Despite selling relatively poorly, the Capcom-published Okami is co🌟♏nsidered by many to be one of the best video games ever made. It’s certainly flawed in many ways – it has inconsistent difficulty spikes, fiddly contro🌳ls, and is painfully slow in places – but it was also groundbreaking for its time. Apart from having a visually stunning cel-shaded art style and a gor♓geous soundtrack, it draws from Japanese culture, folklore, and art to create its astonishingly beautiful world. I didn’t play until 2021, and it still blew me away.
The moment I saw the gameplay trailer for Kunitsu-Gami: Path of the Goddess during the Xbox Partner showcase, it felt like I had been flung back in time to the first time I played Okami. ꦕAlso published by Capcom almost two decades later, Kunitsu-Gami draws from the same aesthetic traditions as Okami does, even if it doesn’t execute in quite the same way. Where Okami was made to look like a watercolour painting, Kunitsu-Gami has more realistic graphics with bright splashes of colour, 🃏but both are clearly inspired by the same mythologies.
What stuck with me most about Okami over the years was its character design. Enemies were strange and unsettling, moving with a bizarre physicality that set my teeth on edge. That same style of character design is abundant in Kunitsu-Gami, which creates similar enemy designs because it references the same folklore. Strange semi-humanoid characters are covered in inky squiggles, green insectoid-types lun💖ge towards you with lolling tongues, and translucent floating fish-looking things throw themselves onto the ground in an attempt to crush you. Both games create a strange and surreal quality through the creatures you encounter.
Both also lean heavily on the rural and the religious. Okami takes place largely i𝕴n rural villages and the countryside, and your job as the Shinto wolf goddess Amaterasu is to cleanse the lands of evil. Torii gates are scattered all over the setting, and golden torii gates even serve as checkpoints. Likewise, Kunitsu-Gami needs you to “purge the defilement” in villages so you can return peace to the land, and there are torii, bridges and rivers all over the world, just like in Okami. Both are aesthetically representing the returning nature to its original state through the removal of evil.
I thought that my immediate k♏nee jerk comparison to Okami was a stretch, but it turns out the developers themselves have called it a “labour of love that follows in the tradition of truly unique Capcom titles such as Okami and Shinsekai - Into the Depths”. Of course, they’re still very different games. Okami is driven by the presence of the Celestial Brush, a paintbrush that allows you to manipulate the environment and fight in combat through actual brushstrokes on the painting that is the game’s world. Kunitsu-Gami, in contrast, seems to be an intriguing mix of action and tower defence.
But it’s difficult to look at Kunitsu-Gami and not see Okami’s legacy. Everything, from the stylistic, kaleidoscopic representation of weapons cutting through the air, to the way that monsters dissolve into empty air when you banish them, pointsﷺ to Okami as its predecessor. Considering we’re unlikely to ever get an Okami sequel, this may be the closest thing we ever get.
A single-play♌er action-adventure from Capcom, Kunitsu-Gami: Path of the Goddess takes place in a fantastical version of feudal Japan. You must guide the Spir♊it Stone Goddess on her journey to cleanse a mountain of its ills.
Your comment has not been saved