Fifteen years of Clover’s classic.
Ever since the The Legend of Zelda turned 35 back in February, we’ve been looking back over the mainline games with a series of features celebrating and examining each one from a personal perspective. However, today it’s the fifteenth anniversary of another fine action-adventure — a game which may not have the name ‘Zelda’ in the title, but one that’s every bit as magical and transporting as the best in Nintendo’s series.
In fact, Clover Studio’s Okami was so good that I remember thinking it felt like a warning shot for the Zelda franchise; a wake up call that the competition had finally caught up. Attempts have been made before and since to make a game in the same vein, but Okami arguably represented the first time a company that wasn’t Nintendo had created a fully 3D Zelda-style adventure — one that followed the same enchanting formula of exploration and discovery — which was absolutely up to Nintendo’s exacting standards in every respect. I’ve written before about how Capcom studio Flagship showed that the 2D formula had been perfected beyond the walls of Nintendo’s Kyoto HQ, but mastering Nintendo’s design language in the third dimension is another matter entirely. Amaterasu and Issun’s quest to save the land of Nippon from destruction is every bit as epic as Link’s sweeping adventures in Hyrule.
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