This review contains spoilers
As of typing this review, I have just finished Ōkami HD. Man, what an experience. It took me 57 hours to complete (as per usual I didn't go for 100%), which is certainly much more of a time sink than I expected when I first jumped into the game. Nonetheless, I very much enjoyed my time with Ōkami HD. I have a lot more to say about it than I anticipated, so its time for me to pump out another ridiculously long review that no one reads.
Ōkami is such a nice game visually. Ordinarily, this is not something I would point out so early in my reviews, but I feel that the way this game looks is very important to its identity. It is based on a style of traditional paintings in Japan (unfortunately I can't tell you the specific style since I am not well-versed in Japanese history) that almost makes the game feel 2D since it feels like a painting. This artistic style is thematically tied together to key elements of the game in a few different ways. Perhaps the most obvious tie is that the entire game looking like an illustration makes sense when the main character - Amaterasu - draws with her tail to use her nature manipulation powers. The art style of Ōkami also immediately communicates visually to the player that its story is inspired by Japanese folklore (unless that player is unfamiliar with this style of traditional Japanese painting). I believe the softer and slightly washed out colors also makes for a good way to communicate mood: areas that shine brilliantly in the light are particularly vibrant, areas that are lit by the moon feel extra tranquil. There are also many locations of the games that are cursed with evil magic and it is easily and effectively communicated through the prominent use of colors.
Gameplay wise, Ōkami gave me some TLoZ vibes. Its an adventure game centering the journey of a god dog, Amaterasu, who is on a quest to restore nature and save humanity from evil. There's a good mix of platforming, puzzle-solving, and dungeon exploring. Overall, the game has a very linear sense of progression, but there's still a good amount of side quests to do and collectibles to find along the way. As you progress, you'll learn a wide berth of brush techniques that you can use to solve puzzles or interact with the world by drawing specific symbols. This is the big unique gameplay draw in my opinion. Pressing R1 (on PS4) instantly turns everything into a sepia-like filter and lets you draw anywhere, where you can then draw the symbols associated with brush techniques to do special things. For instance, Bloom is a circle, so you can draw a circle around a dead tree to bring it back to life for some fruit. You also get Praise for using your techniques to restore nature. Praise is a resource used for upgrading your character and you can use it to permanently increase your health, ink, wallet, or Astral Pouch. The Astral Pouch is a resource that will revive you when you die and its automatically filled by eating food you can find while exploring the land. Something I like about the structure of Ōkami is that its rare for anything you do to feel like a waste of time; fighting enemies gives you yen to buy items with, destroying things around you has a chance to restore your health and ink as well as give you money, and if you're ever lost you can keep doing both of those things so you feel like you're achieving something. While you're traveling, you can find animals around the world that you feed using bags of food that you either naturally find in your travels or buy from merchants. This is a side activity that doesn't really give you much, but is necessary for 100% completion since it fills up something in the menu called an Animal Tome. Certain NPCs at certain parts of the story give you the option to go fishing and, similar to the Animal Tome, this comes with a Fish Tome that you can complete. Both Tomes come with about a page or two of information about the animal that you can freely view after that animal has been fed or caught, which is a neat little detail the developers didn't have to include but did anyway. There are three other menus with reading sections: the Bestiary, the Treasure Tome, and the Travel Guides. The Bestiary will likely be finished by the time you beat the game and it has every enemy and boss you've fought. The available reading for the Bestiary tells you the lore of the enemy and gives hints of their weaknesses. On the other hand, Travel Guides are collectible scrolls that can be read for tips on how to use your brush techniques. You will likely not have all of them unless you are a thorough explorer, which I am unfortunately not. The Treasure Tome is where all the treasures you find are chronicled. The treasures serve as the main collectible of the game and you will find them in most chests you get, but they have no use other than filling the Treasure Tome and being sold for a pretty penny. Finally, the last collectible of note are the Stray Beads, which can be found in chests. They are rare and there is a shit ton of them to get. Each area you go to has 11 beads and there are a whopping 99 in total. They are kind of like this game's Korok Seeds except they have no practical use and are purely for 100% completion. That is a LOT of side content to engage with, but the game doesn't pressure you to engage with it if you don't want to. The only one of these I completed was the Animal Tome.
