Ōkami

• 1. Introduction

  ›

  Ōkami began as a one-minute movie of a wolf racing through a forest, with flowers blooming in its footsteps. Hideki Kamiya made that clip with no gameplay behind it at all. From it grew a 2006 action-adventure about Amaterasu, the Shinto sun goddess, who takes the shape of a white wolf and fights to restore a darkened land. Critics adored the finished game. Its makers, however, would later call its sales a failure. This documentary asks how a demo about blossoming flowers became a game played with a paintbrush. It asks why a celebrated game struggled to find buyers, and what became of the people who built it. It also asks why a game that seemed finished keeps coming back.

  3915

• 2. The Wolf Goddess

  ›

  A narrator opens the legend one hundred years before the game's present, with a white wolf named Shiranui and a swordsman named Nagi. Together they sealed the eight-headed demon Orochi inside the Moon Cave. They did it to save Kamiki Village and Nagi's beloved Nami. In the present, Nagi's descendant Susano boasts that he is the greatest warrior alive and refuses to believe the tale. He frees Orochi, and the demon curses Nippon, the game's version of Japan, draining the life from the land.

  Sakuya, a wood sprite who guards Kamiki Village, summons the long-dormant Amaterasu as a reincarnation of Shiranui and asks her to lift the curse. Most humans see nothing but a plain white wolf, and some take her for Shiranui returned. If the player drains her painted powers through overuse, she reverts to that ordinary form.

  Issun, an inch-tall wandering artist, rides along with her and calls her "Ammy" or "furball". He is arrogant at first, and he wants the thirteen Celestial Brush techniques for himself. He serves as guide, spokesman and comic relief. By the end he is her true friend, her inspiration and her savior.

  Every year, on the day of the Kamiki Festival, Orochi demanded the sacrifice of a young woman. Each of its eight heads carried a different elemental magic. Yet the whole demon could be put into a stupor by a special sake brewed only in Kamiki Village, and that is how Amaterasu beats it. She and a changed Susano return to the Moon Cave and replay the old battle, this time to save Kushi.

  Orochi's spirit drifts north, and Amaterasu follows it to Ryoshima Coast and Sei-an City, the capital. There she works with a priestess named Rao, the legendary submarine Dragon Kingdom and the reclusive Queen Himiko. Together they stop a demonic plague and recover a mystical weapon from a sunken trading ship. Then the truth emerges. The real Rao died before Amaterasu arrived, and her companion was the fox god Ninetails, who kills Himiko and retreats to a fortress on Oni Island. After Amaterasu defeats Ninetails, that spirit also heads for the icy northern island of Kamui.

  On Kamui, the Oina tribe is menaced by two revived demons, Lechku and Nechku, whose blizzard threatens to destroy the island. Here Amaterasu learns that Issun fled his home of Ponc'tan to escape his duty as a Celestial Envoy, a messenger of the gods. He was also running from his grandfather. She learns that Shiranui was herself in an earlier life. That earlier wolf sacrificed herself to kill Orochi, with help from Issun's grandfather.

  Frozen into the plains of Kamui lies the Ark of Yamato, a flying ship made of iron. Waka explains it. He is the flute-playing young man in a tengu-like costume who has appeared to Amaterasu all along. He drops French terms of affection and foretells her future, because he is far older than he looks and walked with her on the Celestial Plain hundreds of years ago. He also leads the Tao Troopers, whose members Abe and Kamo are modeled on two famous onmyōji, Abe no Seimei and Kamo no Yasunori. Waka belongs to the Moon Tribe, a long-living race that used the Ark to sail the stars. They helped the Celestials, the minor and major gods, flee the Celestial Plain after Orochi invaded. But demons had slipped aboard beforehand and killed the other Celestials. When the Ark fell to earth, those demons were loosed on the mortal world.

