Amaterasu!

Jaybird 7 Comments

E.D. recently watched the latest Diablo 3 trailer:

Afterwards, he said: I admit, I like the illustrations at the beginning of the trailer so much that I think a full game should be made using this style of animation.

This got me thinkin’ and remembering.

In the final days of any given console, you usually find absolutely mindblowing games that were pretty much unthinkable when the console was first released. Remember the PS2’s first year? Fantavision. Kessen. Eternal Ring. (shudder) Well, in the last days of the console, we got some real gems… stuff like Rogue Galaxy, Persona 3, and Okami.

The game is cell-shaded and very much has a resemblance to the graphics shown at the beginning of that film (though, granted, it has a different tone entirely). You are a wolf who, somehow, gets his paws on the Celestial Paintbrush. Through your various adventures, you will figure out how to use this paintbrush, remove curses from the land, and awaken the Gods (and all of these things involve painting).

You can revitalize flowers by painting a symbol of health on top of them. You can do damage to enemies by painting a slash on top of them. You can cross rivers by painting a symbol of bridge on top of them. So on and so forth… it’s not only quite clever, it manages to be spectacularly beautiful as well.

(And, if you’re a Wii owner, there’s a version that came out a couple of years later for the Wii that actually has you waving your controller around as if it were a paintbrush. It’s an absolutely charming game that has a feel like nothing else I’ve played.

You can check out the PS2 trailer here:

(And, now that I think about it, this game would be *PERFECT* for the PS3 Move… someone should do that.)

So that’s my recommendation for you this week.

Jaybird

Jaybird is Birdmojo on Xbox Live and Jaybirdmojo on Playstation's network. He's been playing consoles since the Atari 2600 and it was Zork that taught him how to touch-type. If you've got a song for Wednesday, a commercial for Saturday, a recommendation for Tuesday, an essay for Monday, or, heck, just a handful a questions, fire off an email to AskJaybird-at-gmail.com

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7 Comments

  1. I played Okami on the Wii, and I really, really loved it. The painting strokes took some practice, but once I got them down, they were the best control adaptation for the Wii that I played. Early-in-the-game stuff was done with simple strokes, like the slash for damage. A little further into the game, and the strokes are a little harder to master, like the health onion (that’s how I remembered how to paint it, anyway). It makes you feel like you, personally, are getting better, and not just a machine telling you “Congratulations, now you are Level N+1 and you can do this new stuff.”

    The hardest stroke to get right would cause a giant storm to blast your enemies, and it was really, really tough to do in the heat of the moment. Fortunately, the penalty for failing a stroke was only that you had to give up that tactic or try it again.

    What I loved about the game, though, was how magic, life, and painting were combined into something that permeates the land. As Okami runs through a barren land, ephemeral flowers bloom at her heels and vanish into the air. Wind is visible, strokes of white that chill the scene as Okami’s fur is ruffled.

    Oh yeah. Sake. Sake is not just a fun drink in this game, no, it is your secret weapon against the darkest demons of the world.

    Yes, this is a game for which I want to carefully preserve a Wii console just to be able to pull it out in 30 years and visit that wolf again with my grandkids.

    • You do a much better job of selling it than I did.

      It is one of the games I use as an example of a game that “people who hate video games” should play.

      • Agree, I loved the game (I played it on Wii as well) — thematically, visually, gameplay-ly. The only bits of the above that I’d slightly disagree with are:
        – I did find it rather Zelda-like in the general structure, so not entirely novel. Not that that’s a bad thing
        – While the painting mechanism did take some training, it remained finicky through the whole game. Especially frustrating were certain timed sequences where if one component gesture didn’t register correctly, you had to go back and repeat the entire sequence again.

        But overall, a fine, beautiful game.

    • “The hardest stroke to get right would cause a giant storm to blast your enemies, and it was really, really tough to do in the heat of the moment.”

      It’s been a while, but…heat of the moment? Didn’t the game pause while you were painting?

      • Yes, you freeze the world while you paint. However, I get an adrenaline rush in combat sequences, and the nature of the strokes is that you have to complete them in a fluid way. You can’t dally, making sure each step is correct. It has to be a practiced thing, and adrenaline often screws up practiced things for me.

  2. I may miss playing games like that now that I have canceled my Gamefly.

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