Okami Is The Reason I Should Play Games From My Pile Of Shame

Like you, my backlog of media is huge. I need to read Slaughterhouse Five and Gravity’s Rainbow. I should watch Alien and The Godfather at some point. I still haven’t started The Wire. But out of everything I need to get to, games are the most daunting task. I could easily set aside 2 hours for a movie, but the 80 hours I need to beat something like Fallout: New Vegas, or the amount of time I would need to have a deep understanding of the mechanics of Company of Heroes, are far greater than the chunk of my life that would evaporate by binge watching a bad Netflix original show over a weekend. That said, getting to the games I’ve been putting off playing for years brings its own feeling of accomplishment that I can’t get from watching something that I will only engage with for a fraction of the time. And out of the games I’ve been meaning to get to, Okami was relatively high on the list.

Source: Capcom Unity Twitter https://twitter.com/Capcom_Unity/status/941450499596812288

I  had been planning on buying Okami for the PlayStation 2 after it came out in 2006, then again on the Wii where I thought the motion controls would enhance the experience (rather than hinder it), and a third time on the PlayStation 3. The fourth release on the PlayStation 4 has come out at a “right place, right time” for me. Okami has you play as Amaterasu, the Shinto sun goddess. Amaterasu’s current vessel is that of a wolf, although she still has the ability to wield traditional weapons as well as the Celestial Brush, a calligraphy brush that writes on the physical world. I was enjoying my time going on small quests for people in the world or clearing The Legend of Zelda style dungeons, but it wasn’t until after the boss fight with Orochi, the eight headed serpent Amaterasu had fought against 100 years ago, that I came to really start picking up what Okami was laying down.  

After a short cutscene following Orochi’s defeat, your bug sized companion Issun tells you to head back to Kamiki Village, the game’s starting location, for a festival being held to celebrate Orochi’s current defeat and his loss from a century prior. You regain control of Amaterasu in Kamiki Village just after the cutscene ends. Teleporting you here is such a smart way to handle the situation too, because it doesn’t give the player the chance to miss the festival. Okami takes you by the hand and says, “Hey, take a break. You earned it.” The brilliance of the festival scene is in its sincerity. The inhabitants of Kamiki aren’t getting drunk, playing with their pets, and setting off fireworks so that you might get a new weapon or learn more about the story through a text dump. They are celebrating for themselves, and so that you might be able to relax and feel you’ve accomplished something.  What Okami does here to recognize the player’s efforts is so much more powerful than an achievement unlocking or a pop up saying you’ve leveled up.

Okami genuinely wants the player to feel at peace. The night sky being lit up by fireworks in the shape of Amaterasu and Issun is something that should make anyone laugh at the game, not with it. In this respect, the Kamiki Festival is not unlike a lot of Okami director Hideki Kamiya’s output (including Devil May Cry, Viewtiful Joe, and Bayonetta). Kamiya is a man that truly feels a dude named after a 14^th century poet, wearing an ankle length leather duster sans shirt, wielding two guns AND a sword is the coolest cool dude that shoots lava spider demons in the face. Kamiya’s games (and Twitter account) reveal him to be a man devoid of irony. His sincerity in crafting both a sexy witch that uses her hair to send demons back to Hell and a small annual celebration of good’s triumph over evil is what sells me on his games despite how goofy they are at a cursory glance.  Kamiya’s games are cool and stylish for the sake of being cool and stylish. When he wants you to feel you have made life better for a small village in ancient Japan, you honestly feel the respite from everyday life you have provided for these people is real.

The villagers only see Amaterasu as a wolf, not “that which is good and motherly to all”. No one directly thanks you. Instead, you get the privilege to see everyone enjoying themselves, carefree, without the burden of having to bow down to their savoir and shower them with upgrade points or healing items. You have the satisfaction of knowing you altruistically gave them this time of rest and comfort. Okami is a game where you literally use art to make the world a better place. Because the game so honestly wants you to feel a pure sense of joy during the Kamiki Festival, Okami manages to mirror your in-game actions and becomes a brushstroke that enriches the lives of anyone that it comes in contact with. Don’t wait any longer to play this if you haven’t yet. Strike Okami from your backlog as fast as you can.