Okami

The greatest game ever released. I love everything about it. Gameplay: 9/10 Visuals: 10/10 Soundtrack: 10/10 Atmosphere: 10/10

Ōkami es un juego precioso, elegante en su superficie y profundamente consciente de su identidad estética. Su dirección artística —inspirada en la pintura japonesa tradicional— no solo resiste el paso del tiempo, sino que lo convierte en una de las obras visualmente más reconocibles del medio. Es un mundo amable, colorido y lleno de personalidad, que invita a ser recorrido más que conquistado. El problema es que, una vez atravesada la capa estética, el juego aporta poco a nivel sistémico. Sus mecánicas son correctas pero conservadoras, y el pincel celestial, aunque ingenioso en concepto, se agota rápido y rara vez evoluciona hacia algo realmente complejo o transformador. La estructura es clásica hasta lo predecible, heredera directa de Zelda sin cuestionar ni expandir sus fundamentos.

Okami is one of the most visually stunning games on the PS2, but the glacial pacing and unsatisfying combat ultimately result in a relatively disappointing experience.

Oh god I really wanted to love this game. It has no punch. You never have any risk of dying, money is meaningless, and everywhere you walk feels like a MOBA. This is because of the way your character moves, and so everything is just wide ramps and plateaus, which is super boring and uninspired, it doesn't matter if your character and the trees look gorgeous. This game drags so much, and should never be compared to Zelda, this game literally tells you how to solve each puzzle before you even have a chance of trying yourself! It's just busywork! Amazingly flawed game design! The graphic style is beautiful, the characters funny, but god damn does this not deserve all the praise it gets, be warned.

Generally there are many nuisances to playing this game here are a few: -every time you pick up an inventory item the game pauses and displays a popup description that you can't skip until a second and a half whether or not you've picked up that same item before. -every time you choose to feed animals a cutscene is loaded that is unique to the animal type you are feeding, this is even a longer break in gameplay and requires you to wait around 5 seconds before you can get out of it. -The combat becomes super limiting in what you are able to do and certain enemies and bosses require you to perform very specific actions in order to deal damage to them and once you figure out their gimmick they become a breeze. The major nuisances: The dialogue would be better if it didn't exist at all and was more of an artistic representation where the environment indicates where to go and what to do rather than some red text that plainly states it. There are certain points in the story where what you're supposed to do is completely incoherent and the developers knew it or else they wouldn't add a "fortune teller" so you can pay for the red text that tells you what to do. One point in the game requires you to fire a rotating cannon at a wall to crate a hole but there aren't any distinctive marks for what wall this cannon should be fired at. the cannon doesn't appear to fire any sort of projectile out of it to indicate that it will affect the surface it is being targeted at so I assumed that some sort of cannon ball needed to be located but no, it's just bad game design. Then there's also another point in the game with the Orca and finding a "whirlpool" that leads to the dragon temple, the Orca tells you that "the whirlpool is somewhere in the ocean" so I ride around exploring the islands in the ocean and when I decide to actually look for this whirlpool instead I waste 20 minutes looking for it because the Orca couldn't be any more specific about how this "whirlpool" was to be accessed. What I was supposed to do was go back to shore and talk to someone on a cliff that triggers an event where you draw stars in the sky to create a spiral constellation and spin it to create the whirlpool in the ocean. The entire game and everything you do in it is linear and scripted but the game gives away the answers to puzzles straight from the beginning, the balance of how much information the player should be given to complete a task is very rarely intuitive and rewarding to follow through with, either the dialogue overextends information of what the player is to do or it tells you to do "step 4" but completely overlooks steps 1-3 which are seemingly unrelated to step 4. The redeemable qualities of this game are it's art style, the story, cutscenes ,and characters are well executed though don't explore out of the realm of cliche, the fishing minigame that requires me to inject steroids into my left thumb, and some of the objectives/side quests are genuinely intuitive and fun to complete but there's still a lot of missed opportunities to give the player an "Aha" moment. This game feels like it was meant for a younger audience at times when everything you need to do is plainly stated (sometimes even several times over) but that would be in contrast with some of the convolution that not even an adult could figure out where or how to progress without glancing over a walkthough which isn't desirable for any game.