Okami — Wolf of White, Howl My Way, I Wish To Hear Your Song Today

Throughout the years, the Orochi myth has been referenced in numerous media, from anime and manga to video games.  As far back as Dragon Warrior III (and possibly earlier), Orochi has terrorized young maidens everywhere and has been slain over and over again.  In 2006, it was Okami’s turn.  I feel like Okami is the best of the bunch and deserves far more than just the accolades of video game critics.  It should have sold far more than it did, yet each re-release sells less than the previous one.

Okami is the story of a deity named Amaterasu (difficult to pronounce if you’re not Japanese so we’ll just call her Ammy) who takes the form of a wolf in order to save Japan from the darkness of enemies such as Orochi, among others.  Why a wolf?  Well, I suppose there isn’t really a reason to make her a wolf, but many action games like Okami star non-human characters, so it’s probably easier to identify with them than with a human character?  I don’t know.  All that matters is that Ammy is a wolf with a tail that can paint pictures.

It may sound ridiculous, but I promise that it works.  The main gameplay mechanic of Okami involves painting different shapes upon the game’s world to repair bridges or bloom trees or cut objects down, et cetera.  This comes into play during battle as well.  There are some enemies that can be defeated like normal by pressing buttons until they’re dead, but some enemies can’t be killed unless a certain brush stroke is used on them first.  The developers certainly knew what they were doing: most brush strokes in the game have dual purposes.  They can facilitate world exploration and can also be used to defeat enemies.  This is a game where everything is useful always, and older brush strokes never become obsolete when newer ones are discovered.

A sure way of figuring out what the next part of the game is going to require is to wait and see what brush stroke is unlocked next.  The ability to cast wind magic comes in handy when it’s needed to blow out fires, and when fires begin to resist wind, water magic ends up doing the trick.  Magnetism is unlocked much later in the game, and fortunately isn’t needed until then.  I suppose this is the same set-up as in a Zelda game, where something is found when it’s absolutely needed to continue the game, but I’ve not played the Zelda series so I’m just guessing.

I do have one complaint, though.  Certain story sequences required me to make several brush strokes in quick succession and didn’t give me very long to complete them.  Susano defeating Orochi around the mid-point in the game wasn’t too bad, but that damn dance that Mr. Orange did was so very annoying and I started to wonder if I’d ever be able to finish the otherwise easy-to-play game because I couldn’t draw several circles on demand in quick succession with a standard PS2 controller.

But that’s not to say it’s difficult to control the brush with a PS2 controller.  Most of the time, I had no problem cutting objects and drawing water/fire from one place to another.  The circle didn’t always work for me (see previous paragraph) and so to bloom one tree, I sometimes had to draw many circles before one of them would take.  You can see why Mr. Orange’s dance annoyed me.

But when the chips are down and when it really matters, Okami performs well.  While in battle, the brush strokes I used rarely malfunctioned, other than the Cherry Bomb.  The only times when the Cherry Bomb did work were when they were required to finish off an enemy or to progress with the story.  It wasn’t worth using at any other time because often it wouldn’t appear where I wanted it to and it seemed like I always did more harm to me than to my enemies.

I do feel that the game holds my hand at times.  Occasionally, it would prompt me to do a certain brush stroke during battle to defeat or incapacitate an enemy rather than letting me discover for myself which stroke to use.  This sometimes happens even more blatantly during some boss battles.  The game pauses the action and focuses on the important part of the battle, like it’s saying “Look over here!  It’s the boss’s weakness!  You can probably tell how to exploit it, right?  Well, Issun will give you a blatant hint anyway!”  I’m reminded of some of the early Murder, She Wrote episodes, where the camera would deliberately linger on an important clue for a little longer than necessary.  All I had to do to figure out the killer’s identity was to wait for the linger.  “Oh, the director is saying ‘look at the beers’.  Okay.  Then this lady must be the killer, but I have no idea why…”

Outside of battle, Ammy does a lot of running.  And I mean a lot of running.  Especially in the Shinshu Field.  Okay, confession time: that isn’t just Ammy wanting to run.  Do you know how beautiful the music in this game is?  It just lends itself to running joyously around, jumping off of cliffs and just trying to see everything I can before I move on.  I think I must’ve spent more time in that one field than in any other part of the game, simply because the music there was so wonderful.  To this day I can’t listen to the song without wanting to run for the sake of running, with the wind in my fur and the sun high in the sky.

