Okami Reactions

After hearing all the praise heaped on this game by people who have now been playing it, I had to go get myself a copy and give it a spin.

Slight gameplay spoilers might follow:

The visual style of the game is beyond what I could have imagined. The game is 3D, and yet they were able to make a 2D-artistic style work with it. One of the biggest problems I've had with the 2D-to-3D transition in games is that too much of the "art" was given up in favor of trying to make things look realistic, and this game clearly shows that even in a 3D world a games aesthetics can be designed from a purely artistic standpoint.

I've only played about five hours so far, currently in the process of clearing out "Hyrule Field", and my concerns/complaints amount to the following:

The controls are a little "sloppy," I guess I would say, from time to time (though some of this belongs at the foot of the graphical style, which throws off perspective on occasion). I find myself adjusting the camera a little more than I would like. There are little chirps that accompany the text which I find really annoying, though after awhile I just kinda tuned it out. The "puzzles" are at about a first-grade level, and Issun, your fairy, walks you through exactly what you do in many cases anyway. The battles are also a piece of cake. Given that you can choose to avoid most non-boss/miniboss battles anyway it's a little weird to have made it so that button mashing (literally) will get you through unscathed in most of the early battles. It would have been nice if they required you to develop actual battle tactics. Oh well.

Those complaints haven't really detracted much from my overall enjoyment of the game thus far though. Besides the visual stimulation, it has a fairly interesting story and some fun characters. It's cool to see that a game that draws most of its story from a foreign culture can still be enjoyable to people outside it, and to the extent that it could get people at least a little interested in Japanese mythology and traditional art it deserves some applause. The text gets really long-winded at times, but there's a good amount of humor and characterization that comes through in it (and why all the Issun hate?...he's horrible when he tells you where to go next over and over and over and over again, but otherwise Issun >> Navie).

The game might not be anything truly revolutionary outside of its visual style and the Celestial Brush world-altering-technique (certainly there are a lot of parallels to the Zelda games), but the presentation is pretty incredible. Honestly, five hours in, I have to admit that I am more "into the game" than I was for either Ocarina of Time or the Windwaker...and I'm a huge Zelda fan.