I got Okami shortly after it came out, scoring it in a trade with a boy at my school who I frequently swapped games with. It stands out as a weird exchange—he hated Okami’s art brush controls so much that he just let me keep it after bringing my game back. The moment stands out as one of those strange blurs from childhood that somehow become formative. At that age, I still lacked a confident sense of “when I grow up, I want to be this,” often jumping between marine biologist, teacher, or vet. It was Okami that instilled an actual dream in me, a keen sense of what I wanted in life, and some semblance of direction. Clover Studio’s strikingly vibrant world charmed me to no end, becoming one of the first games I found myself eager to lam🌼ent about and ponder on. I wanted to wipe Okami from memory and experience it again, and as it turns 15 years old, I’m still trying to find another way❀ to recreate the feeling.
It didn’t come by an ‘aha’ moment; there was no one scene in Amaterasu’s adventure where I decided it was my career raison d’etre. Instead, it was a creeping warmth inspired by its art and how it moved, and as time went on, I became more fascinated by how it worked. In Okami, Clover relied on this distinct ink wash style that made everything look like a painting. I had no familiarity with technical terminolog🥀y back then. The words to describe games only came with the sudden interest I had in Nippon—a world of Japanese folklore. A nightly ritual of clumsily trying to guide my PS2 controller into creating brushstroke attacks snowballed into curiosity around what cel shading was and asking my teachers how I could go to school and make my own Okami.
In 2021, I reckon it’s easier to look back on a Zelda-inspired game about painting and move on without much thought. We’ve seen plenty of watercolor art styles or similar techniques since, and it’s not like “unique” as a d🐲irection didn’t exist before the PS2 era. Okami felt daring in a way that others of its time did not, though. In an , director Hideki Kamiya described his desire to make people feel like they were a part of nature as Ama🃏terasu, but he couldn’t quite figure out the how part of his game pitch. Its early beginnings depicted a photorealistic Nippon, but the . As games approaching the PS3 era became more obsessed with how real they could look to convey feelings, Okami took a moment to pause and suggest there’s something more to embracing the fantastical and abstract.
It’s this idea that seemed to define my taste in what I saw as art. A game’s performance obviously matters—clunky stuttering messes can impact your ability to enjoy something—but a relentless pꦯursuit for perfect graphic fidelity was never a trap I fell into as I became more involved with games. It’s an appreciation I attribute to Clover for introducing me to new ideas at just the right time.
Amaterasu’s concept is cartoonishly silly with her big, unwieldy weapons—she’s a literal god, so it’s not like it mattꦿers—but her movement and design are obviously far more concerned about that aforementioned feeling versus the departure from𒅌 her boring realness. Ammy, as she’s lovingly dubbed by her companion Issun, floats through Nippon in the same way its rolling waves or cherry blossoms do. Controlling her always feels thoughtful—magical when you’re a kid at a loss—because any one moment in Okami works fine when paused as a portrait. Swirling the camera around causes this subtle ripple in its strokes that are just as fascinating to me now as they were then, and endlessly shifting colors keep me bewildered.
It’s funny how 15 years later, long after I’ve begun a career in games, I still💙 can’t seem to find all of the words I want to use to describe it. Okami was enchanting in a way so impressionable that I gravitated to internet forums to talk about it, diving deep into fandom spaces while trying to pen my first guides. I never learned how to make my own Okami in the way I thought I would, but Clover’s project did bestow a sense of confidence in me about what I wanted to do that I’ll never recreate. It’s not often a moment feels so definitive, so for Okami’s birthday, stumbling through the feelings about how Amaterasu and her journey whisked me away seems like the best gift I can give.