Bullets on FFXII, 2 hours in

--Vayne is intensely charismatic and intensely likeable; I'd swear allegiance to him. He must therefore be psychotically evil.

--The battle system is quite bizarre; I realize I've only gone through a couple of fights but as of the moment the strategy consists of clicking Attack, then running away so the enemy can't attack, then running in close when it's time to swing the sword. I haven't seen any Gambits yet so that'll probably get more in-depth.

--This is the second Squeenix game in a row that I have played that I can think of in which your character in the prologue is not the main character. I wonder if that's a trend and I wonder if I like that.

--The prologue is intensely unfocused. Within the first 20 minutes we have a parade, a wedding, some political intrigue, a battle, the fall of a city, an excerpt from a character's memoirs, an honest-to-goodness playable section/tutorial, a shocking event, some more memoirs, and then we get to see the main character. On one hand, it makes the story seem very epic--the introductory movie is full of excitement--on the other, I'm not sure what i should be focusing on yet.

--The menus are slightly clumsy, and Square doesn't seem to realize that it's at worst difficult and at best extremely awkward to control both the left analog stick and the digital pad at the same time, and yet the game makes you do as such.

--At least the game recognizes that peopel want to skip and pause cutscenes. FMV segments are skippable but unpausable, and I'm not sure why. But in-engine cutscenes you can do both with, and thank you Xenosaga for letting other companies realize the importance of that.

--The game's license board, while I haven't even begun to really spend much time with, is unimpressive at a first glance. While the board allows you to learn dozens of skills and could probably have some very deep strategy in later stages, since all the spots are extremely close together, so it looks small and unimposing. One of the things I liked about FFX's sphere grid was the fact that it was so spread out that it looked like you'd never get it finished and that there was a virtually unlimited amount of skills you can learn. The License Board might even have more varied skills than the Sphere Grid, but it looks like you can complete it easier. I know that won't be the case, but I'm just talking about immediate impressions.

Okami, 20 hours in

I am around 20 hours into Okami. My friend who is playing through the game--he started the same day as I did, but I've been a little more flitty about it and haven't spent as much time as him--is around 50 hours in, and he says he sees no end in sight[1]. This is a game which the major review sites have estimated at 40 hours[2].

I am loving every second of it and I don't particularly care for it to end every time soon; I will be upset when it does. Okami is the best game I have played in a long time, possibly one of the best I've played ever. I take it back--I've said lately that it feels like people don't know how to make a game that's fun, and I take it back: Okami's people do. It's made by Clover Studios, who made Viewtiful Joe. That's another game that was just fun to play. The name of this blog is Jeuissance, which, as we all know meens joy of play--which means that a game should be fun.

And Clover, thank you.

I knew I needed Okami the second I saw a single preview image of it. I'm a sucker for cel-shading and otherwise striking visuals, and Okami has that in spades. The game is based on Japanese mythology, and the visuals look exactly like an classical Japanese painting...except it's 3-d, and in action, and moving. No attempt at realism is even considered--things are stylized, and it looks beautiful. The foreground is bright and colorful, and in the background are simple lines--single lines--of mountains. And you see craggy mountains and wherever your character runs little flowers and grass springs up, and the monsters are horrific in their detail and it's beautiful. And the people are all quirky looking and offbeat, and your character is graceful and elegant and powerful. And when you draw with your brush, it becomes uneven and you see the bristle marks and--God, I could point out things for hours. But play it. You'll see one thing if you see a screenshot, and just about every view is screenshot-worthy, and yet--and-yet--it is amazing to actually see it.

The major gameplay feature is what's called the Celestial Brush, which is a magical calligraphy brush which allows you to do--well, just about anything that the game requires. Hit R1 and the game will pause and a parchment overlay will appear onscreen (and, mercifully, thank you Clover, you're able to change the angle of the camera and pan the view so if the angle isn't exactly right you can change without any effort at all), and hit a button, and move the stick, and draw. You can cause trees to bloom, and cut enemies in half, and create lilypads in the water, fly through the air on vines, change day into night--. It's a combination between a magic spell system and a bag of tools, and it works elegantly. I realized it with the vine thing. There are flowers scattered across the land hanging in the air. If you draw a line from the flower to your character, a vine will cling to her and pull her up. It's a way to get to high places and to travel across great distances, and it works remarkably like the Hookshot from The Legend of Zelda series. The day/night brush techniques work remarkably like the various songs that you play on the Ocarina or whatever. The problem with Zelda as far as those go is that each item needs to be equipped separately. You need to go in the options screen, decide which button you want to assign the tool to, and get out; when you need to equip a different tool, you need to repeat the process again. Okami gives you a series of over a dozen tools or spells, and you access them immediately. No tools need to be equipped because it's a technique rather than a tool issue. And the brush techniques take context-sensitive to a whole new level taht I've never seen. The basic techniques are all similar--in order to summon the sun, cause a tree to bloom, or manifest a lilypad, you just draw a circle, either in the sky, on the ground, or on water. I can see a lesser game putting a lot more clutter in--you'd have a different brush for each technique. Okami puts a lot more effort into streamlining, and it makes for an overall better game.

Okami is definitely concerned with an aesthetic experience, it's definitely concerned with showing you a new world, and it's definitely concerned with a strong narrative--culled from Japanese folktales but told in a particularly interesting way--and yet, unlike so many games which seem interested in those things, it wants to be fun to play. More games need to see this--need to realize that there's someone controlling it and looking to have fun with it. A movie can be watched and one can derive pleasure out of the story and characters--and while a game can and often does give pleasure through that, it adds that interactivity. Interactivity is the most important part of gaming--Pac-Man gives pleasure even though it has no characters and no plot--and if we're not getting pleasure from that, then we won't get pleasure from the game as a whole. Okami gives narrative and aesthetic pleasure, and it gives jeuissance too. I haven't even played a bad sidequest, there hasn't been a single portion of the game that's felt tedious or boring.

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[1] He's admittedly much more thorough in his gaming than me. Sidequests are very hit-or-miss for me, though I've been a bit more into collecting optional items in this game than I am in others.

[2] See also Clive Thompson's article on "The Myth of the 40-Hour Game" at Wired. http://www.wired.com/news/columns/0,71836-0.html?tw=wn_story_page_prev2.