OKAMI HD

Okay, here's the thing. This game game is charming as hell and has a great heart. The art style is gorgeous, and running around the world is a treat. At the same time, like many others, I dropped the game several times before playing through beginning to end. Why? This game is slow. The brush mechanics are novel if a bit narrow in scope and somewhat awkward on controller. The gameplay is a mix of good and clunky. And Issun talks way. Too. Much. The game definitely has a bit of a mixed identity between a "kid friendly game" and an adult-ready adventure, holding your hand way too much but also letting go of the reins at the worst times. And yet? By the end, as I'm sitting in front of the final dungeon, I'm kind of sad to let the game go.
Once you sit down with the right mindset and level of patience to play Okami, you'll find a genuinely inspired game that doesn't land every punch but had the right amount of love put into it. Even through it's flaws it feels like a comforting kind of game that I could come back to on a new file just to roam around to escape from the overstimulation of modern gaming. I can't recommend it to everyone, but I love that this game exists, and I'm very excited to see how they expand on the sequel.

This is my comfort game. I have this on PS2, PS4 and now on PC too. In all versions I’ve 100%ed the game, and on the PS2 version multiple times. That alone tells how much I love this game. One of the best games ever made.
The OST, graphics, story and characters are just /chef kiss. There’s no other game on this Earth that would feel so much like home to me. I usually take my time just to do silly stuff like vibe in Kamiki village with Mrs. Orange and watch her doing her laundry, or turning the entire Oina tribe into dogs for s**t and giggles.
Time has treated this one well, probably because of its cool graphics. They were awesome back then since I had never seen anything like it, and they’re still awesome to this day. The ink painting style with a bit of grain adds to the nostalgic looks. If you learn all skills and max your weapons, the main story bosses are all pretty casual fights. But if you want to do everything there is to do, some of the optional fights can be tough (in a good way).
In case you haven’t played this yet, you have a black hole in your general education. If you’re into RPGs, Japan, like dogs and if your power fantasy is to be a benevolent god, you WILL want ot play this before you die. Get it NAOW!

I believe that back when Ookami was made, Kamiya was a much more hopeful and optimistic person. The game is overladen with the hope that the color and culture will wash over the dark times with just a bit of hope and a prayer. Ever since then he's just been very grumpy and his work has been more outpourings of frustration at how the world refuses to accept all this optimism and good will.

In either case, this game is a masterpiece that people do not appreciate enough. They see it as just a game, they see past all the little things that make up an emotional work. But there's always some people who know what it's like to push a glint of giving a ♥♥♥♥ through everything, and who else would that kind of message be for?

if this game came out in 2025 people would call it a soulslike because its a video game
cool game tho

Greatest art direction I've ever seen. I grew up playing Okami on Ps2 and have beaten it 10+ times. It always makes me happy. Crazy to think this game is 20 years old and not only plays perfect but retains absolutely all charm. <3

Crazy to think that a 20 year-old game holds up graphically so well because of the art direction. If you have a computer that runs Steam, it probably runs Okami too. Has some pacing issues (like one particular boss you need to fight three times) and is very easy combat-wise, but I think it's still a fantastic game. Also this was my first time playing it so there's no nostalgia talking.
Absolutely love the characters and the goofy antics they are up to!

I'm doing everything in my power to give this game a fair chance, but the irritating lack of PC support as well as the awful menu options and default controls, which reset every time you open the game, is making this very hard.
First of all, the game boots in a small windowed mode, similar to Undertale, but unless you picked Borderless Windowed, the game will always boot back into that small window. If you picked regular Fullscreen, there is a very large chance that whenever you tab out of the game (which may be very often as a pc user), and even if you have several monitors, the game will also revert back to that small window again. This is not an error either, if you go back into the settings, it will be back into "Window." And what's so punishing is that when you are in the game, you CANNOT change your display mode back. You can ONLY do this in the title screen. So if you mess up and the game is back to being that tiny window again, you either have to wait until you can save to exit to the title screen, or do it anyways and forfeit whatever progress you have made since the last save. All just to fix the game not being 1/3 the size of the screen.
Every time you boot the game up again, most of your game settings (other than selecting borderless windowed) will reset back to the default. This includes the blaring default full volume and inverted mouse camera controls that are curiously labeled as "normal" despite functioning the opposite. And if you are a poor soul like me who was not aware of any of these settings when jumping into the game, you will be sitting in a VERY LOUD, WINDOWED, UNSKIPPABLE 20 MINUTE INTRO CUTSCENE before you can make your FIRST SAVE FILE.
This is a smaller nitpick but in order to change any settings, the menu will always require you to select an "Exit Options" button instead of simply letting you back out. I understand if you need to select this to let the game know about any updated settings, but you will always have to click this button regardless of if you have made any changes or not. This makes the very, very frequent options navigation due to the above issues even more irritating because it adds yet another layer of punishment to ever have to change everything.
And even more than that, there is an option in-game to press C to switch camera modes, though this is reset every single time a character has dialogue. And some dialogue gives you the option to speed through it faster if you hold the mouse click, but some does not, and this becomes irritating for the many, many sentences that are split by the textbox in very odd places. I understand there may have been limitations to the localization and translation or what they could fill the textboxes with, but as a native English speaker, this has already become irritating less than 30 minutes in, and not having the ability to speed up the reading process to help make up for it half of the time isn't helping.
I'm trying my best, but this is a lot to deal with off the gate. The only reason I'm still giving this game a chance is because I have heard endless praise from reliable sources and am doing everything in my power to get through all of these technical issues. But for anyone else, be warned. I'm sure most of these issues would likely not happen on a console, but I don't have a console.