As half the gaming world holds its breath waiting for the next wave of big-ticket consoles, the other (poor) half, not surprisingly, bides its time enjoying the spoils of an entire semi-decade of delayed games, over-endorsed and over-funded attempts, and the occasional genuine swansong of a poor, near-dismantled studio.
Okami, the penultimate product of newly-defunct Clover Studio (those Viewtifully genius Joneses), is exactly the sort of we've-waited-so-long-for-the-next-Zelda, aww-fuck-it-let's-just-make-our-own-game one would expect from the small artsy division of third-party giant, Capcom. It never quite merits the pre-release awards it garnered over the past year and a half, but it manages to cut all the right corners (there are no voice actors, for instance, just jumbled voice-like sounds over text), is beautifully "illustrated" in eccentrically calligraphic cel-shading, and only really seems to fall short of its hype where the chains of the PS2 fetter it.
The game is, despite the obvious limitations of its antiquated console, gorgeous, providing rather literal fodder for the whole game-as-art debate. I (as well as most, I imagine) have come to expect a more comic-book style from the cel-shading technique (Viewtiful Joe, right) as well as more juvenile gameplay, I suspect. As the technique moves from infancy to adolescence, however, Clover at least seems to have figured out one way to incorporate a whole new aesthetic to go along with a rather different type of game.
Okami, set in ancient Japan and rather saturated with actual Shinto myth and Nippon folktale, turns out to be perfectly animated as a sort of living calligraphed scroll, the harsh lines and limits of cel-shaded objects are given often arbitrary thickness to suggest the varied weight of a brush. The result is a very surreal landscape--peopled with intensely exaggerated individuals whose characters and disposition can be surmised without the aid of voice-over. The ever-present, paper-like textured relief of the background adds a pleasant distraction from the grainy output of the PS2's graphics engine, as well.
As if the theme was not apparent enough in the presentation, the gameplay attempts to incorporate calligraphy as a main component. The story of Okami involves Shinto goddess, Amaterasu, newly awakened to a dead and colorless world. Her duty upon awakening in the form of a she-wolf is to bring life back to the world with her "celestial brush," a pause-action feature that--with some practice--can bring a dead tree back to life as easily as cut an enemy in half. This is probably the most ambitious aspect of the game and, not surprisingly, the most curiously ineffective. Coupled with a rather standard "wandering hero" (it never really feels like you're really a wolf, much to my dismay) main component to the gameplay that is damn near as old as videogaming itself and hasn't seen much but embellishment since the eye-opening experience of Hyrule field, the combat/nature interaction, though well-conceived, seems (I guess) under-realized and poorly-tuned on the PS2.
One wonders what Okami or a (never gonna happen) sequel would feel like with the highly-anticipated Wii-mote (right) or even how a spin-off would deal with the DS' stylus. Unfortunately Capcom is a very large company with many more profitable divisions than Clover. After all, a game that boasts a highly tuned Calligraphy Simulator might not fare so strongly as, say, Resident Evil 4, what with its zombies and machine guns; unfortunate that I will likely remember this game for decades as a gem in a dying console and probably won't see anything remotely like it for equally as long.
At any rate, Okami merits an entry into my Interesting Failures category rather than Terminal Illness. Not unlike John Nash, what bouts of schizophrenia don't kill you only make you... a critical darling.
Or something like that.
