Okami

 Posted by (Visited 4029 times)  Game talk
Oct 122006
 
Okami
Okami

Okami is a really good game for the PS2, with truly inspired art direction. It didn’t sell too hot in Japan, but seems to have done reasonably in the US. It comes from tyhe same studio that earlier gave us the similarly unique Viewtiful Joe games.

This, of course, means that the studio must be shut down.

It may be what makes financial sense, but it’s a real shame.

  7 Responses to “Okami”

  1. Max Battcher says:
    October 12, 2006 at 7:36 pm

    In case you haven’t yet come across it, apparently the Clover “shutdown” is more of a “You quit? You can’t quit because we’ve already closed your studio!” face saving measure by Capcom. (Kotaku’s Latest on the subject)

    Apparently all of the power execs of the studio quit before or were in the process of quitting when Capcom made this announcement. Much of the Clover team is aparently moving on to a company of their own.

  2. David (Tal) says:
    October 12, 2006 at 8:25 pm

    That is a shame. Okami is a great game – I’ve heard nothing but good things about it from US reviewers and having played it, I have to echo their sentiments. It’s got a very unique feel to it that makes it a whole lot of fun. Hopefully we’ll continue to see good things from the folks who made it, wherever they end up.

  3. Oren says:
    October 12, 2006 at 8:41 pm

    I completely agree, Okami is an amazing game. I just hope all the important people from Clover come back with another great studio that can produce such unique concepts as Okami and Viewtiful Joe in the future. Lets just hope its true that they are starting a more “independent” studio. This is further proof that the game industry is abandoning any semblence of creativity. Madden 2011 anyone? What about GTA 12? I think I might go for Star Wars Online 40, or how executives killed a gaming franchise and Raph couldnt stop it; oh wait, that already happened!

  4. Faith says:
    October 13, 2006 at 6:54 am

    […] Comments […]

  5. Patrick says:
    October 13, 2006 at 8:22 am

    If anything this is highly positive, Shinji Mikami is goddamn auteur and he’ll only be more creatively unbound working through third party firm.

  6. Matt Mihaly says:
    October 13, 2006 at 9:10 am

    I got Okami and was very disappointed insofar as the visual style made me literally sick to my stomach any time I moved the camera too much. Shame.

    –matt

  7. Kev R. says:
    October 13, 2006 at 1:11 pm

    Oren said:

    This is further proof that the game industry is abandoning any semblence of creativity.

    I am an outsider to the industry, but it seems to me that the cliques which have always existed ever since the days of programs for the 48k Spectrum (yes, I’m that old!) are simply becoming more defined. The power companies like Microsoft and EA can afford to buy up obviously high performing talent such as Bungie and Dice in order to throw money at them to make a great game. In many circumstances, this works; the battlefield franchise for example. But we’re also seeing smaller, old skool type enterprises working well…usually by thinking outside the box. Introversion have had a critical success with DEFCON, and from mine and my friends opinion a commercial success because we’re all playing it! CCP, managing to dump their publisher in 2003 and yet still improve on their user base to the current of 125,000 (on one server, which WOW could only dream of!)

    I like the fact that at least some unique hits are making it through. If the big guns of EA and the like can realise that they don’t have to throw millions at one developer to have a commercial success, it can only mean more support for the “little guy”. I’m chuffed to bits to see how well Steam is taking off as a distribution system, it really shows that it’s working. Just this week Activision have said that they will be using Steam to distribute older games so it seems that the “out of the box” method is attracting publishers too.

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