A review of sorts

I finally got round to finishing Okami this week and all I can say that it is a truly awesome game, so if you haven’t played it then you don’t know what your missing. It’s got an truly outstanding art style, and the game play works with such fluidity with the style that it was a really good game, also it had really humorous parts in it- I love games that have a sense of humour to them.

It’s also expected to come out on to the Wii soon I believe. I think that it would work well on the Wii since the game play involves a celestial brush in which you draw your moves out, so I think it would be a good transition form PS2 to Wii, shame I don’t own a Wii – yet.

I’ve been playing more lost Odyssey over the past few days and it’s a really good, fun game to play. I do like playing turn based combat games from time to time as it always has an organised retro feeling to them. It reminds me heavily of the Final Fantasy series but that hardly surprising considering who worked on it. It has the standard male protagonist (Kaim Argonar ) who is solemn and doesn’t say much, however the game gets more interesting when Jansen Friedh, a womanising drunk, enters your party. Some of the scripts on the game really crack me up, its funny bits are sometimes hilarious with this guy, however it’s sad parts, are well… that brings me to the downside of the game.

This game seriously tries its hardest to make you well up and crumple into an emotional wreck. It takes itself so seriously with all the grief and turmoil and dead people throughout the game. Anyone who has played the game would understand, you get to read these memories of Kaim in the game and the first one you hear is about a little girl dying (sorry if I spoilt that for anyone), but either way it’s not heart lifting stuff. Problem is that the memories are all in text with some sound effects and maybe a background or something, I would of liked to of seen the memories in CG as having them in all text kind of disrupts the flow of the game as their not even short, it’s like reading a chapter in a book – but I guess that’s what they wanted.

Two other things slightly irk me about the game, firstly is the voice casting. In the English version they have Kath Soucie voicing a little girl called Cooke. Well Kath Soucie is better known for voicing Cubert Farnsworth out of Futurama so this gets on my nerves since I’m so used to hearing her voice portray a clone chubby boy that I can’t get used to her voice fitting a little white mage girl. However this is really minor and I’m sure I’ll get used to it.

Another really slight thing is Kaim’s run, I mean his super fast turbo boosted run. He can just zoom level to level with this run that in my opinion is way, way to fast, it doesn’t really fit. But again this is just me whining I guess.

Little things with the animation sometimes bug me in games like the double jump in God of War, y’know the one where he pelvic thrusts himself higher into the air.

Well I just needed to get a few things off my chest. I guess that’s all I have to say on the matter.