A God Made of Ink

Ōkami is the reason I briefly resented every Wii owner I knew. Clover Studio—the Capcom-backed team behind Viewtiful Joe and God Hand, dissolved a year before the Wii port even arrived—built something genuinely unlike anything else on the platform: a cel-shaded action game where you play as Amaterasu, the Japanese sun goddess reincarnated as a white wolf, moving through a mythological version of ancient Japan and painting miracles into existence with a divine brush.

The visual style is the thing. It pulls from ukiyo-e woodblock prints and sumi-e ink painting, which means the world has this quality of being constantly illustrated—outlines visible, colors flat in the best way, everything looking like it was brushed onto rice paper by someone who really cared. As a designer I found it almost embarrassing how good it looked. The Celestial Brush mechanics on Wii, where you drew symbols in the air with the controller to slice enemies or summon wind, made even more intuitive sense than on the original PS2 release.

The music is gorgeous, pulling from traditional Japanese instruments without sliding into pastiche. The atmosphere is one of those rare things where every system—audio, visual, mechanical—is pulling in exactly the same direction. You know immediately what this world wants to feel like, and it just delivers it.

Buy it. Love it. Envy someone who owns a Wii.