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tenshinoakuma) wrote2012-02-11 09:09 pm
tenshinoakuma) wrote2012-02-11 09:09 pm
Entry tags:
HEY LOOK A NON-DDS POST
So, even though I've said previously in chats that Okamiden is an alright game, I've slowly come to realise that I really don't like Okamiden. Maybe I'm judging too early, because I haven't even hit 10 hours on Okamiden, but this is, what, an Action-Adventure game, not a JRPG. I don't think it's wrong to expect Okamiden to get to the exciting stuff faster than, say, Persona 4.
I will say that when I first heard the announcement of Okamiden's production, I suspected I would find gameplay annoying due to swapping between stylus and buttons. Yet I bought Okamiden anyway, on good faith because I really, really enjoyed Okami.
Unfortunately, I was not wrong about the awkwardness of playing Okamiden.
Because you'll be using brush powers frequently (and there's a [generous] timer on how long it takes for you to draw things), it's simply not viable to put your stylus back in your DS once you're done using a brush power since you'll be taking it out every few minutes, if not more. As a result, you'll probably end up playing Okamiden with the stylus tucked between your thumb and finger as you push buttons to do other frequently used actions such as attacking normally and jumping. I don't know if this is the case for anyone else who plays this game, but my right hand cramps after an hour or so of playing Okamiden. And this isn't like Castlevania: Dawn of Sorrow, where you can use your finger instead of the stylus to draw stuff; the game requires you to be quite precise on your stroke placement. I probably would have preferred it if I used, say, the directional pad for movement, and brush skills/attacking with the touch screen. There's a lot of DS games that have the same rather clunky control system if they're designed to use both touch screen and buttons, so I was willing to forgive Okamiden for this, even though it could have been handled better.
Secondly, bosses. They are... really long and tedious to do. Even when you know what you're supposed to do to defeat them, not only is the amount of damage you do compared to the amount of life the bosses have really pathetic (maybe that was the game's way of saying Chibiterasu isn't as strong as Ammy), many of the bosses have numerous moments of invincibility i.e. times where you can't do anything except for wait around for the boss to stop being invincible. I'm thinking primarily of the Catfish fight, where you spend half your time watching the Catfish circle this tiny island you're on. Eventually, it'll surface, and depending on how it surfaces is whether you can take advantage of its weak point and smack it around for a short amount of time (doing ridiculously little damage) or whether you have to dodge its attack and you have to wait for it to swim around and surface again. As the battle progresses, the number of times you can attack the Catfish versus times you have to dodge an attack and wait again becomes lower and lower, meaning you end up spending about 3/4 of the fight waiting. But I'm also thinking of the boss(es) in the Dance Theatre of Sei-An City. Did we really need to fight the same thing 3 times, which each phase making you do progressively less and less damage?
Something that bothers me on a more minor level is how sometimes I hit an invisible wall when trying to jump on stuff. It's a bit frustrating because it looks like I can jump up on there (Chibiterasu has the jump height to reach) but apparently there's something that blocks the path. What's even more annoying is when I'm supposed to be jumping onto that platform, and apparently I need the stars to align in order to make the jump when, by all appearances, it should be a straightforward jump.
On a less battle/platforming oriented note, the "talking" speed in cutscenes bothers me a lot. Okamiden, like Okami, uses dialogue boxes that scroll at a fixed speed during cutscenes. That isn't to say that Okami didn't have ridiculously slow talking, because it did omg (video games with dialogue boxes with slow scrolling text, especially when there's no way to make it faster, is a pet peeve of mine, since I usually read faster than text appears). But both games have little voice gibberish as 'voice acting' to go with the dialogue boxes, and I find that really charming! The problem with Okamiden's 'voice acting' is that it stops within the first two words of the auto-advancing dialogue box. This is especially bad because there's a lengthy pause after all the text of the dialogue box has appeared (this pause is necessary, as the player may not have finished reading the text that's just appeared). Basically, because the 'voice acting' in Okamiden is cut off really early in the dialogue, there's a lot of dead air in Okamiden. Imagine being in a face-to-face conversation where the latter half of each sentence spoken is inaudible AND there's a 3 second pause between every sentence spoken. Yeah, it's as awkward as that.
Story wise, I don't feel engaged. The main problem I'm having is that Chibiterasu's travelling companion doesn't stay with Chibiterasu for very long (for various plot reasons), I'd estimate about 2 hours for each one so far. Since they don't hang around for very long (maybe you get to see them later again; the plot seems to be setting things up that way), I don't get to really know them. Add the fact I just don't actually like any of the partner characters means I don't feel motivated to find out more about them through plot advancement.
On top of this is the fact that Chibiterasu himself is really similar to Ammy personality wise. Sure, he gets bullied a lot more by his ratbag partners, but there hasn't been much that makes him something more than a 'lesser' version of Ammy. So when I see him get bored by characters tl;dring, I'm not really amused by it as much as I should be because I've already seen this.
I guess my main beef with Okamiden is that it plays like a lesser version of Okami. Yes, it's a DS game, and the DS doesn't have as much power as a PS2 and the DS cartridges can't store as much information as the PS2 disc. But just because a game is on the DS does not mean the game should be any less fun to play than a console version (this is something that really irritated me about Tales of Innocence too, but perhaps that's a topic for another day). A less powerful platform doesn't mean I should lower my standards of enjoyment on a game, you know?
And unfortunately, Okamiden plays like a less fun Okami. The core things are still there (brush powers, beating people up with divine instruments, pretty art direction), but Okamiden is missing all the little extras that made Okami fun for me (digging up random stuff, headbutting people, feeding animals, wall/double jumping, tearing across the landscape, lol drowning, etc.). And I don't expect Okamiden to have the same little extras as Okami because it's not Okami. However, I do expect Okamiden to have little extras that make it fun and different from Okami. Sadly, it's sorely lacking in that department. Aside from the partner assisted puzzles in dungeons (which can be hit or miss for me, depending on my mood), there has yet to be something in the game I can say I really enjoy.
