Flammie reviews: Ōkami HD

Okami is an action RPG game that is often said to be like Zelda, and while both games are action RPGs, I find that they do not share awfully lot. In Okami, you control a dog that is a sun god. Also, you have a flea that can draw things on screen. This is one of the main mechanics of the game, you draw things that affect the stuff in the world. It starts up as very cool and interesting feature, early on in the game you draw a bridge to create a bridge, and it works in the first try. However, the further you get into the game more apparent it gets that this feature is both under-utilised and overused if that makes sense. For example, most of the things that you will always draw are circles. And circles are things that the game is the worst at recognising. So more often than not you end up redrawing things on screen several times. This is not a good mechanic if failure means getting damage in battle or restarting a long sequence of coreographed action events. The battle mechanic that doesn’t concern drawing is really boring, about 95 % of fights can be dealt with with button smashing. A few fights require you to jump around or sneak behind the monsters to hit soft spots, but all in all it’s not very exciting.

Luckily fighting is not the main part of the game, dungeons and towns are full of puzzles and there’s a collectatelement to all this. The plot is cool and fun and dialogue is ok, some parts show its age as I’m playing this in HD remake of 2020, the constant barrage of infantile boobs jokes from the flea are more of fremdscham than funny already.

I played it all through in 40 hours and it was mostly enjoyable so altogether I would recommend it for fans of Zeldas and Kingdom Hearts, it’s better than average but not super good. Find it in discount if you can.

Score: ★★★★★★★★☆☆ (8 out of 10)