I’m finding it hard to think of another game with a soundtrack of the same calibre as Okami’s.  Final Fantasy VIII?  Maybe.  I want to say Final Fantasy IX because that’s my favourite game of all time, but the soundtrack to that game is less epic and more of a medieval fantasy style.  Going through the rest of my favourite games, Breath of Fire III is light jazz and Lunar: The Silver Star (and its remakes) sound more like an anime than a video game.  Chrono Trigger probably comes closest to the kind of epic soundtrack Okami possesses, but even then it falls just a little short.  I’m sure my fellow Damage Control writers can think of games that I’ve missed, but I can’t think of anything that sounds as epic as Okami does.

There is a lot to do in Okami.  Ammy can bloom flowers and trees and gets praise for it.  She can feed animals and get praise for it.  She can get lots of praise for purifying an area.  She can get praise from humans for helping them with various brush-related tasks.  She can find stray beads, but this doesn’t get her any praise.  What
does she do with all this praise?  Well, to a god, praise is like currency.  It’s like in Populous, where the more worshippers the player has, the more miracles he can do.  In Okami, Ammy can take the praise she’s been given and use it to upgrade her health, add another pot of ink to her supply, increase her wallet so that she can carry more money and purchase more stuff with it, or add another astral pouch which, if full, acts as an extra life for her if she were to die in battle.  Ammy will become very strong if belief in her is very strong, and by the end of my game, she was very strong.

Graphics don’t usually matter to me, even if I sometimes mention how rough they are.  I’ve seen 3-D games that look like garbage and are otherwise excellent to play, and 2-D games that look like veritable works of art and are otherwise less than stellar.  In Okami’s case, the graphics are as good as the gameplay.  The game makes excellent use of the sumi-e art style, which ties in beautifully with both the gameplay and the setting.  I remember when I first saw a video promoting Okami, the game had a more realistic look back then and I couldn’t help but think that this game would be fun to play but that we probably wouldn’t get it out here in the west.  To my surprise and joy, we did get it.  And during development, the developers had made the interesting choice to deliberately invoke sumi-e rather than the original, more realistic look.

You’d think that, when characters are made out of strokes of paint, they’d be hard to relate to.  Yet despite the art style of the game, I found I’d grown attached to it.  Very attached, in fact.  Despite deliberately not looking real, Ammy was real enough to me.  Spoiler warning: there is a point late in the game that moved me nearly to tears, and then I was still expected to be able to fight the final boss despite no longer being able to see through my tears.

Although it took me upwards of 80 hours to beat the game, I don’t feel like Okami wore out its welcome.  In fact, when I first played the game, I knew that I’d want to binge on the game and spend hours and hours and hours playing.  As a result, I only played it when I had plenty of time for myself and inevitably the game ended up in my unfinished pile.  Eventually I restarted and beat the game, so counting my first partial playthrough, I have actually spent over a hundred and twenty hours with Ammy, guiding her in her quest to save Japan.

An HD version was released digitally last year for the PlayStation 3, but there is also a version on the PlayStation 2 and one on the Wii if you want a hard copy.  This is honestly one of the best games I’ve ever played and I think everyone should at least try this game and give it a chance.  Five hours.  If you can peel yourself away from the latest pro-America war-time my-penis-is-obviously-huge-because-I’m-killing-foreigners shooter for five hours and give Okami a try, you may be surprised.