a sidekick who tells you stuff and there are all sorts of collections and little sidequests to get lame stuff. Even playing a wolf was ripped off from Zelda, that new “Princess of the Twilight” one. They don’t even steal good things from Zelda, though, since you don’t get cool items like a hookshot or spinny thing. You instead just have to draw more stuff, and can’t use it very often. You can draw a vine from a little flying flower thing that doesn’t have roots and shouldn’t be able to survive, but there aren’t a lot of them. Also, there are random things like a space ship buried underground. The game doesn’t make any sense.

Along the game you get to do things like throwing cards at ghosts and climbing a tower with some fish, but nothing that’s really that new. The game feels lame and not original at all, since you do the same thing a lot and the story makes no sense. Why do people talk to a wolf? If I saw a wolf walking around my fun American town where I live I wouldn’t go and talk to it and tell it I wanted it to draw a boat or something, I would call the control of animals and tell them to bring a trap to trap the wolf, since I don’t like wolves. Why did they think I or other people would like this game? People don’t like wolves.

The graphics are really horrible also. The Clover guys felt like “Oh, we aren’t good enough to make a wolf look good”, so instead of good graphics they just used some weird cel-shaded watercolor thing. Cel-shading, another ripoff of Zelda, is just a lame excuse for not drawing well, and watercolor is just making things blurry so they don’t need to be detailed. All the trees and stuff are 2d and always face you, which is so unrealistic. Trees don’t turn towards you all the time, they only do that in a game made without enough money by a lame studio. No wonder Capcom made them dead, since their games didn’t sell, which is good, because they aren’t.

See, the game is weird and lame because it’s too long also. You do this thing and the game should be over but instead of credits they made you go to a new half of the Earth and do lame things. After that you just do random things like time travel and digging bamboo rockets from a hot spring and climbing a tower to give fish to a kitty. It’s like they just kept trying to come up with random things to make the game long so nobody would see the credits ever and find out who made this bad and not fun game.

You can also try to collect these beads in the game, but there are too many of them and the only reason you can use them is to replay a game which nobody would want to do with this one since it’s too long and you can’t skip the text and the graphics are lame as is everything else.

So this game of Okami doesn’t offer anything fun or new or not involving wolves. As such, I don’t like it and you shouldn’t either.