I believe it was former U.S. Poet Laureate Ice Cube who coined the phrase "life aint a track meet, it's a marathon" and I can't think of any phrase more appropriate to sum up my feelings after finally beating Okami. Okami is an action/adventure game I purchased last Black Friday that has drawn comparisons to the Legend of Zelda series. I got about an hour into it sometime last December and quickly gave up, only to restart the game two weeks ago. This has been an arduous task- finishing in at about 37 hours means I averaged 2.6 hours per day. Of course I wouldn't have been able to keep up this pace with a terrible game so you know it's good, but the truth is Okami is a fantastic game. Puzzle-filled dungeons, beautiful landscapes straight out of a painting, and an epic story- all staples of the Zelda series- abound here. Hell, you play as a wolf, just like in Twilight Princess. What sets this apart is that the whole thing feels so fresh, while Twilight Princess seemed to be struggling to show something that we hadn't seen before. Okami is very loosely based on Japanese folklore, and defies many story-telling conventions- for instance, you face the guy who's hyped up to be the final boss a little over a third of the way through the game. Instead of using items normally, you paint items- to slash an enemy, to repair a broken bridge, to make the sun rise and set, etc., you paint. While the game does do almost everything right, unfortunately when it does something wrong, it sticks out even more, and there were two things in specific that really held Okami back. First, quick-time elements simply shouldn't use the Wii's motion-sensing capabilities, considering how shaky they are. Two seperate QTEs- one to draw five circles, on to draw 8 lines, literally took me over an hour to complete combined. Talk about stopping the flow of a game to a halt. The other misstep here was the reuse of bosses. One boss, the one I mentioned before, is fought three times, all the same. I mean this literally- you fight him once and kill him, and then you fight him two more times in the exact same fashion for no reason than to add length to the game. I could understand if they had added in a new challenge or made him more difficult, but it was just the same boss fight three times! Several other bosses are fought twice as well. Well, aside from these unfortunate miscues, the rest of the game is superb and this merely drops Okami from a "must-play" to a "if-you-have-some-free-time-play", and I'll be honest, it was fun while it lasted, but I'm really glad this behemoth is out of the way. Onward!
November 9, 2009
Okami
I believe it was former U.S. Poet Laureate Ice Cube who coined the phrase "life aint a track meet, it's a marathon" and I can't think of any phrase more appropriate to sum up my feelings after finally beating Okami. Okami is an action/adventure game I purchased last Black Friday that has drawn comparisons to the Legend of Zelda series. I got about an hour into it sometime last December and quickly gave up, only to restart the game two weeks ago. This has been an arduous task- finishing in at about 37 hours means I averaged 2.6 hours per day. Of course I wouldn't have been able to keep up this pace with a terrible game so you know it's good, but the truth is Okami is a fantastic game. Puzzle-filled dungeons, beautiful landscapes straight out of a painting, and an epic story- all staples of the Zelda series- abound here. Hell, you play as a wolf, just like in Twilight Princess. What sets this apart is that the whole thing feels so fresh, while Twilight Princess seemed to be struggling to show something that we hadn't seen before. Okami is very loosely based on Japanese folklore, and defies many story-telling conventions- for instance, you face the guy who's hyped up to be the final boss a little over a third of the way through the game. Instead of using items normally, you paint items- to slash an enemy, to repair a broken bridge, to make the sun rise and set, etc., you paint. While the game does do almost everything right, unfortunately when it does something wrong, it sticks out even more, and there were two things in specific that really held Okami back. First, quick-time elements simply shouldn't use the Wii's motion-sensing capabilities, considering how shaky they are. Two seperate QTEs- one to draw five circles, on to draw 8 lines, literally took me over an hour to complete combined. Talk about stopping the flow of a game to a halt. The other misstep here was the reuse of bosses. One boss, the one I mentioned before, is fought three times, all the same. I mean this literally- you fight him once and kill him, and then you fight him two more times in the exact same fashion for no reason than to add length to the game. I could understand if they had added in a new challenge or made him more difficult, but it was just the same boss fight three times! Several other bosses are fought twice as well. Well, aside from these unfortunate miscues, the rest of the game is superb and this merely drops Okami from a "must-play" to a "if-you-have-some-free-time-play", and I'll be honest, it was fun while it lasted, but I'm really glad this behemoth is out of the way. Onward!
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