  Amaterasu boards the Ark alone and finds Waka fighting Yami, the ruler of the demons. Yami appears as a small fish inside a huge sphere, and his design changes at each stage of the battle. Waka is knocked unconscious, and Amaterasu takes his place. Yami drains her powers at the start and leaves her a plain wolf. She regains them as the fight goes on, but after the fourth round he destroys them again and leaves her near death. Before the fifth round, Issun accepts his role as a Celestial Envoy and gets everyone she has helped to believe in her. She changes into her most powerful form and vanquishes Yami for good. In that last fight Yami wields a huge clawed hand, meant to show the evil that comes from human hands. His name means darkness in Japanese. Amaterasu and Waka then take control of the Ark and sail it back to the Celestial Plain to rebuild the land of the gods.

  1546

• 3. Ink and Woodblock

  ›

  Kamiya first saw the photorealistic engine being built for the Resident Evil remake on the GameCube while he was working on Viewtiful Joe for Capcom. He wanted to use it for something lighter, centered on healing and on showing a lot of nature. The first prototype, in his own words, was "incredibly boring to play".

  The PlayStation 2, the target platform, struggled with that engine. Kamiya also admitted that he welcomed so many ideas from the team that development drifted off target, even toward a simulation. While the team tried to optimize the engine, character designer Kenichiro Yoshimura drew the wolf with a brush. That drawing led the leads to adopt the ukiyo-e and sumi-e styles, Japanese watercolor and woodcut traditions seen in the work of Hokusai. The new look suited the idea of restoring nature, and it solved the performance problem too. Over three days, the leads rethought the whole game around it. Atsushi Inaba, the CEO of Clover, recalled the question that followed: "Wouldn't it be great if we could somehow get the player involved and participate in this artwork instead of just watching it?" That question produced the Celestial Brush.

  Early enemy concepts included dinosaurs, before the designs settled on demons. Amaterasu's first designs aimed to avoid a character who looked like "your pet wearing clothing". The team considered turning her into a dolphin in water and a falcon when she leapt off a cliff, then dropped both ideas. Sakuya, designed around a peach motif, was planned with "level 2" and "level 3" looks in which she wore less clothing as the story went on. Inaba vetoed the "level 3" look, which was effectively naked. Waka was meant to resemble a Tatsunoko-style character, with a hood reminiscent of those worn by the Gatchaman.

  Sawaki Takeyasu, the lead character designer, knew that Orochi is a gigantic creature in Japanese mythology. He gave the demon a garden and a palace on its back. That inspired the game designers to place a bell in those structures as Orochi's fatal weakness.

  Kamiya said the story was meant to be larger, but time ran out and the team resolved it with about half of what they had planned. In 2024 he said Clover Studio had been gathered as a "dream team", yet there was strife between the developers. Ikumi Nakamura, who worked alongside Kamiya on Ōkami and earlier games, said enthusiasm for it was less uniform than for Viewtiful Joe or Devil May Cry.

  At the 2005 E3 Convention, Ōkami was shown about 30% complete, with the Celestial Brush and the combat system already in place. It reached Japan on the 20th of April 2006, North America on the 19th of September 2006, Europe on the 9th of February 2007 and Australia on the 14th of February. Just a few weeks after the North American launch, Capcom announced that Clover Studio would close.

  31413259

• 4. Painting Miracles

  ›

  Draw a loop on the canvas and a strong wind blows. Draw a line through an enemy and it is cut. Paint over a broken bridge and it mends. These are the miracles of the Celestial Brush. The player pauses the game, calls up a canvas and draws with the left analog stick of the DualShock controller. Later ports let players point with the Wii Remote, the Joy-Con, a touchscreen or the PlayStation Move controller.

  Constellations hide the Celestial Brush gods, who were inspired by the Chinese zodiac. Completing a constellation releases one of them and teaches a new technique. Some techniques can be modified later. The power called Inferno, for example, can gain a variant called Fireburst. It uses a different drawing pattern and lets players make flames without torches. Ink limits the whole system. Special ink wells hold a set amount, so the player cannot simply paint every enemy away, and the ink refills over time when the Brush rests.

  The structure around the Brush borrows from The Legend of Zelda, one of Kamiya's favorite series. He calls himself a Zelda fan and admits it shaped his design. Many reviewers noticed the resemblance. The game mixes action, platforming and puzzles. The main story is mostly linear and steered by Issun, while side quests and optional activities let players roam the open world at their own pace.

