Ōkami
After saying “I’ve been meaning to play ŌKAMI” for 10+ years, I finally bought it when my quarantine malaise had me desperately searching the Nintendo Switch store for some source of dopamine that would last at least a day or two, and I noticed it was on sale. I badly wanted a 3D adventure game, for reasons I haven’t fully unpacked yet (I think I wanted a game with both goals and the freedom to be aimless - no pressure to perform, nothing to stop me from finding something meaningful to do), and there it was, only $10 - like a messenger from the heavens.
ŌKAMI may well have saved me from downloading SKYRIM that night. If nothing else, I’m grateful for that.
I got what I wanted from ŌKAMI. It’s very pretty and relaxing, just like I’d imagined/hoped. But at the same time, man, there's a lot that I didn't expect about this game.
What's really interesting is that there's almost a clean break between the good stuff and the bad stuff:
The gameplay and core loops themselves are (mostly) great, and why I kept going back to it and playing it for hours longer than I expected each time I sat down.
By contrast, almost all of the non-gameplay stuff - cutscenes, recurring characters, etc., - are terrible. And fully half of that badness is bad in a really weird way that's completely incongruous with the rest of the game's goals and aesthetics.
It makes me wish that this game weren't a big studio effort but instead a charming little indie title, if that makes any sense. And if it doesn't, hopefully it will by the end of this.
A tale of two games
So.
ŌKAMI is a game set in mythical Japan, where you play a wolf that is the reincarnation of the sun goddess Amaterasu, risen to fight an evil deity and to save the land from the disarray it's fallen into over the past 100 years. You have the power to shape reality using the Celestial Brush - a calligraphy brush that you use to paint on the screen, and can do almost anything from slicing foes to making trees bloom.
What it looks like when you use the Celestial Brush to summon the sun over a flowering mountainside in ŌKAMI
That's the game I wanted to play. That's the game that you see on the box. It's beautiful and charming and fun.
However.
Amaterasu is accompanied by a character named Issun. Amaterasu can’t talk, so Issun is your tutorial, your interlocutor in dialog scenes, and your narrator. He is a little bug who rides on you. (Technically, he’s a fairy-like creature called a Poncle, but it doesn’t matter. The point is he’s an inch high.) He is also a greedy, selfish, cowardly lecher - and he never stops reminding you of these things. When you first meet him, he is hiding in a woman’s robes. Issun spends the entire game blabbing about treasure and babes. Every time a female character is introduced, there's multiple lines of dialog dedicated to Issun swooning over her and wanting to score with her. He frequently asserts that all ugly women are bad (and vice versa), and that whenever a woman hides her face it must be because she's hideous and therefore evil. Issun is an annoying, ugly addition to the game, and he's your inescapable partner throughout all of it.
Why though?
But Issun isn’t just the avatar of these dumb impulses. The same people who made Issun and thought he'd be funny made the rest of the game too. So when a nature goddess gets her powers restored, her already sultry kimono turns into a bikini. Another character is an important priestess in ceremonial robes…that have a boob window. Not only that, her breasts noticeably jiggle in every cutscene she's in. You can’t miss it, because the camera is virtually always centered-and-zoomed-in on her rack. There’s male NPCs too…like a destined hero named Susano who is basically just diet Issun, and a mystical swordsman who speaks French and has a legendary sword named (I shit you not) Pillowtalk.
Just…why the fuck?
Another image from the same game as the previous screenshot, believe it or not. Although this character’s name is Rao, they are only referred to as “babe” or “busty babe” in dialog
I mean, I'd ask what impulse drove the developers to include that kinda uncreative gross shit in a game that's ostensibly trying to brand itself as a charming aesthetic romp through Japanese folklore, but I mean, we all know why.
In fact, this sort of crap is so generic that it isn't what's striking here - what's striking is how completely disconnected it is from the rest of the game. You could honestly remove Issun's non-tutorial dialog and nearly 80% of all cutscenes and the game would be both functional and greatly improved (though you'd still have the boob window character models and titty cams).
If you're looking just at the gameplay, you see a very different world from the cutscenes. So let me paint a picture (yuk yuk) of what the rest of the game is like, what the gameplay tells you that the game is about:
Amaterasu, your character, is the goddess of the Sun, and also a benevolent creator deity. However, because the power of the gods has faded from the land, most people can't see your divinity - they only see you as a normal wolf. So you go around the country, finding everyday people in hard times, and you help them.
You clear boulders and repair bridges to unblock trade routes for merchants. You make old trees in town bloom with beautiful pink blossoms. You fix mills so that townsfolk can brew sake.
