Is Okami > Twilight Princess?
Feb. 5I found the Wii's Zelda launch title, Twilight Princess, a bit underwhelming. Good controls, not a bad game, but so much brown and so much boring story. I can't say whether this is because I tend to be cool to any Zelda in 3D... or because I played Okami first on my PS2, and I am salivating for the chance to own that game on the Wii. Okami was amazing in every way Zelda III was to me. CVG's head-to-head comparison article zeroes in on the brushstroke system as the feature that really puts Okami over Twilight Princess, though.
And not only is Nippon a brighter world than Hyrule, it's also busier. There seems to be no end to the interactivity of Okami's waterpaint world: with a flick of your brush, you can drench, blind or frazzle passers-by, and a circular stroke prompts dank, dark deadwood to explode into a torrent of technicolour.
Some minor RPG leanings aside, there's little point doing this other than that it's fun; exploring old lands with new skills has the joyous feel of a less dogmatic Castlevania.
Hmm. This is definitely a sentiment I agree with, but I wonder what you guys think?
Comments
I'd agree with the overarching point (Okami is definitely better than Twilight Princess), but not the specific ways they put it.
I don't think they go quite far enough in talking about the "extras" and the ways Amaterasu can interact with the world. They mention the brush strokes, but it goes a lot further than that. There are lots of little things - like barking with the O button, which will cause dogs off in a distance to bark back at you. The physics are a huge part of it as well - Amaterasu just moves so well that it's incredibly fun simply running somewhere without doing anything else. By comparison, Twilight Princess's physics are so stodgy and comparatively awkward that it took me an hour or two of gameplay to adapt. It's not in any way terrible (it's at least as good as most other games), but Okami sort of spoiled me. I never had that kind of enjoyment of just moving around in Twilight Princess.
I can't agree with their point on design. Twilight Princess is such a slave to the previous games in the series that it didn't feel like it was doing anything much new or original - the dungeons were fun, but not nearly so interesting as they imply. It feels almost like they're paralyzed by everything that's been done in previous Zelda games, and feel the need to stick to it - I groaned the third or fourth time I had to light three torches to make a chest appear. I'm puzzled by their singling out the Temple of Time; it's a pretty rote variation on the traditional "put item on switch, open door" puzzle. Other parts of the game were executed much better. I found that Okami's dungeons, in part because of the brush strokes, felt much fresher and less like they were retreading old ground.
What really surprised me was when they talked about Twilight Princess's "cut-scenes powerful enough to make Mike Tyson weep." I found the Twilight Princess storytelling pretty wooden - Midna is charming, but none of the other characters ever got past caricatures enough to make me care about them in any meaningful way.
This sounds quite negative about Twilight Princess, but I was very addicted to it and enjoyed it a lot. It just pales compared to Okami.
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