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Dear betrothed Capcom,

We’ve always had a fluctuating relationship. Back in the 90s, when you showered me with such glorious titles like the first three Megaman games and Bionic Commando for the NES, you then tarnish it with Megaman X6. Hell, after your brush with fame courtesy of Street Fighter 2, you basically recycled the same game four times before counting to three.

Along comes a little division of yours which created a then-Gamecube exclusive involving sentai warriors, a dose of movie clich�s of the 50s & 60s, and the power to fast forward and slow down time. The first two Viewtiful Joe games were indeed a mixed breath of freshness and old-school beatdown, before it was beaten to death with its spin-offs. They’ve even decided to pay a loving tribute to Japan. Until you guys decided to disband the studio as they reach to the peak of their creativity. Smart move there, guys. I still love you, though.

I speak of course about the division known as Clover Studio, now labeled as Seed. What possessed you to disown these bunch of talented developers? Who knows, so let’s look at their magnum opus: Okami for the PS2. Okami (which is a play on both “ookami”, which means wolf, and “kami”, which means god) is what one would call a bookmark on the illustrious topic of art in games. Essentially, Okami is “when a great rendition of a Zelda game isn’t actually a Zelda game, produced by Capcom”. I figured with all the less-than-stellar beat-em-ups you’ve been churning out(Chaos Legion & Final Fight Streetwise to name a few), your new sibling Seed got sick of it and decided to go all out with their wild game designing ideas and their apparent love of Japanese culture.

Then, they took 19^th Century Japanese paintings treasured by rich noble cunts and brought them to vivid life via cel-shading. If pictures are indeed a thousand words, Okami is the unabridged Bible. As if making sure that your main character moves as realistically as possible wasn’t enough, you go around and made the entire of 14th century Japan look so damn colorful to live in, even in the dark and evil bits. Okami’s story is a loose interpretation of Japanese folklore: the Orochi, Nine-Tails, the hero Susano-O. All meshed up cohesively to tell the tale of a slumbering god’s quest to rid the taint of the feudal land of Japan. In this case, the god in question walks on all fours, barks a lot, and wields a discus-like reflector shield better than most trained animals would. He also gets Magatama beads and pronged swords too, the former which is used either as a whip or a ballistics apparatus, and the latter like, well, a sword.

Every person or demigod or things your sibling created are unforgettable. You’ve got Issun the chirpy sidekick with infatuations of poking into female character’s kimonos, a piece of Spirit paper who challenges you in a race to the death, a bird mafia group who resides in a bamboo-themed spa R&R resort, an old man named Mr. Orange who has, well, an orange on his head and has a dance which make Cherry Blossom flowers bloom on sight. Even the bad guys you fight are esoterically-designed, from the paper-faced imps to the bulb-creatures which need specific powers to open up its weak spot hidden within their rotund bodies. Then again, you people did leave a legacy of flamboyant character designs (see Sengoku Basara series).

And herein lies your multi-trick pony, the cash crop, your standout game mechanic: the Celestial Brush. You press and hold the R1 on your PS2 controller, and you paint onto the canvas using the left analog to move the brush and the Square or Triangle to add in the paint. From the Celestial Brush comes the crux of your powers. Draw a simple circle with a line crossed on the top to make a bomb appear and blow up whatever’s in front of you. Fill in a broken bridge by just painting the empty section black. Draw a circle on a dead tree to bring it to life. Draw a 1-stroke line to slice demons in half as well as piss off the townsfolk. Absolute fun!

Okami is built on the foundation that helping people, feeding animals and making plants grow out of dead things can make you powerful. When you do one of the aforementioned things, you garner an amount of praise which can be used to increase your life, your Celestial Ink containers, and so forth. It’s all optional, but doing it sometimes make you feel a little warm inside, not to mention help you kick more ass effectively. You, Capcom, are trying to make an environmental-loving hippie out of gamers.

And then there’s the little bits. Here’s one example: hen you first encounter your first boss the Spider Queen, the build-up is well-played. Candles are put out as you pass by them, and the music gets eerie with ominous chants and echoing chimes in the distance. When the supposedly main baddie Orochi made his appearance the first time, almost all of its heads were posing for the intro “painting” shot with his name in kanji on the side. Just after that, the last of the eight heads popped up, confused. Makes me chuckle every time. The introductions to the Celestial powers are also noteworthy. You also add a few nods to your previous games in here; amongst them is when Mrs. Orange from the first village performed Akuma’s Murderous Rage (you know, THAT Akuma super move) on an unsuspecting kitchen pot to serve our four-legged Cherry cakes. There are probably others which I’ve missed out, but you can’t deny the charm you have wrought onto the gaming community with this game.

As I close this letter, I would like to say that re-releasing Okami onto the Wii is a smart move, albeit a bit of a no-brainer, considering that the Wii-mote is suitable in making anyone a Pablo Picasso poser. Let us hope that with the Wii’s larger consumer demography that Okami will get the sales number it deserves, because it got a lot of love from journalists and critics, myself included. For those lucky enough to have the PS2 copy, let us stop whatever FPS you’re playing right now, dust off and plug in the PS2, and enrich ourselves by loading in the godsend of game design and game art that was bestowed to us on 2006.

Love,

Jonathan Leo, affable Capcom asskisser whore fanboy enthusiast.

P.S: Thanks for the new Street Fighter IV pics. They look lovely on my desktop background.

Technorati : GOTY 2006, cel shading, japanese folklore, okami, paintbrush, ps2, wii, wolf