I've known this for awhile, probably starting when I stopped playing Twilight Princess after some Moblin kidnapped a girl and I literally felt nothing during some overwrought bridge chase sequence, holding the Wiimote and trying to summon some kind of reaction to the shit on the screen. But it didn't really strike me until I was just about done with Okamiden that I haven't enjoyed a single Zelda game since 2001's Oracle duo. It's depressing, considering the massive nostalgia boner I still have for everything up to Zelda 64. My dad and I were ridiculous fans of the series, getting the SNES largely because Link to the Past haunted my goddamned dreams.
The reason for my lack of interest is pretty simple: Every Zelda game is the same fucking bullshit. I'm not saying that repetition of game mechanics and story are a bad thing. I'm sure I'd play the fuck out of Mario Sunshine if I had a Wii, and Metal Slug would probably be improved if they dropped the ridiculous attempts to add on to the core gameplay (or maybe at least give Tarma something better than the stupidest goddamned character ability in the game). But everything feels so fucking familiar in Zelda, and its always so boring. Nothing has changed plot wise, aside from a creepy slide towards appealing to the fanbase that thought Midna was an acceptable target of amour, and gameplay is still the same horrible progression of dungeons with the only changes being an increasing amount of bloated chores you're compelled to accomplish before you can just kick another dungeon's ass.
The worst example of this is probably the DS Zeldas. In those, the gimmick essentially exists to shoehorn you in a series of poorly controlled, overly long, and brain-numbing transit sections. I stopped HORRIBLE BOAT ZELDA around halfway through when I realized the game was going to throw even more stupid obstacles at me every time I charted another sobriety test-failing path through endless water and probably have to visit FORCED STEALTH SECTION WITH A GODDAMNED TIME LIMIT another three times or something. I think I got right to the end of Spirit Tracks, but got distracted with something and never bothered to finish it, because everything about it was just so generically dumb
Okamiden is depressingly superior to the DS Zeldas, to the point that I'd occasionally have Jacob's Ladder-esque flashbacks to me tapping the stylus on the SS THIS IS GAY to make it hop over another thorn fence in the middle of the ocean for the 20th time in a single voyage.
The single best thing I can say about Okamiden is that it ends right about where it is starting to wear its welcome. This was probably the worst part about Okami where after spending roughly 30 hours to kill the boss that everyone has talked about for the entire game, TWICE, suddenly the game decides that no there's actually a super hidden boss and now you have to spend like 10 more hours in some fucking ice stage battling obnoxious enemies that take five minutes to kill and a maze forest and aggggh. God help me, I soldiered through the pain, and to add insult to injury, we get the worst final boss relative to the quality of the rest of the game. Seriously, if I have to spend 40 hours on some massive adventure, it would be nice to get something better than "evil fish fetus in giant claw ball." Okamiden get a little long in the puppy tooth, but the story actually did some vaguely surprising things and without spoiling anything, the final boss actually felt like a satisfying culmination to all the shit I had been doing.
The game even managed to break up the typical Zelda 'tween dungeon doldrums by instituting the concept of having multiple people riding on your main character's back throughout the story. Some characters are worse than others (YES YOU'RE SCARED OF THE MONSTER BUT YOU CAN'T RUN I GET IT), though they're all generally more tolerable in the amount of time you have them than Okami's Issun, who sure as hell didn't make the Ice Stage Screwjob any easier to bear. The story itself is pretty serviceable, a standard fairy-tale story of growing up that manages not to take itself too seriously, which makes it a little easier to deal with the fact that alot of the plot twists, at best, are a little inconsistent. If anything really hurts the pace it's that the game often employs cutscenes with text that you cannot scroll through. This wouldn't be so bad if Okamiden didn't employ the "repeat every plot point 20 times per conversation" element. Granted, this gave me plenty of time catch up glorious lisa foiles videos OH MAN TOP FIVE ROBOTS THIS IS GREAT, and there's also a nice little option that fills you in on what happened and what you need to do if you miss something or just decide to skip the conversation entirely.
Dungeons are at an absolutely perfect length for the platform, giving you some forced encounters, some standard puzzles, and some hee-larious "guide your companion through enemy minefield sections." The only new paint skill (which would be annoying if using the stylus wasn't absolutely wonderful for the purpose of fucking up bads, as opposed to the PS2 version recognizing I wanted to draw a bomb under the enemy roughly 5% of the time) is that you can draw unseat your ally, and paint him a path to follow. God knows that I got extremely nervous when this was revealed, but it's merely overused (which after years of DS playing I've learned is the best you can hope for with stylus gimmicks), and while time-consuming, it usually goes as planned.
The only real failing of Okamiden is in its combat system. Okami didn't have lots of slutty friction and gaping anus combos, but it was serviceable and all three weapons felt appropriate at certain times. In Okamiden, you actually have a fairly realistic simulation of what happens if a puppy tried to fight! Trying to combo anything is a waste of time, as Chibiterasu will randomly fly into the air to attack his floating sense of self-loathing, or just get bamboozled by the camera. It is an unholy mess, especially since your partner will also attack, which usually serves just to knock enemies away from a combo you just started and no you cannot cancel out of them. The only weapon of any worth is the sword, which can be charged into a short, powerful combo that made me feel like a Sears catalog. The "battle report" screens from Okami are back, but now joining "time" and "damage" is "partner help." I honestly have no idea what partner help refers to even after spending twenty-five hours in the game. Sometimes I'd have my partner absolutely wrecking the enemy and get a dead twig rating, and other times I'd kill everything without my partner lifting a hand and I'd get a pink cherry blossom rating. Not that it really mattered, as the only thing that battle ratings affect is how much bonus money you get, and there was never a point in the game I was wanting for cash with just story fights and the occasional random attack.
On the other hand, the bosses are generally pretty well done, of course requiring whatever new brush skill(s) you required since the last king evil to exterminate them, but also actually requiring some genuine combat skills too, which is a modifier that hasn't applied to a Zelda boss fight for years. They're not exactly hard if just for that fact that you will be drowning in health and ink restorative items by the second boss, but they're actually really fun to battle against, to the point that you won't even mind dealing with them in the boss rush whoooops did I say that.
Graphics and Music, whatever. You probably know what to expect from Okamiden graphics wise, that being lower resolution cel shading and less extraneous pretty stuff floating around GLORIOUS NIPPON. Music is basically the same as Okami, traditional japanese music as a horrible nerd would expect it to sound, which is fun at first but got progressively more grating, especially with the WACKY COMEDY THEME.
I liked Okamiden. Fuck Zelda forever. Long live the New Wolf Flesh arrrrrrrrrrrrrooooooooooo BANG
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