The combat in Ōkami is just alright. It never feels all that involved aside from figuring out an enemy's weakness. Some have patterns, others are just a "hit it until it dies" case. As the game progresses, you get several weapons of three different types: reflectors, rosaries, and glaives. You can equip one as your main weapon and another as a sub weapon, which the game seems to encourage switching between since the weapons can give different effects when equipped as a sub. I kept my combo of rosary main and reflector sub almost the whole game without feeling like I missed out on anything. For my play style, I found that Rosaries were by far the best, trading lower damage for long range was worth it for me. Overall, combat was very basic, so weapon choice doesn't seem to diversify it too much. Boss fights require slightly more complex strategies, but once you figure it out you'll realize that most of the time spent in those fights is waiting on them to show their weak point and then punishing it. It doesn't help that there's only a couple of bosses and you often have to refight them, which probably gets most annoying with Orochi himself since you have to fight him three times in the story and the fights are quite long in comparison to the others. You also do almost the exact same strategy every time you refight the bosses, there is no significant difference in your methods even though, by the point you rematch these bosses, you have a lot of brush techniques to play with. It doesn't help that, if you've been holding onto those Exorcism Slips like I did, you could just use a whole bunch of them to effortlessly destroy bosses. Exorcism Slips are items that deal unavoidable damage to enemies near you once they are used. I thought for sure that they wouldn't let you use them on bosses, so I didn't even try...until the final boss, when I was surprised to find that I could just relentlessly assault it with my slips and not have to try fighting. Almost wish I found that out earlier, but I am also glad I did not figure that out since you can buy the Exorcism Slips so you could probably cheese every boss fight if you have the cash.
Alright, after explaining everything about the game, let's get into some story. I found the characters of Ōkami to be quite enjoyable. This game somehow made me care about a living sheet of paper (if you know, you know). As for the main characters...Amaterasu doesn't speak, but she's fun. She is a cute stoic god dog that wants to help everyone, but she also has a sassy side; she makes her disinterest known when talking to people that bore her. There's also Issun, a boisterous Poncle (basically a sprite) that speaks for Amaterasu and travels with her the whole game. Anyone who's played this game will tell you how annoying Issun is. I wanted to give him the benefit of the doubt, in truth he isn't too irritating if you just accept the fact he will be constantly talking every two seconds in cutscenes. He also explains things way too much, but I'm pretty dumb when playing games sometimes so I appreciate the extra help. Nonetheless, this guy is always explaining everything to you and I can see that getting on a player's nerves. Issun is an annoying character in general, too; he's an egotistical little dude that hits on literally every woman he sees and he has a short temper. It made me wish the women in the game would actually call him out for it but it never happens. It's worth noting that he does get some nice development since he starts to humble out a little more and he stops being an insufferable creep towards every woman he meets. In around the first quarter of the story, Susano is a major character and I thought he was pretty entertaining. He is the lazy descendent of the long-deceased legendary hero Nagi. He uses the title to boost his ego, but he really isn't very heroic in the beginning. In fact, he's the one that releases the big bad villain - Orochi - in the first place. Susano has a nice arc of turning from a big mouthed lazy wannabe hero to a true hero. Its not mind-blowing, but I think it works well; a precedent is set for his growth since he slowly becomes less afraid of real danger and gets better at the whole hero thing as the game goes on. Susano stops showing up in the story entirely after he gets the finishing blow on Orochi in the first 15 hours or so of the story, but it works since his arc is completed. Waka is another major character and he is probably my favorite character in the game. Waka is the mysterious flamboyant rival that gives prophecies to Amaterasu and Issun, duels Ammy at times, and pisses Issun off to no end. He often shows up to tease the duo and lead them the right way. The way his dialogue is written is pretty eccentric and fun, he has a cheesy way of talking and he randomly inserts French words in conversations despite there being no indication of other countries even existing in this game. There are hints that he's hiding something, but it isn't until the very end when this is finally seen. Waka is ultimately heroic in his goals, which I was glad to see since I was worried they were going to make him an awful twist villain. As for the other characters in the story, they are fairly minor but still plot important. Nonetheless, I don't feel they're worth explaining here; they have their charms but they are still side characters.