I will say that when I first heard the announcement of Okamiden's production, I suspected I would find gameplay annoying due to swapping between stylus and buttons. Yet I bought Okamiden anyway, on good faith because I really, really enjoyed Okami.
Unfortunately, I was not wrong about the awkwardness of playing Okamiden.
Because you'll be using brush powers frequently (and there's a [generous] timer on how long it takes for you to draw things), it's simply not viable to put your stylus back in your DS once you're done using a brush power since you'll be taking it out every few minutes, if not more. As a result, you'll probably end up playing Okamiden with the stylus tucked between your thumb and finger as you push buttons to do other frequently used actions such as attacking normally and jumping. I don't know if this is the case for anyone else who plays this game, but my right hand cramps after an hour or so of playing Okamiden. And this isn't like Castlevania: Dawn of Sorrow, where you can use your finger instead of the stylus to draw stuff; the game requires you to be quite precise on your stroke placement. I probably would have preferred it if I used, say, the directional pad for movement, and brush skills/attacking with the touch screen. There's a lot of DS games that have the same rather clunky control system if they're designed to use both touch screen and buttons, so I was willing to forgive Okamiden for this, even though it could have been handled better.
Secondly, bosses. They are... really long and tedious to do. Even when you know what you're supposed to do to defeat them, not only is the amount of damage you do compared to the amount of life the bosses have really pathetic (maybe that was the game's way of saying Chibiterasu isn't as strong as Ammy), many of the bosses have numerous moments of invincibility i.e. times where you can't do anything except for wait around for the boss to stop being invincible. I'm thinking primarily of the Catfish fight, where you spend half your time watching the Catfish circle this tiny island you're on. Eventually, it'll surface, and depending on how it surfaces is whether you can take advantage of its weak point and smack it around for a short amount of time (doing ridiculously little damage) or whether you have to dodge its attack and you have to wait for it to swim around and surface again. As the battle progresses, the number of times you can attack the Catfish versus times you have to dodge an attack and wait again becomes lower and lower, meaning you end up spending about 3/4 of the fight waiting. But I'm also thinking of the boss(es) in the Dance Theatre of Sei-An City. Did we really need to fight the same thing 3 times, which each phase making you do progressively less and less damage?
Something that bothers me on a more minor level is how sometimes I hit an invisible wall when trying to jump on stuff. It's a bit frustrating because it looks like I can jump up on there (Chibiterasu has the jump height to reach) but apparently there's something that blocks the path. What's even more annoying is when I'm supposed to be jumping onto that platform, and apparently I need the stars to align in order to make the jump when, by all appearances, it should be a straightforward jump.
On a less battle/platforming oriented note, the "talking" speed in cutscenes bothers me a lot. Okamiden, like Okami, uses dialogue boxes that scroll at a fixed speed during cutscenes. That isn't to say that Okami didn't have ridiculously slow talking, because it did omg (video games with dialogue boxes with slow scrolling text, especially when there's no way to make it faster, is a pet peeve of mine, since I usually read faster than text appears). But both games have little voice gibberish as 'voice acting' to go with the dialogue boxes, and I find that really charming! The problem with Okamiden's 'voice acting' is that it stops within the first two words of the auto-advancing dialogue box. This is especially bad because there's a lengthy pause after all the text of the dialogue box has appeared (this pause is necessary, as the player may not have finished reading the text that's just appeared). Basically, because the 'voice acting' in Okamiden is cut off really early in the dialogue, there's a lot of dead air in Okamiden. Imagine being in a face-to-face conversation where the latter half of each sentence spoken is inaudible AND there's a 3 second pause between every sentence spoken. Yeah, it's as awkward as that.
Story wise, I don't feel engaged. The main problem I'm having is that Chibiterasu's travelling companion doesn't stay with Chibiterasu for very long (for various plot reasons), I'd estimate about 2 hours for each one so far. Since they don't hang around for very long (maybe you get to see them later again; the plot seems to be setting things up that way), I don't get to really know them. Add the fact I just don't actually like any of the partner characters means I don't feel motivated to find out more about them through plot advancement.
On top of this is the fact that Chibiterasu himself is really similar to Ammy personality wise. Sure, he gets bullied a lot more by his ratbag partners, but there hasn't been much that makes him something more than a 'lesser' version of Ammy. So when I see him get bored by characters tl;dring, I'm not really amused by it as much as I should be because I've already seen this.
I guess my main beef with Okamiden is that it plays like a lesser version of Okami. Yes, it's a DS game, and the DS doesn't have as much power as a PS2 and the DS cartridges can't store as much information as the PS2 disc. But just because a game is on the DS does not mean the game should be any less fun to play than a console version (this is something that really irritated me about Tales of Innocence too, but perhaps that's a topic for another day). A less powerful platform doesn't mean I should lower my standards of enjoyment on a game, you know?
And unfortunately, Okamiden plays like a less fun Okami. The core things are still there (brush powers, beating people up with divine instruments, pretty art direction), but Okamiden is missing all the little extras that made Okami fun for me (digging up random stuff, headbutting people, feeding animals, wall/double jumping, tearing across the landscape, lol drowning, etc.). And I don't expect Okamiden to have the same little extras as Okami because it's not Okami. However, I do expect Okamiden to have little extras that make it fun and different from Okami. Sadly, it's sorely lacking in that department. Aside from the partner assisted puzzles in dungeons (which can be hit or miss for me, depending on my mood), there has yet to be something in the game I can say I really enjoy.