Okami was a 2006 game of the year winner that never achieved sale success in-line with its critical-acclaim. It’s fitting then, if still completely bonkers, that a sequel to the Legend of Zelda-inspired adventure game would get announced at this year’s Game Awards. A musical medley on stage revealed we’re getting Okami 2 from the original director almost two decades later.
What made players fall in love with the original game back in the PlayStation 2 and Nintendo Wii days was its evocative art inspired by Japanese folklore and its innovative painterly mechanics that had players emulate brush strokes across the screen to solve puzzles and combat enemies. There’s never been anything quite like it since, until maybe now.
It was directed by Hideki Kamiya as part of Clover Studio. A Capcom veteran, he had also previously directed Resident Evil 2 and Devil May Cry. Following the game’s release, he and other creative leads at the company departed to found Platinum Games where he made the Bayonetta series and other action games. At the Game Awards, Keighley revealed that Kamiya has returned to Capcom to lead a new studio called Clovers that’s working on the sequel.
“One thing I would like to make clear is that I did not quit PlatinumGames so that I could make a particular game elsewhere, or that I quit the company to work with a specific partner under better conditions,” he told IGN in an interview last year after leaving his previous company. “I hear baseless rumors saying that I’ll be working with this or that person, but nothing has been decided yet. When I left PlatinumGames, I genuinely had no other plans lined up. After I quit, I spent some time just lying around watching movies and TV shows. But when I started to think about it, I found I already had a clear idea of a game I would like to make. I can’t start putting these ideas into action yet, but I’ve started to think about ways to potentially make it happen. That said, making games rarely goes the way you imagined, so I want to explore my options and find the route that works best for me.”
In the years since its release, Okami received a spiritual successor called Ōkamiden on the Nintendo DS and later an HD port which is currently available on PlayStation 4, Xbox One, Switch, and PC. We still don’t know much about Okami 2 and it sounds like it could still be early days. The original game was so special and fans have waited so long that I’m sure they’ll be content to sit patiently for a few more years to play the sequel.