OKAMI HD

It's Legend of Zelda, but in Heian-era Japan and starring a god-wolf. 10/10.

Modern games cannot compare to this game. Okami's level design, style, story, and gameplay all reflect the wii era and are still the best recipe for a good game. I hope Okami 2 lives up to the original.

8/10 A couple of flaws away from an all-time great, Okami’s highs soar sky-high. Astral wolf-god high. The visual style is stunning, unmistakably blending cel-shading with traditional Japanese art. The Zeldalike gameplay, swapping equipment acquisition for magic brushstroke learning, is a tactile pleasure and an inventive blast. It starts slow and small but rapidly builds in pace and scope into an epic adventure. The world is large yet manageable, with side quests and secrets galore. The combat, including boss battles, smartly incorporates the brushstroke dynamic and stays fresh and engaging. But, O M G, the plot and writing are bad, bad, bad. If the designers had kept the game identical but trimmed the exposition down to Zelda levels, everything would have hummed. Instead, it’s all besodden with the chafing weight of soggy writing, like a caricature of the worst Japanese storytelling tropes, accentuated by grating Simlish babble-speak stretched across interminable dialogue. This latter fault is excusable, given the era. The babbling, the icky, ogling misogyny of your sidekick, and the unwieldy camera are all relics of a 2006 release. Everything else is so near-perfect that it’s still deservedly a common entry on best-of lists. With better editors, this, along with the also great Viewtiful Joe, would have, or at least should have, made Clover Studio and Hideki Kamiya bigger gamer-household names.