It Is Finished

Finally beat Okami. I may or may not have more thoughts on it later. For now, I'm going to bed.

Game Log - 8/11/08

100% in Burnout Paradise! Woohoo! Now to work on getting all 420 online challenges. I think I'm up to 184 completed so far...

Made significant progress in Okami over the weekend. I think I'll have it beat in one or two more sessions. I'm probably not going to bother trying to get 100% completion in the game. It would just take too long and I don't feel motivated to take that amount of time to do so. Next Wii game is Super Mario Galaxy. That should be some good silly fun.

Bought Braid, and I really like it, but some of those puzzles are brain busting... Truly an amazing game though. I can't imagine what it takes to design such fiendish puzzles.

Even though I got to the final boss and was promptly slaughtered, I may once again try to beat Final Fantasy X. But I'm also thinking of starting Final Fantasy XII. But then I hear that it's a 60 hour game. I'm losing patience with these so called "epic" games that are really more like 20 hour adventures unnecessarily padded out for length. I want to play Lost Odyssey on the 360, but am hesitant for the same reason. Plus, with these JRPGs in particular, I'm afraid that I'll be stuck in the same situation as I am in FFX. I don't want to spend all this time progressing, only to get stuck at the end, unable to actually beat the final ultimate evil. Perhaps that's how these things play out in real life...? Whoa, I think I just blew my own mind...

Well That Was Different...

So after writing my last post about Okami, later that night I played some more. During my playthough, I was shrunk down to 1/1000th of my original size. I then had to infiltrate the imperial palace and track down why an evil mist was emanating from it. Turns out, the sick emperor was the source of the mist. So what do I do? Jump down his throat, fall down his esophagus, and fight a boss battle in his stomach, of course!

And, well...

That was awesome.

Watercolor Dreams

I picked up Okami for theWii, and it's been quite a fun experience. The motion controls are a little twitchy and take some getting used to, and your companion in the game, Issun, is mostly annoying. Everything else though is excellent. The graphics are gorgeous and really make me feel as if I'm walking inside a painting. The story is different enough from anything else I've played that it mostly feels fresh.

Here's the thing though.

I've played for around 21 hours or so. Very suddenly, without much warning, I was plunged into a pretty epic fight with the main antagonist. I was a little puzzled at this. As I progressed through the game I picked up various abilities that allow you to use your paint brush to perform different actions. There are 13 total actions, but at that point in the game, I had found 9. I also knew there was a whole other city that I hadn't gained access to. I thought that maybe the game gave you the option of finishing it without finding all of the powers and other content, which would have been very different from any other game I've played before. Alas, it was not to be.

I killed the bad guy, saved the day, everyone was celebrating. And then the game kept going. Apparently, some other evil wormed its way out of the original bad guy's rotting corpse and still needs to be put down. And to be honest, I'm not sure how inclined I feel to continue.

At this point, I feel like I've experienced the whole package. Sure, there are 4 more brush powers to find, but I looked the game up on GameFAQ's and it appears that I'm barely halfway through the game. What new stuff can there be to sustain another 20-30 hours of playtime? The story, being heavily influenced by ancient Japanese mythology, is different, but it still boils down to saving the world from the Great Evil. I've saved the world several times over at this point in my gaming life, so that's not a great motivator.

It doesn't help that while continuing into the next area, the Wii froze up about an hour after I had last saved my game. I thought only Xbox 360's came with that feature. :-(