It doesn't just stop with helping people, though - you help the world, too. You dig holes for plants and help them bloom. You fill dried up ponds. You feed wild animals - from birds to monkeys to tigers. You can feed domesticated animals, too - dogs, cats, cattle and horses, etc.
You also heal the land spiritually: After you help out a potter, he will make you artful vases, which you can carry to abandoned mossy shrines - and when you do, a flower appears in the vase, and the shrine cleans itself up, rosy cheeks now appearing on the inanimate stone faces.
You obviously do heroic things too, like lifting curses and vanquishing monsters - but even that stuff feels mythological and charming most of the time, like you're living out a fairy tale. For instance, you need to rescue the daughter of the Sparrow Clan (who are literal sparrows) - and you find out she's been kidnapped by a mean old couple who live in an ugly run-down hut in a dark part of the valley. You discover the couple intends to eat the sparrow. To save her, you must make a hole in the old couple's ceiling so that pure moonlight shines through - and then drag the old woman from her bed into the moonlight, whose holy rays reveal the old woman's true form (a monstrous crow oni).
The monsters are all folkloric like that. After you fight them, you get entries in your “bestiary” which shows old-style painted scroll artwork for them, and tells you a little myth of the origin of the monster. One baddie is a wooden wheel, with a huge human ear in the axle, that is wreathed in thunderstorms. The bestiary tells you that this is a malevolent spirit born from a person who failed to listen to important advice. That’s delightful.
The bestiary art for the mythical nine-tailed fox
Combat is fun, too. It's pretty easy, but the game gives me a score and a reward based on how well I do in any given fight, so I feel like I'm always striving to be as efficient as possible, rather than just to survive. And if I'm not? I just get slightly less cash, rather than dying and needing to redo things. (I love DARK SOULS, deeply, but this gentler paradigm is fun too.) Also, you can use your Celestial Brush in combat to do things like slice vulnerable enemies in half, make gusts of wind that blow airborne enemies down, and use the flames from a fire enemy to melt an ice enemy.
That stuff? It's great. It's awesome. It's why I played the game way more than I expected.
All that flavor isn't just on the sidelines - it's tightly woven into how ŌKAMI presents its core gameplay loop. It’s basically a pseudo-open-world game like THE LEGEND OF ZELDA: OCARINA OF TIME: there's linear objectives, but a decent amount of “explore the world and find fun shit to do”, and also a lot of “ooh, you found this hidden place, but you'll need to come back here later in the game once you've gotten the ability you need to unlock it”. But the things you unlock in ŌKAMI are patches of grass that you can now make bloom, a wild boar and her piglets that you can feed, forgotten shrines to clean up and dignify, etc. Doing these tasks earns you experience points, which are called “praise”. This gameplay loop is charming all the way through.
When you feed animals, little hearts appear over their heads to let you know you've fed them - and there's a certain amount of each type of animal in the game world, which you can view in your menu. Pretty quickly into the game, I made it my mission to feed every animal - occasionally aggravating my boyfriend with random bursts like “I, benevolent Amaterasu, have fed every Nightingale in all of Japan!” Aside from scratching a generic collectathon itch, it does genuinely make you feel godlike - just in a very different way than, say, a game like GOD OF WAR. Don’t get me wrong, I still love playing a divine hunk that slays monsters, just ask my HADES save file. But this is nice too.
It's so good, and such a break from the version of the game you see in, like, every single goddamn cutscene whenever Issun opens his stupid mouth. But even outside of the shitty content, the cutscenes have major problems.
In fact, each time a cutscene begins, instead of being excited to see more story, I'm aggravated - they're built terribly, too. There's a lot of well-written dialog in the game, but it's displayed on screen in a text box that fits fewer characters than a fucking tweet, and the text speed is unacceptably slow, making each cutscene a slog even if the content weren't aggravating. The game's opening sequence, where it tells you the mythology of the world and then introduces the main characters and then leads you to the tutorial area, takes seventeen real-world minutes. That's not 17 minutes of fully-rendered cutscenes - that's 17 minutes of dialog crawling across tiny textboxes as you feverishly mash the “next” button, while mostly-static in-game models twitch in unflattering close-ups.
I almost resent when the writing is good, because that means the sentences are longer. That's how bad the cutscene experience is.
It’s like two different games mashed together. Or, more accurately, it’s like an episode in a cartoon where two people are inhabiting the same body, and they keep fighting for control. It’s always really clear which one is in control at any time, and even if you’re rooting for one of them, it’s hard for the overall experience to not feel obnoxious. At the very least, you’re frustrated each time the jerk shows up.
Cracks in the porcelain
Now, to be fair, there are at least a couple elements in the gameplay that aren't great, too.
