Okami Game Review
Rejecting the Usual to Ignite the Imagination
Okami from Clover Studios is a complex quest that features a wolf who is actually a goddess.
Last year I went to the video game trade show in Los Angeles called E3, a noisy event with games displayed on gigantic video screens and wandering models, skimpily dressed as video game characters, who looked as uncomfortable as you might expect of people standing in a crowded convention hall in their underwear.
I saw hundreds of games in development at E3, and they all looked pretty much alike. There were a bunch of first-person shooters I couldn’t tell apart, strategy games that looked the way strategy games always look and cartoony action adventures that looked like the previous year’s crop. Public relations people were praising the improved graphics of the brand-new Xbox 360, boasting that you could see the players’ sweat in a sports game, but to me the 360 games were just slightly sweatier versions of the games that had come out the year before.
Then I saw a Japanese game for PlayStation 2 that looked like a living watercolor painting. And as I watched a white wolf running across a field, flowers sprouting in its wake, I fell in love.
A year and a half later, that game, Okami, is on sale in the United States. The game, from Clover Studios, is everything I was hoping for, a visually dazzling, imaginative action-adventure game that stands apart from the crowd.
That white wolf is the goddess Amaterasu, who has manifested a mortal form to battle an eight-headed dragon terrorizing the land. She is joined by Wandering Artist Issun, a flea-size creature who functions as the player’s guide and irreverently refers to Amaterasu as “furball.”
Okami’s locales have been blighted by demons, and Amaterasu must bring these lands to life by finding magical trees and making them bloom, causing a desolate valley to erupt in flowers and take on the look of an ancient elegant Japanese woodprint.
To perform this magic, Amaterasu uses the Celestial Brush. At any point the player can freeze time and draw a circle to make flowers bloom, two lines to call forth a breeze, or a zigzag line to create a climbing rope.
The brush can also be used when battling demons. A painted line hits them like a sword, drawing a circle with a line through it creates a bomb, and swishing the ink on their faces temporarily blinds them.
There is a lot to do in Okami. Besides the main story, there are side quests that generally involve helping people. Every time Amaterasu does a good deed — restoring a withered tree, finding medicine for a sick man, feeding a mewing cat — she is bombarded with affection that translates into points used to increase her health or the number of symbols she can draw before her ink runs out.
There are also various treasures throughout the land, many of which you won’t be able to retrieve until you’ve learned a particular symbol. The game is very reminiscent of the Legend of Zelda series, and is at least as good as those games.
There are also interesting mini-games that turn up occasionally. At times Amaterasu will have to dig quickly through a series of stone blocks or catch fish. You must also help out Susano, a samurai of dubious talent, by quickly slashing with your brush the monsters he attacks.
Okami is tantalizingly close to perfection, but is not without flaws. Dialogue is in written text that scrolls out much more slowly than anyone over the age of 10 reads. While you can speed that up in some scenes, in others you can’t, forcing the player to do a lot of thumb-twiddling. And feeding an animal, which should take a couple of seconds, prompts a little scene that just wastes the player’s time.
But over all, this game is so visually striking, so original and so well done that most other game designers should look at it and then hang their heads in shame. It is proof that the important thing in game design is not the graphical processing power of the game console but the power of the designer’s imagination.
While Okami aims to create something fresh and new, Al Emmo and the Lost Dutchman’s Mine, from Himalaya Studios, is equally eager to do something really old. The game is a sincere and loving effort to recreate the style of the humorous adventure games published by Sierra in the late 1980’s and early 90’s, like Leisure Suit Larry and Space Quest.
Taking place in the Wild West, the game follows the adventures of Al Emmo, a short, dweeby character with a bad comb-over who comes to the town of Anozira to meet his mail-order bride. Upon learning that Al is closer to good looking than he is to prosperous, she calls the wedding off.
Stuck in Anozira until the next train arrives, Al promptly falls for the town chanteuse, Rita, and determines to win her love, a task made more difficult by the suave Antonio Bandana.
Al soon learns what it takes to win a beautiful woman’s heart: steal a flag, make a fishing rod and dress up as a woman. This at least is how it works in adventure games, where everything, including love, is a puzzle that can be solved through the proper use of hammers, flasks and inflatable dolls.
The game uses the point-and-click interface of those old games, and clicking on any item elicits some witticism. Click on a dartboard and the game’s narrator will say, “Your eyes dart to the board.”
While sometimes clever, the humor often falls flat. It’s commendable to try to put a laugh in every bit of scenery, but it’s disappointing when not a single tombstone epitaph in the town graveyard is actually funny.
The humor isn’t helped by the voice acting, which has the rather hammy, artificial quality of community theater.
Still, the game can be quite amusing. I liked a Greek chorus of ditzy ladies and was surprised by the pointed wit in a scene involving an extremist pest exterminator determined to wipe out “termites of mass destruction” at any cost.
Like the acting, the game’s puzzles are competent but unexceptional. Good puzzles force the player to think outside the box, but Al Emmo rarely challenges the player’s ingenuity.
Al Emmo finally kicks into gear in its last third, when the humor becomes sharper and the puzzles become smarter. If the whole game were as good as the last part, it might have matched the games that inspired it, but instead Al Emmo is just a decent game for fans nostalgic for old-style adventures.
Still, like Okami, Al Emmo doesn’t want to look like every other game on the market. Both games reject the cookie-cutter approach that permeates the video game industry and teach us a valuable lesson: the best games are not necessarily the sweatiest.
posted by Clay at 11:37 AM
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