Baud Attitude

Apologies to any Bob Ross fans who stumble across this accidentally, there was simply no other appropriate title.

I finished Okami last night.  Since I recieved it for Christmas 2006, that means that I had put off playing it for just about two years.  That might not be an altogether bad thing, because I don’t know if I would have been able to play through it two years ago.  While the fights were never terribly difficult, some of the platforming required towards the end was… well, I wound up falling down bottomless pits a lot, and even though the game was always rather nice about putting me back on the last ledge I’d fallen off of, it took a lot of tries to make it through some areas.

Looking back at reviews from the time of its release, Okami got billed as the PS2’s “Last Big Game!”, which is rather ironic considering how well the system has held on in the intervening two years.  I think Persona 4 is the PS2’s CURRENT “Last Big Game!” and I wouldn’t be surprised if we see a few more “Last Big Game!” releases before the system finally does shuffle off into obscurity.

Anyway, back to the game.

I was worried about two things when I started Okami – first, that it was reputedly a tremendously long game, and second that I wouldn’t be able to pull off the whole painting-mechanic gameplay.

It didn’t turn out to be as long as I’d heard.  Admittedly, I skipped a bunch of side quests, but it took a little less than 44 hours to complete.  That’s still a pretty epic game, by my standards, and I have confidence that if I’d really gotten into the collecting-and-completing aspect of the game I could have easily spent 80 hours at it.

The painting turned out to be a little tricky, more so as the game progressed and I got access to more brush strokes, but it never really justified my initial apprehension.

There were a lot of occasions where I wanted to do a brush technique involving drawing a circle, and the game thought I wanted a loop-the-loop instead, which resulted in triggering a completely different power, but – in its defense – I never found a single situation where accidental misuse of an ability resulted in anything negative happening.  If I drew the wrong stroke, I just didn’t get the intended effect.  This is a neat trick; it means that the player CAN fail at something, but it means that failure just means “try again”.

Okami ended well.  The last few Big Fights were of suitably impressive scale and nastiness, without ever being too overwhelming, the story threw a couple of unexpected – but entirely logical – twists at me before wrapping up, and while actually coming to an end, it left a little room for a sequel.  Of course, Clover is dead and we’ll never see a sequel, so it’s a good thing that they only left a little room for a sequel and didn’t dwell on it all that much.

This was the last of the Games-Are-Art-Really titles I had to play, so I have no clue how I’m going to follow it up.  I’ll think of something. 🙂

Oh, and Merry Christmas, by the way.

I’ve been playing between two and five hours of Okami a night, and I think I’m about halfway through as of this writing.

I’m past the Big Plot Tw… I probably shouldn’t say that.  I’m past what seems to have been at least the FIRST Big Plot Twist.  More specifically, if this were your average 20-hour game, I’m past the point where I’d have expected ending credits and unanswered questions designed to sucker me into buying the sequel.

I don’t know WHY this comes to mind all of a sudden, but my copy of Kingdom Hearts Re: Chain of Memories (AKA: Kingdom Hearts 1.5) just arrived from Amazon.

Sniping at Square-Enix aside, back to Okami.

In the manual, you find out that your character will at some point in the game gain the ability to double jump, which is mostly a device that’s used to scatter stuff throughout the early levels, just barely out of reach, so you have a reason to come back to them – the ability is completely optional in the early levels.

It was when I got to the point where I NEEDED to be able to double-jump to progress that the trouble started, because I couldn’t.  I kind of expected to be given the ability at the point where I needed it, so getting to that point and then not being able to was, well, sort of like walking into a door.

As I was running around trying to figure out how to pull off this suddenly-essential move, I ran into an NPC with a helpful hint – to learn to double jump, I would need to go to the dojo and train.

Now, I’d been to the dojo a few times already, and I’d purchased three of the four abilities available there, so I figured that there would suddenly be more entries in the moves list that I could select from now that I needed them.

There weren’t.  It was still the three I’d learned already and a fourth which I had never learned because it was really expensive, about five times the price of the next most expensive ability.

Well, says I, obviously I just need to buy the fourth ability and then I’ll unlock more.   Time to farm up some cash.

Buying this skill had a price tag of 100000.

When I hit 99999, I hit the limit of my coin purse.

It IS possible to buy a bigger coin purse.  Problem is, you buy it with “praise”, which you mostly get by doing nice things for people.  I didn’t have much praise stockpiled, and I had been pretty good about doing nice things for people and feeding animals and so on and so forth so it’s not like I’d walked away from lots of opportunities to accumulate praise.

It took me a couple of hours of running around and doing quests for NPCs to get my praise up to the point where I could get a bigger coin purse, and it was almost all doing quests that I had deliberately skipped because they looked annoying.  Most of them were, by the way, and just to add insult, only about half of them actually gave me praise.

Still, I got enough praise to increase the size of my coin purse, dropped the 100k on that final ability, and… absolutely nothing unlocked.

I said some bad words and started thinking about it rationally.

An NPC had told me to go to the dojo.  Maybe he meant a dojo a little closer to him?  I’d had to backtrack an awful long way to get back to this dojo, after all.

It turns out that there’s another dojo, and that you can learn the double jump skill at THAT dojo for a very reasonable 20k, and if I hadn’t dropped 100K on learning what turned out to be a completely optional skill, I would have had that 20K and more besides.

I rolled up my virtual sleeves, got back to cash farming, and it wasn’t TOO long before I was able to double jump with the best of them, able to get a bit further in the game, and considerably less frustrated.

But, for a few hours there, the game actually did manage to go from “wow, this is really pretty and the music is so peaceful and the characters have Charm To Spare” to “the developers hate me, personally, and I’m starting to hate them back.”