There's been a couple of recurring minigames that temporarily change the game layout and controls, which are mandatory in a few parts. I assumed it would be mandatory only the first time, and then there would be optional sidequests to engage in them, but no - the fishing and digging minigames are mandatory at multiple points. Which is worsened by the fact that the minigames themselves eventually get harder than the combat. It was harder for me to finish the third digging minigame than to slay the Dreaded Demon Viper Orochi, who cursed the entire land of Japan with his hate. That's stupid, and it's frustrating, and it takes me out of the game. Minigames should be a chance to expand your gameplay to include different mechanics and modes to enrich the experience - but the minigames in ŌKAMI just use the same core mechanics, except the minigame versions of them are narrower and more time-sensitive. Making these parts mandatory is like making stealth missions where your character doesn't have all their gear mandatory in action games - it's terrible, don't do it, why do people keep doing it, it should be a game crime, holy shit.
Oh and speaking of game crimes - ŌKAMI does also feature segments that require you to finesse a fundamentally imprecise task with controls that are poorly suited for it (in this case, using wind to blow a raft down a river and rolling a ball uphill without being able to grab it). That's also terrible and those segments suck. They are, at least so far, blessedly few and far apart, and not that many are mandatory (I only had to do the ball thing once, and blessedly, the ball was heavy enough to not roll around too much).
But even these two issues are, for the most part, also “intrusions: on the core loop. Minigames are by definition separate from the core gameplay loop, and the ball/wind shit is so infrequent (and mostly optional) that it feels “extra” and somewhat avoidable.
Lastly, the game has some pretty ham-fisted railroading - moments where the game actively prevents you from doing something that you already have the ability to do, until you talk to someone who asks you to do it - that sort of thing. I was willing to cut it some slack at the beginning, because the gameplay was fun and because you’ve come to expect a bit of it at the start of these sorts of games (not every game is BREATH OF THE WILD) - but by the end it started getting egregious.
So while there is a really stark and jarring break between the gross stuff and the charming stuff, there’s also still some underlying gameplay issues here too. I’m tempted to say “to be fair, this game is nearly 20 years old” (ŌKAMI was initially released in 2006; I played the HD remaster that first came out in 2012 and was ported to the Switch in 2018) - but come on, they should’ve known better then, too.
Too big to succeed
All of this goes back to the conclusion that this feels like a game that has very pretty and compelling core gameplay loops, but is saddled with, well…bullshit. Bullshit that is generically bad, and present in a ton of other games. Bullshit that we take for granted as being part of big studio releases.
Which is why I find myself wishing this game weren't a big studio release - that it were made by a smaller group, like Supergiant Games or something - a team that would have been so in love and dedicated to what made the game uniquely beautiful (the Celestial Brush, the folkloric setting, the charming quests to restore the land), and not have so many resources at their disposal that they almost accidentally, maybe even unthinkingly, include a Greatest Hits list of what is shitty about video games from the 2000s.
Because that's really what it feels like.
It feels like the only reason that all the titty cams and snail-paced textboxes and obligatory minigames are there is because of course they are.
After playing the game, I learned that it was directed by Hideki Kamiya, who is famous for directing several other noteworthy games - and looking at his oeuvre, I feel the same whiplash as I did while playing ŌKAMI: He directed both RESIDENT EVIL 2 (an important early entry in the survival horror canon) and RESIDENT EVIL ZERO (a gaudy caricature of Resident Evil games). He also directed VIEWTIFUL JOE (another stylized, creative, fluid action game) and BAYONETTA (a much hornier variant of the DEVIL MAY CRY formula [oh, and he directed the original DEVIL MAY CRY, too]). It would be wrong to treat Kamiya as an auteur, and give him all the credit for these games. Major video game releases, like major movies, are “art by committee”, as the saying goes. But whoever you assign them to, you see some clear trends throughout these games.
And you see a clear lack of restraint, too - and not in an exciting or novel way, but in a “nobody stopped them from putting all the same old bullshit in this game” way.
If I were trying to tell a joke about why we need fresh talent in the games industry (and every industry, honestly) to avoid repeating generic toxic stupid tropes, I'm not sure I could've come up with a better hypothetical game to illustrate it than ŌKAMI - a game which, right after recounting the myth of how a mysterious wolf teamed up with an ancient hero to vanquish a powerful evil, has a character jump out from between the tits of a nature goddess, followed by a camera angle showing you that the back of her elegant kimono has a peach-shaped cut-out exposing her bare ass.
I can’t get over how wild it is to see this sort of junk in this particular setting. Sometimes, the divide is so clear, you literally see it between two lines of dialog - like this moment, when you investigate a quaint beachside shrine, that is burned in my memory as an unfortunate encapsulation of ŌKAMI:
“Somebody took real good care of this statue.”
“I bet the real busty babe was a devout worshipper.”
