Phoenix Gamer Review: Okami Den

Okami Den - One of the best games on the Nintendo DS?

Okami Den was released earlier this year for the Nintendo DS handheld system. It is the sequel to one of the most underrated games to ever grace the Playstation 2, Okami. Okami Den's story takes place 9 months after the end of the previous game and stars the child of Amaterasu, Chibiterasu, a smaller pup sun god who also wields the power of the celestial brush. The gameplay, setting, most of the characters, and even the graphics are almost exactly the same as the game before, with the exception of the help of various partner characters you pick up throughout the different parts of the game which each have their own powers to contribute.

The battle system hasn't changed at all. You can still do physical damage with your weapons and you can still freeze time to use your brush to draw and use your magic abilities. This seems more organic with the use of the DS stylus. It feels like you have more control and it flows more naturally than it did with the use of the controller in the PS2 version of the game. This and other features in the game almost make up for the lack of variety in enemies. While the bosses are imaginative and challenging in their own right, the enemies you run into on a regular basis get boring with their obvious and predictable attack patterns and weak points. Another problem you might run into while playing Okami Den is the sparsity of save points. Early in the game they are everywhere, but later on there are parts where you will wish there was a save point and then there isn't. Such as after a big boss battle or a really long cut scene.

How they managed to fit so much content on a tiny little DS cartridge is beyond me. As mentioned above, there are cut scenes. Very very long cut scenes. And a lot of them. Most of them are skippable, but you might not want to skip them as they sometimes contain key points on where you need to go next. There are also dialogue exchanges or what I like to call "minor cut scenes" that are unskippable which is annoying further on where they serve more as filler more than necessity. The game is very story driven, but that isn't a bad thing at all, especially with games today lacking the charm that this game brings. Over all it's a very solid, and extremely entertaining game, though it sticks a little too close to the original formula to make it groundbreaking in any way.

Okami Den gets an 8.5/10
Review submitted by Mel the Office Gamer Girl