I was randomly recommended Okami by a friend, and didn't think I'd like it that much. Boy, was I wrong. Okami turned out to be a very charming adventure with great style and humour.
However starting out required a lot of patience, as the intro section was incredibly long - it's 10-15 minutes of exposition and dialogue to set the scene, history and some characters in one swoop using some artistic brushwork to paint the story, as storytelling goes, Wolf going by several names, Okami/Shiranui/White Wolf/Ammy along with a warrior Nagi saves the village of Kamiki from the dragon Orochi, while also losing her life. The dragon sealed with a sword is half-released once again to sow disaster, and the wolf is revived to fulfill its purpose, however the purpose goes much deeper than just slaying Orochi again.
The audiovisual presentation is great, it reminds me of older legend of zelda titles, characters have that artistic/caricature-like shapes and are distinct from one another, you will end up remembering most of them in some form as the story nears its end, and they have the characters to boot too.Locations distinct each with their own flairs and gimmicks.
Character-wise we have the main protagonist, Okami which herself doesn't really speaks, bar occasional barking and gesture that will imply whether she likes or hates someone. So additional protagonist is much more talkative, wanderin artist Issun, who can also be called "the horniest bug that's ever lived" because ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ he likes some BUSTY BABES. While it today's climate that character trait is very off, there are a lot of redeeming qualities to him and I consider him very much on the good scale in terms of quality, his chatter serves as a way of giving tips, story directions, lore, and additional knowledge of the game world, his teaming up with Okami is one of the best aspects of the game. The other characters are also outstanding, the succesor of Nagi: Susano who is a lazy bum, the mysterious and occasional french speaker Waka, the cherry blossom revive dancer Mr Orange, with many others who will certainly be left with memory a bit after leaving the game.
The gameplay is a metroidvania, where you explore locations and dungeons and fight with enemies all the while using a unique set of brushwork abilities that can be used both offensively or to progress through various environments, the brush arts are the main seller and unique gimmick of Okami, with various abilities that will only work if you paint certain shapes on the screen. This works... decently well but as you can understand with old games come old limitations, so you will be usually just drawing lines to slice at enemies, circles at objects to activate abilities corresponding to it, and draw a thing into existence by just flailing your brush as much as possible. There are some unique abilities, like the brush that slows the environment, but I found out it's not consistent and doesn't work with everything, like a certain despised mole quest, where you have to catch moles moving at the speed of light, i have no idea why that is so.
Performance is a problem... partially. Because it is perfect, but targets 30 fps, you cannot change it. So it will be terrible to play when fast paced action and timing is required like in some of the main boss dungeons. It's a shame that so much of game physics relies on this framerate to work, and the game wasn't ever changed from the ground up, but we have to take the classics with all the faults, occasionally hating it for it, but aside from that I haven't seen any crashes, so it's good enough.
For last - music. Which is great, the scores have that old japanese flair, lots of drums and flutes going around, the beats hit very good, and increase the emotional moments and boss fights greatly. I feel like some tracks are overused a bit, as Okami is a pretty long game (about 30h while not hunting all the side quests and collectables) and even then you will end up going back through a lot of areas so while their tracks are not grating, they can be tiring.
Okami is a cult classic, and I can see now why, it's got the heart, and the uniqueness that many games nowadays just don't have, the new Okami game reveal certainly turned some head in my community and make me discover and try this classic by myself, and even though there are negatives I find the strongest points, the characters, the story(although pretty long), and the mechanics fun and interesting, some things didn't work out even in the final production, but it's nothing to ultimately cry about, I enjoyed.
