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'Okami' even better on the Wii

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| Tuesday, May 13, 2008 12:46 PM CDT | () comments

(Contributed photo)

Back when the Wii came out, I started thinking about games I thought would be good to pair with the system's motion-sensitive capabilities.

One of those that came to mind was ''Okami,'' an artistic action game in which you use paint strokes on the screen to perform certain moves. Hey, I thought, painting on the screen seems perfect for the Wii.

Well, here we are a year and a half later, and Capcom has released ''Okami'' for the Wii. And I was right; it works great with the Wii's controls.

In case you didn't play the original on the PlayStation 2, ''Okami'' is about the sun god Amaterasu, who is brought to the world in the shape of a wolf to defeat a legendary monster and chase the darkness from the land.

Amaterasu - or Ammy, as his buglike sidekick calls him - has the ability to use the Celestial Brush, a paintbrush that allows him to paint on and change the world.

Holding the B button on the Wii remote freezes everything and turns it gray. The brush appears, and you can hold down the A button and make whatever stroke you want. As you progress in the game, you learn more strokes with different results.

The slash is what you start with, a simple line across the middle of anything in the landscape that you want to destroy. For example, bringing up the brush and drawing the slash across a tree trunk cuts the tree in half. This sometimes reveals a fruit or vegetable, which Ammy uses to increase his life force.

This works really well with the Wii remote and is loads of fun. But that's not the only reason to like ''Okami.'' The other is its fantastic art scheme. Everything in the game looks as if it were hand-drawn, with thick lines and bright colors. It's like running through a painting - or, more specifically, a Japanese watercolor on a scroll.

Lots of third-party developers can't seem to get a grip on the Wii's controls, but Capcom has it down. It could have made ''Okami'' awkward and annoying with the motion controls; instead, ''Okami'' is made even better. The drawing mechanics work well and fit perfectly into ''Okami's'' world.

''Okami,'' on Wii or PS2, is a game that shouldn't be missed.

Reach Aimee Green at (402) 473-7326 or Aimee.Green@lee.net.

OKAMI

Capcom, for Wii

Rated: Teen

Cost: $39.99

Score: 9/10

Score based on an evaluation of gameplay (4 points), visuals (2), sound (2) and replayability/value (2).