As I mentioned in the first paragraph, Ōkami is a lot longer than I thought it would be. It has a fake out ending after about 15 or 20 hours worth of progression: although Amaterasu is successful in her quest to restore nature from Orochi's curse and defeat him, his death releases other evil spirits that create more problems for her to fix. For a brief summary of what the continued plot looks like: there's a dark magic fog in Sei-an City that plagues the citizens (turns out it's from the emperor who was cursed by one of the Orochi ghosts), you help the priestess Rao explore a ship for the Fox Rods only to find nothing there, you save a woman named Kaguya from imprisonment and help her learn who she is (this is resolved in like five minutes since you quickly find a bamboo rocket tied to her past that she leaves the planet with), you speak with the queen of Sei-an City, you activate a galaxy in the sky to get to the underwater city to speak to the Draconians to learn how to stop the Water Dragon, you go inside the dragon's body to get the Dragon Orb and stop it's rampage, both Rao and Himiko are killed by a demon called Ninetails, you go on a treacherous trip through Oni Island to beat up Ninetails, once you beat it it's revealed that Ninetails' spirit went to Kamui so you go there too, in Kamui you find a swordsman of the Oina Tribe named Oki that becomes an ally after a duel, you go to the mountain village of the Oina and agree to help the people there find Lika (the lost daughter of the chief), you go to the forest Yoshpet where you find Issun's home land and an old friend of Amaterasu, once you get through Yoshpet you find the Spirit Gate, going inside the Spirit Gate takes you to 100 years ago in the past of the first village of the game, you then go to the moon cave with Nagi to make sure the hero prophecy goes through as normal, you kill Orochi together with Nagi and your past self and rescue Lika, after that you return to your own time by going back in the Spirit Gate, you go to the Wawku Shrine to then go fight the remaining two demons, you eventually beat those demons with the help of Oki and your past self, the wrecked ark of legend activates afterwards (of course you go inside), the ark has a boss gauntlet, then FINALLY you fight the lord of darkness Yami and the game ends after you narrowly win the long battle. I skipped over details for the sake of making this breakdown as swift and easily understandable as I could. Nonetheless, for how surprisingly long the story of Ōkami is, I did not find it to be all that special. Everything connects full circle, though, and that's always nice. I know all the characters and some of the story-beats are based on Japanese mythology, but I do not have any background knowledge on what those myths are.
Overall I think Ōkami HD was a solid experience. My only real problems with it involve how sluggish it can feel at times when it comes to progression, the bland combat, the repetition of bosses (made worse by needing to rematch them a few times with little to no change in your strategy), and Issun being annoying. Ōkami HD gets a solid 3.5 stars from me.
Ōkami is such a nice game visually. Ordinarily, this is not something I would point out so early in my reviews, but I feel that the way this game looks is very important to its identity. It is based on a style of traditional paintings in Japan (unfortunately I can't tell you the specific style since I am not well-versed in Japanese history) that almost makes the game feel 2D since it feels like a painting. This artistic style is thematically tied together to key elements of the game in a few different ways. Perhaps the most obvious tie is that the entire game looking like an illustration makes sense when the main character - Amaterasu - draws with her tail to use her nature manipulation powers. The art style of Ōkami also immediately communicates visually to the player that its story is inspired by Japanese folklore (unless that player is unfamiliar with this style of traditional Japanese painting). I believe the softer and slightly washed out colors also makes for a good way to communicate mood: areas that shine brilliantly in the light are particularly vibrant, areas that are lit by the moon feel extra tranquil. There are also many locations of the games that are cursed with evil magic and it is easily and effectively communicated through the prominent use of colors.
