In 2006, Capcom and its offbeat development group Clover released the PlayStation 2 version of Okami -- an engrossing action-adventure set in a beautifully rendered mythological Japan that met with great critical fanfare but little commercial success. Clover has been dissolved since then, but at least Okami is getting a well-deserved second chance at a wide audience with a Wii port handled by God of War: Chains of Olympus developers Ready at Dawn. Despite some ill-advised use of motion controls in this version, Okami's overall quality is no less compelling than it was two years ago. There's not much new here for veterans of the PS2 original, but Wii-owning newcomers will find Okami to be one of the best adventures currently available on their console.

The game is set during an indeterminate time in Japan's ancient, mystical past. It's been 100 years since a valiant warrior named Nagi and a mysterious ethereal white wolf called Shiranui defeated the evil, eight-headed serpent-beast Orochi (though it was Shiranui who handled most of the heavy lifting). Now Orochi has somehow been freed from its imprisonment in the Moon Cave, and a creeping decay has begun to blacken the landscape and fill the countryside with monsters. You take control of Amaterasu, a second white wolf said to be the embodiment of the sun god himself. Along with Issun, a tiny traveling artiste who provides running commentary and comic relief, you'll direct Amaterasu across the blighted lands of old Nippon, using your divine powers to defeat demons and magically restore the country's verdant hills and babbling brooks to their former splendor.

Okami flows a lot like modern 3-D Zelda games: You'll move from villages to shrines to caves, meeting a variety of characters and solving their problems as you work to reverse Orochi's blight. Collectively, the game's many areas are a real sight to behold. Even two years after its first release, Okami's evocative graphics are one of the first and most impressive things you notice about the game. Clover took the game's setting as inspiration for its visual design, combining smart texture and modeling work with post-processing filters and effects to give the game a wispy, ethereal look that's effectively reminiscent of an old-fashioned Japanese watercolor painting. It's a style best appreciated in motion, and it really enhances the sense of otherworldly mysticism that's present throughout Okami's adventure.

The game's painterly visuals go hand in hand with the Celestial Brush, the game's primary puzzle-solving mechanic. You can flatten the game world onto a 2-D canvas at any time, and then use this brush to paint a number of different simple shapes that cause all sorts of magical effects. A simple horizontal stroke can chop down a number of trees, for instance, while painting a circle in the sky at nighttime causes the sun to appear and bring about a new dawn. Painting that same circle over a rotted old tree or befouled patch of earth, however, causes it to bloom anew. Painting a circle with a line through one side (that is, a bomb with a fuse) causes an explosion that you can use to demolish some obstacles. You meet numerous divine personalities as you continue to restore the land, and each one of them will bestow a new brush technique you can use to solve future puzzles.

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.

This review is based on a retail copy of the game provided by the publisher.