It’s OK-ami, but not GREAT-ami

Do I really hate this wolf?

I started playing Okami a while ago and I don’t think I like it much. I can tell there’s a fun game in there, one I’m interested in playing, but there are just so many tiny problems.

(1) The camera control is terrible. You have two choices: move the camera with the d-pad, or enter drawing mode with B and use the nunchuk to move the camera. One requires you to choke up on the Wiimote; the other requires you to pause the game. Since neither is fluid, and the built-in camera is always kind of hinting into its own preferred position, I always feel claustrophobic: I can never quite see where I want to go.

The antecedent of “those” in the sentence above is presumably the letters in the game’s terrible typeface, rendered in poorly resampled pixels. They are indeed monsters.

(2) The text is awful. By which I mean: the auto-scroll speed is way too slow. It takes forever to get through one line of dialogue. The text also looks terrible: not just all the pixels are jagged, but because they chose an unreadable typeface. Is that Marker Felt?

(3) The controls suck. You’d think that drawing on the screen with the wiimote would be as natural as can be, but you’d be wrong! For some reason, the drawing feels cramped and inaccurate. My guess is that they’re translating the movement of the wiimote into a series of vectors and feeding that into the underlying PS2 code, which was designed to read input from a joystick, instead of taking the time to do the right thing (which would be to let the player draw whatever, and then analyze the drawing for shapes afterwards). (3b) Wiimote waggle for charging on the map and slashing in combat just feels wrong. I would rather have the waggle mapped to jump (since you do that much less frequently, at least in the first ~4 hours).

(4) I’m really, really getting sick of running around towns and asking people for something to do. Maybe this is just my JRPG fatigue talking.

—Adam

1. alexaroar reblogged this from warpskip and added:

   i completely agree!...experience. credit goes where its due though,

2. warpskip posted this