Gameplay wise, Ōkami gave me some TLoZ vibes. Its an adventure game centering the journey of a god dog, Amaterasu, who is on a quest to restore nature and save humanity from evil. There's a good mix of platforming, puzzle-solving, and dungeon exploring. Overall, the game has a very linear sense of progression, but there's still a good amount of side quests to do and collectibles to find along the way. As you progress, you'll learn a wide berth of brush techniques that you can use to solve puzzles or interact with the world by drawing specific symbols. This is the big unique gameplay draw in my opinion. Pressing R1 (on PS4) instantly turns everything into a sepia-like filter and lets you draw anywhere, where you can then draw the symbols associated with brush techniques to do special things. For instance, Bloom is a circle, so you can draw a circle around a dead tree to bring it back to life for some fruit. You also get Praise for using your techniques to restore nature. Praise is a resource used for upgrading your character and you can use it to permanently increase your health, ink, wallet, or Astral Pouch. The Astral Pouch is a resource that will revive you when you die and its automatically filled by eating food you can find while exploring the land. Something I like about the structure of Ōkami is that its rare for anything you do to feel like a waste of time; fighting enemies gives you yen to buy items with, destroying things around you has a chance to restore your health and ink as well as give you money, and if you're ever lost you can keep doing both of those things so you feel like you're achieving something. While you're traveling, you can find animals around the world that you feed using bags of food that you either naturally find in your travels or buy from merchants. This is a side activity that doesn't really give you much, but is necessary for 100% completion since it fills up something in the menu called an Animal Tome. Certain NPCs at certain parts of the story give you the option to go fishing and, similar to the Animal Tome, this comes with a Fish Tome that you can complete. Both Tomes come with about a page or two of information about the animal that you can freely view after that animal has been fed or caught, which is a neat little detail the developers didn't have to include but did anyway. There are three other menus with reading sections: the Bestiary, the Treasure Tome, and the Travel Guides. The Bestiary will likely be finished by the time you beat the game and it has every enemy and boss you've fought. The available reading for the Bestiary tells you the lore of the enemy and gives hints of their weaknesses. On the other hand, Travel Guides are collectible scrolls that can be read for tips on how to use your brush techniques. You will likely not have all of them unless you are a thorough explorer, which I am unfortunately not. The Treasure Tome is where all the treasures you find are chronicled. The treasures serve as the main collectible of the game and you will find them in most chests you get, but they have no use other than filling the Treasure Tome and being sold for a pretty penny. Finally, the last collectible of note are the Stray Beads, which can be found in chests. They are rare and there is a shit ton of them to get. Each area you go to has 11 beads and there are a whopping 99 in total. They are kind of like this game's Korok Seeds except they have no practical use and are purely for 100% completion. That is a LOT of side content to engage with, but the game doesn't pressure you to engage with it if you don't want to. The only one of these I completed was the Animal Tome.
The combat in Ōkami is just alright. It never feels all that involved aside from figuring out an enemy's weakness. Some have patterns, others are just a "hit it until it dies" case. As the game progresses, you get several weapons of three different types: reflectors, rosaries, and glaives. You can equip one as your main weapon and another as a sub weapon, which the game seems to encourage switching between since the weapons can give different effects when equipped as a sub. I kept my combo of rosary main and reflector sub almost the whole game without feeling like I missed out on anything. For my play style, I found that Rosaries were by far the best, trading lower damage for long range was worth it for me. Overall, combat was very basic, so weapon choice doesn't seem to diversify it too much. Boss fights require slightly more complex strategies, but once you figure it out you'll realize that most of the time spent in those fights is waiting on them to show their weak point and then punishing it. It doesn't help that there's only a couple of bosses and you often have to refight them, which probably gets most annoying with Orochi himself since you have to fight him three times in the story and the fights are quite long in comparison to the others. You also do almost the exact same strategy every time you refight the bosses, there is no significant difference in your methods even though, by the point you rematch these bosses, you have a lot of brush techniques to play with. It doesn't help that, if you've been holding onto those Exorcism Slips like I did, you could just use a whole bunch of them to effortlessly destroy bosses. Exorcism Slips are items that deal unavoidable damage to enemies near you once they are used. I thought for sure that they wouldn't let you use them on bosses, so I didn't even try...until the final boss, when I was surprised to find that I could just relentlessly assault it with my slips and not have to try fighting. Almost wish I found that out earlier, but I am also glad I did not figure that out since you can buy the Exorcism Slips so you could probably cheese every boss fight if you have the cash.
