Topic: Games You Recently Beat?

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Title: Okami HD

Platform: Nintendo Switch

What is it? An HD remaster of a 2006 PS2 game.

Level of completion: Completed the main quest and found all of the brush techniques (required and secret). Did not complete all of the side-quests or find all of the beads, however. Also didn't engage in any post-game activities.

What I liked:

• The game is most famous for its gorgeous mix of cel-shading and and an ukiyo-e art style, giving it a distinctive, timeless, and gorgeous visual presentation that still looks fantastic on modern HD consoles.
• The main character, Amaterasu, is a god in the form of a white wolf, and she's a wonderfully animated and charming protagonist. Granted, there's no talking, but there's a ton of body language and fun silliness involving her canine embodiment. Simply put, there's a bunch of great physical dog humor in the game. More broadly, the game never abandons its sense of humor.
• I really dig the way this game derives its fantasy elements from ancient Japanese mythology. The approach makes this game feel very cool and distinctive in a way you'd never get with, say, a game like The Legend of Zelda or Skyrim.
• The music, very much a high point of the experience, also has a traditional Japanese folk flair to it, but arranged in ways that are more modern. This old-timey inspired music with more contemporary instrumentation gives the game much of its identity. And, speaking plainly, the score is just flat out gorgeous most of the time. Definitely play this with headphones on, if possible.
• This game (mostly) successfully emulates the game design of older Zelda titles.
• There is a wealth of stuff to do besides advance the main plot. There are a number of collectibles, a decent amount of weapons to buy, new techniques to learn, side-quests to complete, etc. In this respect, the game feels denser than your average Zelda title.
• Unusual for games of this era, the game has a surprisingly robust fast travel system in place. Although I generally didn't need to warp around the game's world too much.
• The game's Switch port is great all around. The presentation is seemingly flawless. You can control the celestial brush in a number of ways: with the sticks, with motion controls, or with the touch screen. I often found the touch controls to be ideal for this game, and the game looks stunning in handheld form, so I spent 90% of the game playing undocked. But the gyro controls work about as well as you could expect them to, so it's a good time either way.

What I disliked:

• I'm not really a fan of how demons were integrated into the overworld (or, rather, how they weren't). As it stands, you run around the game's fairly barren areas while flags that represent enemy demons chase you relentlessly.
• The worst aspect of this game is the dungeon design. It simply sucks. The dungeons barely have any puzzles and are, for the most part, incredibly linear. This becomes even more noticeable because of how closely this game hews to the design of post-OoT 3D Zelda games in other respects. The dungeons are what really stand out in those games, and, in this respect, Okami simply fails.
• Some control and camera issues that weren't uncommon in games from this era.
• Issun, this game's equivalent of OoT's Navi and possibly the one character you'll hear the most over the course of the game, is incredibly unpleasant: he's rude, selfish, and, worst of all, aggressively misogynistic (don't play a drinking game where you take a shot every time he refers to a woman in this game as "busty" or "babe" or makes a perverse remarks to their faces unless you want to quickly die from alcohol poisoning).
• In general, there aren't a lot of really memorable characters in this game.
• The game's structure is unfortunate. The story is roughly divided into three arcs, but, for me, these never felt like properly cohered into a satisfying narrative. Rather, it just felt like the writers were unable to craft a compelling narrative that could stretch the length of the game and encompass the various ideas they were interested in exploring, so they just had you fight a series of more and more powerful evil forces over the course of the various arcs.
• Why is there a three minute cutscene every time you feed an animal? Sure, you can easily skip it, but it's odd and just another thing that makes this title feel unpolished as an experience.
• There are a variety of weapons to purchase and utilize, but, in lieu of stats or special abilities, I didn't see a reason to opt for one weapon of a particular type over another. There were only three or so actual weapon types, so it was an odd situation where I didn't feel like I had much to choose from, despite having purchased several weapons of those few types.
• I found the cherry bombs difficult to accurately place in this game. I'd paint one on the screen, only for it to appear somewhere else entirely, which was troublesome when I needed it to explode over a specific enemy or object.
• Having to remember what brush technique you had to use to finish off a particular enemy to obtain their fangs was a bit annoying to me. As was the process of demon fang farming in general.
• The Yooka Laylee-esque nonsense language these characters speak in is painful to listen to. Thankfully, the game allows you to mute the "voice acting" (if meaningless, repetitive noises can indeed be called voice acting), which is preferable to having my ears shredded every time I talk to a character.
• I really, really hated the block enemies in this game. A few times throughout the game (at least two of them being mandatory parts of the experience), these large block monsters keep you from advancing until you hit them in a randomized sequence of spots across their bodies with the celestial brush (from memory, because the spots are only illuminated for a split second). If you're even a tiny bit off, you have to start over, and, I swear to god, I was stuck for a good hour at each of these tossers. Worst part of the game. They ruined my mood whenever I encountered them, because I knew whatever fun I was having at the time was about to change into pure frustration.
• The final boss fight is disappointing. Granted, none of the bosses are fantastic, but this one seemed pretty basic and lackluster.
• In general, the ending feels a bit unsatisfying to me.

Final thoughts: Okami HD is a superior port that looks and sounds gorgeous and controls very well. Unfortunately, there are some game design shortcomings that kept me from appreciating this as much as I had hoped to. It's still a solid game, and it's currently the one truly traditional Zelda-like experience on the Switch, but I wouldn't call it a masterpiece, by any means.

Score: 6/10