  Small kind acts earn a reward called Praise. Making trees bloom and feeding wild animals count, along with quests and side quests. Praise buys upgrades such as more health and extra ink wells.

  Battles take place in a ghostly virtual arena, where Amaterasu mixes weapons, fighting techniques and Brush methods. Winning pays yen, with bonuses for finishing quickly and taking no damage. Merchants and dojos across the land sell healing goods, better weapons, tools, key items and combat techniques. Rare Demon Fangs dropped in combat can be traded for special items that help but are not required to finish the game.

  Three weapons take their inspiration from the Imperial Regalia of Japan: the Reflector, the Rosaries and the Glaive. Amaterasu can carry one as a main weapon and another as a sub-weapon, alongside the melee attacks she learns along the way.

  564442

• 5. Words and Music

  ›

  In Japanese, the word ōkami means wolf, while the kanji 大神, pronounced the same way, mean great deity. The title is therefore a pun, and it describes the heroine: a great wolf deity. The same characters appear in the honorific name of the Shinto sun goddess Amaterasu, though they are pronounced differently there.

  The localization team faced 1500 pages of text that all had to pass a "native check". Japanese has no plurals, and the game has a large cast and many conditional conversations, which made the job harder. Only one puzzle had to change. It required knowing the steps for drawing a kanji character, which Japanese players would know at once, so the Western release demonstrated those steps in the game. The team knew some elements would be unfamiliar to Western players. They left enough detail for players to look the references up themselves.

  Character personality was another problem. In Japanese, a character's manner can come through in how sentences are built or slurred. English could not copy that directly. Working with Kamiya, the team either recreated each personality or invented new mannerisms where that suited the character.

  The team shortened Japanese names rather than replacing them with Western ones. A boy named Mushikai, for example, became Mushi. The nickname "Ammy" in the Western translation came from Kamiya himself, and it matches the tone of the Japanese nickname "Ammako".

  Mrs. Orange makes cherry cake with a technique that parodies Akuma's Shun Goku Satsu from Street Fighter, complete with a kanji word on screen and her back to the camera. Other jokes target the Clover staff. A non-player character called "Animal Lover" has lost his rabbit, named "Inaba" after the head producer. In the closing credits, that rabbit can be seen falling out of a tree directly beneath Atsushi Inaba's name.

  The characters' speech is built by scrambling samples of voice actors' lines, and the more emotional lines come from voice work given in that emotion. The music draws on classical Japanese works, and the credits play over a song called "Reset", sung by Ayaka Hirahara. In May 2006 Capcom released a 5-disc soundtrack in Japan. Players who finish the Western release can open a jukebox to hear the in-game music. A piano album, Ōkami Piano Arrange, followed on the 30th of March 2007, with Mika Matsura arranging and performing its 10 songs. When Ōkami HD reached the Nintendo Switch, Data Disc prepared a four-disc vinyl compilation of more than 60 tracks for release in October 2018.

  1525362927

• 6. Acclaim and Failure

  ›

  Ōkami earned a score of 93/100 on Metacritic, and the reviews read like a chorus. GameSpot gave it 9 out of 10 and an Editor's Choice, while IGN gave it 9.1. Three Electronic Gaming Monthly reviewers scored it 9, 9.5 and 9. One of them wrote, "I'll be surprised if you can find a better game on any system this fall". Newtype USA made it Game of the Month for October 2006 and called it "that rarest of beasts: a game without any obvious flaws". Eurogamer gave it 10/10 and predicted a game "that will be talked about for years to come". Famitsu scored it 39 out of 40, the 15th game to earn that score from the publication.

  Critics did find flaws. Difficulty was uneven, and some reviewers struggled to get the game to recognize the correct Celestial Brush patterns. There was also an excess of dialog, especially at the start, which was not helped by computer-generated voices in place of voice acting.

  The prizes began at E3 in 2005. 1UP named it Best PS2 Game, IGN named it Best PS2 Game of Show, and X-Play called it the Most Original Game. After release, IGN, Edge Magazine and Game Revolution each rated it the best game of 2006. In Japan it won the Grand Prize in the Entertainment Division of the 2006 Japan Media Arts Festival. At the 2007 Game Developers Choice Awards it took Best Character Design and one of three Innovation Awards. The 2007 BAFTA awards honored it for Artistic Achievement and Original Score.