Alright, after explaining everything about the game, let's get into some story. I found the characters of Ōkami to be quite enjoyable. This game somehow made me care about a living sheet of paper (if you know, you know). As for the main characters...Amaterasu doesn't speak, but she's fun. She is a cute stoic god dog that wants to help everyone, but she also has a sassy side; she makes her disinterest known when talking to people that bore her. There's also Issun, a boisterous Poncle (basically a sprite) that speaks for Amaterasu and travels with her the whole game. Anyone who's played this game will tell you how annoying Issun is. I wanted to give him the benefit of the doubt, in truth he isn't too irritating if you just accept the fact he will be constantly talking every two seconds in cutscenes. He also explains things way too much, but I'm pretty dumb when playing games sometimes so I appreciate the extra help. Nonetheless, this guy is always explaining everything to you and I can see that getting on a player's nerves. Issun is an annoying character in general, too; he's an egotistical little dude that hits on literally every woman he sees and he has a short temper. It made me wish the women in the game would actually call him out for it but it never happens. It's worth noting that he does get some nice development since he starts to humble out a little more and he stops being an insufferable creep towards every woman he meets. In around the first quarter of the story, Susano is a major character and I thought he was pretty entertaining. He is the lazy descendent of the long-deceased legendary hero Nagi. He uses the title to boost his ego, but he really isn't very heroic in the beginning. In fact, he's the one that releases the big bad villain - Orochi - in the first place. Susano has a nice arc of turning from a big mouthed lazy wannabe hero to a true hero. Its not mind-blowing, but I think it works well; a precedent is set for his growth since he slowly becomes less afraid of real danger and gets better at the whole hero thing as the game goes on. Susano stops showing up in the story entirely after he gets the finishing blow on Orochi in the first 15 hours or so of the story, but it works since his arc is completed. Waka is another major character and he is probably my favorite character in the game. Waka is the mysterious flamboyant rival that gives prophecies to Amaterasu and Issun, duels Ammy at times, and pisses Issun off to no end. He often shows up to tease the duo and lead them the right way. The way his dialogue is written is pretty eccentric and fun, he has a cheesy way of talking and he randomly inserts French words in conversations despite there being no indication of other countries even existing in this game. There are hints that he's hiding something, but it isn't until the very end when this is finally seen. Waka is ultimately heroic in his goals, which I was glad to see since I was worried they were going to make him an awful twist villain. As for the other characters in the story, they are fairly minor but still plot important. Nonetheless, I don't feel they're worth explaining here; they have their charms but they are still side characters.
As I mentioned in the first paragraph, Ōkami is a lot longer than I thought it would be. It has a fake out ending after about 15 or 20 hours worth of progression: although Amaterasu is successful in her quest to restore nature from Orochi's curse and defeat him, his death releases other evil spirits that create more problems for her to fix. For a brief summary of what the continued plot looks like: there's a dark magic fog in Sei-an City that plagues the citizens (turns out it's from the emperor who was cursed by one of the Orochi ghosts), you help the priestess Rao explore a ship for the Fox Rods only to find nothing there, you save a woman named Kaguya from imprisonment and help her learn who she is (this is resolved in like five minutes since you quickly find a bamboo rocket tied to her past that she leaves the planet with), you speak with the queen of Sei-an City, you activate a galaxy in the sky to get to the underwater city to speak to the Draconians to learn how to stop the Water Dragon, you go inside the dragon's body to get the Dragon Orb and stop it's rampage, both Rao and Himiko are killed by a demon called Ninetails, you go on a treacherous trip through Oni Island to beat up Ninetails, once you beat it it's revealed that Ninetails' spirit went to Kamui so you go there too, in Kamui you find a swordsman of the Oina Tribe named Oki that becomes an ally after a duel, you go to the mountain village of the Oina and agree to help the people there find Lika (the lost daughter of the chief), you go to the forest Yoshpet where you find Issun's home land and an old friend of Amaterasu, once you get through Yoshpet you find the Spirit Gate, going inside the Spirit Gate takes you to 100 years ago in the past of the first village of the game, you then go to the moon cave with Nagi to make sure the hero prophecy goes through as normal, you kill Orochi together with Nagi and your past self and rescue Lika, after that you return to your own time by going back in the Spirit Gate, you go to the Wawku Shrine to then go fight the remaining two demons, you eventually beat those demons with the help of Oki and your past self, the wrecked ark of legend activates afterwards (of course you go inside), the ark has a boss gauntlet, then FINALLY you fight the lord of darkness Yami and the game ends after you narrowly win the long battle. I skipped over details for the sake of making this breakdown as swift and easily understandable as I could. Nonetheless, for how surprisingly long the story of Ōkami is, I did not find it to be all that special. Everything connects full circle, though, and that's always nice. I know all the characters and some of the story-beats are based on Japanese mythology, but I do not have any background knowledge on what those myths are.
Overall I think Ōkami HD was a solid experience. My only real problems with it involve how sluggish it can feel at times when it comes to progression, the bland combat, the repetition of bosses (made worse by needing to rematch them a few times with little to no change in your strategy), and Issun being annoying. Ōkami HD gets a solid 3.5 stars from me.