Review

Okami has issues. Issues that present themselves immediately to you upon beginning a playthrough. This game is fucking talky. And I feel like just calling it talky really is not underlining the extent to how hand-holdy it truly is. Nearly every second of the game you are directly told exactly where you need to go next. It's suffocating. Even when I first played the game many a long year ago (on the Wii), and had much more patience it was annoying. It is yet more annoying now on a subsequent playthrough. The game starts to open up some good way into it, but it takes way too long to get to a point where you're expected to just like walk around without Navi on your ass.

Okami is in desperate need of a butthole edition. So first change I'm making is we're removing the weird perverse stuff. There's some cultural thing with Japanese stuff that I don't understand and frankly I don't want to. Issun threatening to get back into a woman' kimono after having been hidden in it for who knows how long is not a funny ha ha. That's super going away. Issun is a pretty big part of the game. And he starts in a real bad place. I do genuinely kind of turn around on him by the end of the game and find myself missing him when we get to the Ark. But there are several times where we go too far and taking those out needs to happen. I promise I am not a puritan. But sometimes it's just too much and maybe we need to see the light of God.

Next change. This is a big one. In general, quite a lot of the "go here" dialogue and cutscenes are straight up getting deleted. No-holds-barred, get rid of it, permanent deletion. For dialogue that does not fit into that extreme bad bucket, where it serves no purpose but to dumb down the enterprise, we're going to make an important change. There are a couple rare times in the game where the dialogue box comes up but you are still physically in control. It only shows up like once or twice. We're going to use that system significantly more. Issun is perfectly capable of talking to you while you are walking around looking at stuff. I think that sort of change would make the game feel way less hand-holdy.

An additional annoyance, we're deleting the whole dialogue box that comes up when you pick up treasures. That's gone. It serves no purpose. I could imagine seeing it just the first time you pick up a given treasure. And then all subsequent times just doing the little icon notification (like what happens with food items). But no, I think even that is too much. If the player wants to read the description, they can go into the scroll. These are not Dark Souls item descriptions. None of them are additive, they're just flavor. So they're going away. In addition, I think I'd add a sell-all to the merchant menu. All treasures and non-story fish can be sold instantly.

I would also add difficulty settings. I don't just want the game to be harder for everyone. I'm not a shitty Soulsborne player. What I want is to be able to control it. But over the course of maybe 3 full playthroughs of the game, I have never fully died. I think once or twice when doing the endgame demon gate fights, I had to use the 1-ups from the astral pouch. It is fully insane that we have this whole system that never ever gets used because the game is simply too easy. Or that you could safely ignore 99% of the consumables you're given because they literally are not necessary. I like the getting extra yen and praise and stuff for finishing the fights faster. I just would like for there to be some level of danger from literally anything.

I think that those changes largely account for my biggest issues with the game. Okami is a game where I don't think anyone who likes it (I am including myself in that) would deny that it's style over substance. The game is absolutely gorgeous. The art is both the draw and also the primary reason you're staying. The gameplay is passable and sometimes fun. You're never really asked to do anything particularly crazy. The game was frequently compared with Zelda. And that's a well-founded comparison. Nearly every dungeon consists of the initial period where you roam around for a bit, dealing with some new dangers or obstacles. Before you find the new item (in this case brush power) that allows you to move past all that. It's basic video gaming. Which I don't think we should necessarily discount.

Something I feel much more strongly after this past year of gaming is that we need to have a bit more respect for the game that can just do a fundamental thing. I'd love more. But so many games aren't capable of tripping over themselves. A game that is a game is something I look forward to more and more. So while I think there need to be a lot of changes to Okami to really make it great, it's never really failing to just be a game. It's just over-tutorialized.