Okami (Wii)

Occasionally frustrating motion controls can't dampen the spirit of this lively and visually stunning adventure.
5/2/2008 3:07 PM | 0 Comments | Page 2 of 3

Of course, there's plenty of combat in Okami as well. You start battles by running into enemies in the overworld, which quickly transitions you to an enclosed arena where you have to finish off all foes before you can get back to roaming. Amaterasu starts with a basic melee weapon, a spinning disk that you can fling at enemies. As you move through the game, you'll pick up other divine instruments with different effects that you can equip as primary or secondary weapons. The Celestial Brush also plays a role in combat; each enemy is vulnerable to a different brush technique at certain times during a battle, so you can get a real leg up in tougher fights by figuring out when to use each brush stroke.

In addition to the multiple weapons, there's a decent amount of character leveling to do in Okami, though you won't be leveling up with experience points, per se. Amaterasu's abilities are dependent on the idea that a god is only as powerful as the strength of its followers' belief, so the game quantifies character advancement with "praise" gained by aiding people, animals and even the land itself. The pursuit of praise forms the basis for a lot of Okami's optional side missions and activities. The more imaginative of these activities involve using your brushwork to solve complex puzzles, though even simple tasks like resurrecting a dead old tree or providing food to some passing deer can yield a few points of praise. You can cash those points in to raise your health and ink levels, as well as improve an ability to resurrect yourself when you die.

Okami shares a lot of design elements with recent 3-D Zelda games like Twilight Princess, and anyone who enjoys Zelda and other games of its ilk will find a lot to like here. Unfortunately, Okami shares another aspect with Twilight Princess: awkward, shoehorned motion controls. Most of your movement and actions are thankfully mapped to the Wii remote and Nunchuk's buttons and analog stick, as they should be. But in combat, you have to give a flick of the remote to attack, which is a longer and less immediate action than simply pressing a button. Since your attack combos depend on very specific timing, this can make it difficult to string attacks together effectively. Shaking the remote too vigorously can cancel the attack altogether.

You'd think the Wii remote would be a natural fit for the Celestial Brush controls, since it allows you to paint freehand shapes on the screen. The control of the brush itself is a little too sensitive, but it's possible to reliably paint the circles and straight lines the game demands after some practice. But the game's shape detection is frustratingly strict. Often, what looks to you like a perfectly straight horizontal line or a nicely rounded circle will be rejected, requiring you to try again (and again, and again...) to reproduce the exact shapes required. This is merely an annoyance in regular combat or puzzle scenarios, but occasionally the game will throw a sequence of demanding, mandatory brush-based challenges at you. It's just plain frustrating to have to try a challenge 20 times over before the game decides you've drawn a circle perfect enough to register.

The control issues can be maddening at first, but they become less frustrating as you get a feel for the timing and brush strokes the game is looking for. More importantly, if you've never played Okami before, you shouldn't let those issues stop you from enjoying this inspired and rewarding adventure. The only significant improvement over the PlayStation 2 original is the addition of true progressive-scan, 16 x 9 widescreen support, so if you've played the first game through to completion, there's not much reason to revisit this one. But if you sadly missed out on Okami before, this is now the best-looking way to experience a magical game that deserved a lot more attention the first time around.