A few weeks ago I wrote about the Wii, and noted that two of the system’s best games — Resident Evil 4 and Okami — were cursed with an overeager implementation of Wii Remote function. I guess I was only half wrong; while Resident Evil 4 will never earn a complete play-through on my Wii (I’m not shaking anything in order to run, thank you very much), Okami has been getting buckets of overtime lately, and it turns out that its control is only half cursed.
When it was first released on the Playstation 2 in September of 2006, Okami earned not only its share of critical acclaim, but also a predictable amount of consumer indifference. After all; on the double-y chromosome prison planet of deathmatch, capture-the-flag, teabag-happy, adolescent ambulatory testosterone emitters, who has time for a sumi-e style, artistic action-adventure game in which you play as the Shinto sun goddess Amaterasu incarnated as a white wolf? Who’s going to dedicate thirty-to-forty hours of their lives to a game whose unifying design principle is not one of destruction, but of restoration and renewal? About 330,000 out of a worldwide base of over 140 million Playstation 2 owners, that’s who. (Gears of War, by comparison, has sold 4.7 million copies as of May 2008, with far fewer Xbox 360s installed worldwide.) So whaddaya know, it didn’t sell as well as Capcom had hoped, but it did okay enough to warrant a port to the Wii. Judged by that criteria alone it’s no better or worse than Ninjabread Man or Rebel Raiders.
Okami was developed by the now-defunct Clover Studio, purveyors of the unique-yet-frustrating Viewtiful Joe, its uniquer-yet-frustratinger sequel, and the quirky-yet-craptacular God Hand. Each of these games might accurately be classified as a beat-’em-up, although the Viewtifuls at least possess the distinct virtue of being, you know, good, while God Hand moseys into town and takes up permanent residence at Miss Kitty’s Lodge and Saloon of Everything Shit.
Okami is an amalgamation of all the good and bad from Clover’s previous titles, mostly the good, yet it managed to accomplish that most seemingly insurmountable of all gaming tasks these days; it got me to play my Wii. What’s more, it got me to enjoy a lengthy, fairly deep single-player game on the Wii, with near-flawless utilization of the Wii remote. Indeed, what is this thing called “hope?”
As noted before, most Wii titles desperately try to cram all their input gestures into the Wii Remote, and the result has been an entire library of games in most dire need of a telethon. (Almost a billion and a half dollars have been raised by MDA every Labor Day since 1966, and we can’t get Jerry Lewis anywhere near Dewy’s Advenure? The fuck is up with that?) Forcing the use of the Remote/Nunchuk in a game like Death Jr.: Root of Evil — which might have actually been playable, or God forbid, fun, with the Classic Controller — makes as much sense as it would if Jamba Juice forced their patrons to consume their smoothies with a fork; it might not be the best tool for the job, but since they’ve invested rather heavily in four-pronged polypropylene flatware, you don’t get a choice. Just grab your extra large Mango-a-go-go and your Peanut Buttter Moo’d and get the fork outta here.
The point at which a game has me shaking my controller like Team Chihuahua in the Iditarod is the point where I punt that shivering bitch across the yard and seek a less strenuous pastime, such as hummingbird wrangling or Red Savina tasting. Thankfully, in porting Okami to the Wii Readyatdawn mostly eschewed the lascivious Remote fixation that keeps other developers sipping at the margarita of mediocrity with spastic, tequila-sloshing abandon, and instead opted for that most elusive nuance of Wii development; subtlety. Mostly.
Ssssausages!
While Okami’s controls are far from perfect, they provide the finest example of what the Wii might become in the hands of a developer concerned with simply making a good game, instead of consistently trying to find a way to justify a gratuitously simple input. Okami uses Remote gestures only for the many Celestial Brush techniques and combat; that’s it. While combat with the Remote is frequently imprecise and sometimes tedious, the Celesital Brush is the finest use of the Remote that I’ve yet seen in a Wii title — sure, it’s often as imprecise as the combat, and on many occasions requires repeatedly drawing the same symbol over again in order to produce the desired result, but if there’s a logical model to which other developers should aspire when designing the Remote-based input for their Wii project, Okami is it.
Some people don’t like to criticize that which is popular out of fear that they might be accused of being unsophisticated, or have their insecurities flayed and exposed to the world for the mass-consumption lemmings to point at and laugh and ridicule at their leisure. While this might not indicate the impending death of objective thought, it certainly sends it an FTD bouquet and inquires about its will.
That said, the Wii remote is poorly designed. I know it’s supposed to entice non-gamers into picking the damn thing up and bowling a few frames with their cronies as they knock back a few Milk of Magnesia cocktails and reminisce about V.E. Day, but frankly, I could give less than a hammered shit about non-gamers. In their fevered haste to invite other folks to the festivities, Nintendo has forgotten about those of us who’ve been here for years, streamers and party hats gripped faithfully at the ready as we’re elbowed to a musty corner of the rec center to make room for the New People With Money. Kind of like when you were a kid and your mother would whip out the good plates and order the fancy takeout because “company’s coming.”
Okami controls as though it were designed for the Wii Remote, but that doesn’t excuse the hardware’s failings; it needs to be completely reworked so that it more closely resembles the Nunchuk while retaining its motion-sensing capability — move the A button to the rear, similar to the C button on the Nunchuk, and group the remaining face buttons (+, -, 1, 2, Menu) in an accessible cluster right beneath the new analog stick so that your hand doesn’t cramp like a bastard after an hour of playing. (Oh, by the way, we’ve added an analog stick.) Give the thing a more hand-friendly shape, again, like the Nunchuk, and we’ll have something we can work with. For crying out loud, the layout of the basic TV remote is nearly sixty years old, and it’s not getting better with age. Why imitate it? To encourage the technologically inept to pick it up and play, of course.
Popularity is the new standard of quality, and though objectivity might not yet be dead, its carnations are wilting and the lawyers are warming up the probate. Nothing can be improved by appealing to the same mass of consumers who’ve turned the nine shitty mini-games in Wii Play into the system’s best-selling title. Nothing.
Hardware should exist to assist the software, not the other way around, and Okami is the perfect example of this principle at work; it was made better by its appearance on the Wii, but it is not defined by it. No doubt a must-buy for Wii owners who are tired of the same old party games and 20-year-old Nintendo retreads.
Tags: Capcom, Clover, Ninjabread, Okami, Shaking, Telethon, Wii
