Watercolor Masterpiece Okami Has Found New Life on Modern Consoles

More than a decade later, the thing I most remember about Okami is how color follows you wherever you go. Released in 2006, by the now-defunct Clover Studios, the game starred a wolf-god named Amaterasu in a vibrant world inspired by Japanese ink wash painting. The folkoric Japanese landscape Ameratsu finds herself in, though, is dying—empty and colorless. The eight-headed demon Orochi has been unsealed to wreak havoc, and in doing so he has turned everything literally black and white; the world is effectively a painting with its hues all gone.

That color comes flooding back when you help the people of Japan fight Orochi. It bursts forth from Amaterasu—an incarnation of the Shinto goddess of the sun, an avatar of life and light—and fills the landscape outward. Flowers erupt from the ground. Okami's pastoral landscape sings and becomes new with each victory, each step made against the malingering darkness. It's as potent an image of renewal and redemption as I've ever seen, one of the only moments in any game to stir the religious parts of me.

Now, after a lengthy absence, Okami itself has been renewed, updated to run on modern consoles and the PC. For a game that only sold around 200,000 copies at launch, released only months before the studio that made it collapsed, it's a well-deserved resurrection. Okami deserves a place in the modern landscape; however, its return is more than a commercial boon. Meditative and warm, dedicated to an uncomplicated belief in the beauty of the natural world and the power of people to make the world better, the game is a balm—an emotional corrective in a time of upheaval.

In keeping with the sumi-e art style, Amaterasu herself is an artist, wielding a magic paintbrush with the help of a tiny helper named Issun. Her magic ink gives her direct authorial sway over the world itself—a sweeping brush stroke might create a mighty wind, while a wide circle might be a means of pushing life back into the dead world. Playing Okami is a surprisingly creative endeavor, using Amaterasu's powers to not only redeem but transform the world, opening up passages, slaying demons, and calling the powers of nature itself to your aid.

The creators at Clover placed this ideas within the familiar structure of a 3D The Legend of Zelda-style game. Okami has a narrow open world to navigate and various constrained encounters and dungeons gating off parts of that world, creating, like in a Zelda game, a slow sense of progress and a broad sense of adventure. Amaterasu plays the role of a vagabond god, setting right what once went wrong, occasionally pausing along the way to indulge her inner wolf and howl at the moon or dig for a buried treat.

Okami's biggest weakness is that it's, perhaps, too long, hedging its bets too far toward a traditional single-player game experience and pushing past the point where its distinct mechanics start to lose their mystic luster. But at the same time, every moment in this world feels special. The creators at Clover Studio, which included Shinji Mikami of Resident Evil fame, Hideki Kamiya, and a bevy of other minds who would go on to create Platinum Games, put everything they had into Okami. They built an underrated masterpiece, the kind of beautiful work that's critically acclaimed but forgotten all too quickly.

Now, good fortune and the good sense of its publishers at Capcom have made Okami more widely available than it's ever been. Amaterasu will be there waiting, her white tail bushy and wild in the wind, eager to lead the way into a world worth saving.

CULTURE