There you are, sitting at the edge of a cliff, the cherry blossoms freshly in bloom.  You should know – you brought them back to life.  The mountainous terrain is intermittently sharpened like a knife, then smoothed like a polished jewel; the wind above is less a line and more of a suggestion of where life might take you.  The scenery isn’t something you merely look at.  It’s a full sensory experience.

The in-game timer read 48 hours, but my time in Nippon felt so much longer than that, although it wasn’t really long enough.  If I close my eyes, I can imagine the breeze.

Nothing I will ever write, and nothing you will ever read, will ever fully capture the experience of playing Okami.  It is a game of another place, another time, one that probably couldn’t have existed in any other period.  Birthed at the cross section between modern “AAA” gaming blotting out the sun of mid-budget development, and delivered to the masses in the final salad days of the PS2 (whose spectacular install base made all manner of odd game ideas more palatable to risk-averse executives), it was a game destined to fall between the cracks.  But that fate also means a new audience gets to discover it every few years.

Okami famously began life aiming for photo-realism.  But before the age of high-definition textures and consoles as powerful as collapsing stars, its conceptual video put Clover Studios in a bit of a bind.  In theory, the PS2 could spit out that environment for a trailer, sure, but it simply wasn’t up to the task for an actual game:

“Originally the Director wanted to create a realistic looking world, but we had to give up on this concept as we were not able to realize the level of detail we wished for given the constraints of the hardware. One day an art designer came up with the brush painting style, we all liked it and it became the final style. Therefore I can say that team members did not talk to decide the direction but an inspiration of a designer stimulated the director’s sensitivity and the art as we know it today was born.”
–Atushi Inaba [via IGN AU]

We’re are all lucky for that art designer – that brief spark of inspiration created a timeless visual masterpiece.  It is a bit humorous, though, considering that Okami has only been done justice by more powerful hardware, spitting out HD Nippon as if that was the plan all along.  Originally, I played this game on Wii, which was fine.  The quasi-cel shading worked perfectly well in 480p, and looked quite pretty with a lighter paper filter over the whole visual presentation.  But once you’ve seen Nippon with the heavy-paper filter in HD?  Game over, man.  If you haven’t played this on a modern system, you need to think carefully about doing so, because it might ruin you for all future games.  It’s damn-near cheating.  To get an acceptably large world up and running on the PS2, Clover sacrificed textural detail.  In HD, the heavy-paper filter fills in all of that missing detail to truly create a moving painting.  You can’t take a bad screen shot of this game.

So yes, it’s pretty.  It is sui generis in its medium.  But so is the film “Only God Forgives,” and its great visuals couldn’t mask an atrocity of a movie.

Okami is much more than a nice paint job, though.  What really makes it special is that every other piece of the game reinforces and breathes life into its central painterly idea.  The celestial brush mechanic puts you in the painting itself, allowing you to manipulate and Bob Ross it.  The adventure is open and breezy, inviting you to bring beauty into the world, not merely save it from the apocalypse.  The characters are full of heart and soul, and helping them is well worth your time.

Yes, I suppose we have to talk about Issun for a moment.  Listen, I know your Tumblr post is all queued up.  I get it.  “Your fav is problematic: Issun Edition” would make for a lengthy read, and you’d have points worth arguing.  The character is casually horny and occasionally sexist.  He is also not malicious and ultimately redeemable.  That may not matter to you, and that is fair enough.  Maybe you don’t want a Picaresque low-life in your mythic nature tale.  This is still a story worth seeing through, in my view.

So, other caveats?  The pacing could use work.  Okami has the sort of 3-hour prologue people used to complain about in Zelda. Pop-in is hilarious. The camera is very 2006, and there is an issue with either the frame pacing or motion blur.  Yes, I know that DF said the game is almost locked at 30, but it doesn’t feel like that while walking and running through a big field.

…and that’s about it.  I can pick at a somewhat hitch-y horizon as I pan the camera while running through a field, or I could laugh at a pot spontaneously appearing, but these are venal sins within the religion of graphical whoredom.  These are noticeable issues, but nothing that drags down the experience.  Hell, I can’t even bemoan using dual analog for the celestial brush.  Sure, the gyro drawing is faster, and the touchscreen drawing is giggle-inducing, but sticks are perfectly adequate, if that’s your thing.

Overall?  As it was a dozen years ago, so it is now.  Okami is like nothing else out there.  It’s once again GOTY caliber, the same way it is every time it is re-released, and the same way it always will be every time it is reissued.

I talked with a friend a few weeks ago, about how the original Legend of Zelda had obvious RPG elements.  In its day, before rigid genre classifications, it had some role-playing ingredients.  Okami is like asking “what if that flavor had been kept in Zelda, in more obvious ways?”  The floating enemy encounters triggering a fight, banking XP to spend it on what attributes you want to buff, the diet weapon crafting…it all adds a freshness here that had been lacking in Twilight Princess-era Nintendo.

It had been lacking in the rest of gaming, too, at that point.  It has been lacking in all of gaming since.