There are no problems with fiddly controls or awkward structuring. It's clear even from spending 10 minutes with a 25 per cent complete Okamiden that it's extremely solid already.
Bosses, though, will hopefully be as creative as ever - disappointingly, the demo ends just before I'm allowed to take on the giant frog with an eyepatch at the end of the first dungeon. Rather than wandering freely around the dungeons and landscape, enemies seem to turn up at predetermined points, making it feel distressingly like random battles. Hopefully the game has another few new ideas up its sleeve as it progresses further.Ĭombat was always Okami's weakness, and that looks to be the case here, too - it's still one-button combos augmented by slashing with the Celestial Brush. Things do move in a different direction after the first puzzle, as the emphasis shifts more towards using your partner in puzzles and combat. Wonderful as Okami was, we'd rather have a new game based around the same concepts than play the whole thing again. Like everything else, the combat looks nice, but it's one-dimensional.Īll this familiarity is comforting, until you realise that the first big puzzle of the game is actually exactly the same as Okami's first puzzle - drawing a sun in the sky of a stone carving, then doing the same to make a tree grow in a shaft of sunlight in an enclosed cave - at which point it becomes a little worrying. Okamiden seems capable of presenting environments almost as open and sprawling as its predecessor's, though the village is divided up into three or four sections separated by sparkly portals and a few seconds of loading. The technical limitations of the DS are barely evident. The first portion of Okamiden is set in a beautiful mountain town, with trees, houses and red-painted bridges that could be straight out of Kamiki Village. The environments, too, are extremely familiar at this stage. This hints at how Okamiden's puzzles might eventually differentiate themselves - you can get away with demanding more complex drawing from a player when they have a stylus in hand than when they're wrestling with a DualShock or waving a Wiimote. The mouse with the obscenely giant sword who grants the slash power makes a return, as does the first game's drunkard-turned-legendary-warrior, Susano - you have to draw the outline of a flower on a branch sprouting from his wooden sword to open a door. The Celestial Brush powers are introduced by familiar faces.
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