  Sales told a different story. More than 200,000 copies sold in North America in 2006, grossing about US$8 million and ranking 100th among the year's best sellers there. By March 2007 the PlayStation 2 version was near 270,000 copies. Japan bought only 66,000 copies in 2006. In 2024, Kamiya said those numbers made the game a "failure".

  At first, poor sales of Ōkami and of God Hand, another Clover game from the same period, were blamed for the studio's end. It was later revealed that three key developers, Shinji Mikami, Hideki Kamiya and Atsushi Inaba, had left the company. The studio was dissolved so that, as the announcement put it, "now all the resources should be used more effectively and more efficiently since they are centralized". The trio formed a company called Seeds Inc, which later merged with a company called ODD to become PlatinumGames. PlatinumGames then brought in several members of the Clover team once Capcom disbanded it.

  95692131

• 7. Ports and Remasters

  ›

  Atsushi Inaba of Clover Studio once said that Ōkami's action-based gameplay would not translate well to the Wii, and Capcom stated that there were "no plans for Ōkami on Wii". Then, at the 2007 UK Gamers Day, Capcom announced that Ready at Dawn would oversee a Wii version. It was first scheduled for March 2008 and later pushed to April.

  Christian Svensson, a Capcom vice-president, said fans had demanded the port, especially on message boards, "even if they're sometimes mean to us". The work was hard. The assets Capcom Japan supplied were incomplete, so Ready at Dawn recreated some from scratch and recoded the optimizations made for the PlayStation 2. Ru Weerasuriya, the studio's creative director, later said, "we started with no assets and literally reverse-engineered the whole thing back onto the Wii". The effort was so great that he would not attempt such a port again.

  The Wii Remote's motion sensing handled the Celestial Brush, and two buttons offered either free-form strokes or a straight line from the starting point. Text and cutscenes became skippable. Capcom skipped television advertising and relied on online marketing, including art contests and a fan website that went live on the 3rd of April 2008. The port reached North America on the 15th of April 2008, Australia on the 12th of June, Europe on the 13th of June and Japan on the 15th of October 2009.

  The final credits of the PlayStation 2 version vanished from the Wii release, and Kamiya mourned them. He called the original "a special staff roll for a special moment". A Capcom representative said the credits were a pre-rendered movie containing the Clover Studio logo, and Capcom had no legal right to use that logo in a game it was not directly involved in. Didier Malenfant of Ready at Dawn said instead that the movie was cut to fit everything on one disc. The Japanese release restored the credits and revealed that Tose had co-developed the port.

  Players also found an IGN watermark on the cover art of the North American Wii release, traced to an image taken from IGN's site. Capcom offered a free replacement cover for a limited time. The European cover had no such error.

  GameSpot said the Wii Remote "improves the pace of the game" when painting, though combat controls were weaker. Nintendo Power recommended the PlayStation 2 version instead. Capcom said about 280,000 Wii copies had sold in North America and Europe by the 30th of July 2008. Japan managed 24,000 in the first week. Total sales stayed under 600,000 by March 2009, and the 2010 Guinness World Records Gamer's Edition named it the least commercially successful winner of a game of the year award.

  In October 2012, Capcom and HexaDrive released Ōkami HD for the PlayStation 3, with PlayStation Move support. It restored the ending credits, but the Clover Studio logo was removed. On non-Japanese copies, an instrumental remix of the Ryoshima Coast music replaced "Reset". On the 12th of December 2017 the game reached Windows, PlayStation 4 and Xbox One with 4K resolution at 30 frames per second and an optional widescreen mode. The Nintendo Switch version followed on the 9th of August 2018, using touchscreen and motion controls, and Amazon Luna received it in the United States on the 20th of April 2022.

  Praise for the remasters was strong. Polygon's Jeff Ramos called the 2017 release the best example of a remaster. Wired's Julie Muncy called the game "an underrated masterpiece". PC Gamer's Chris Schilling called it a "gorgeous and unforgettable adventure", even while finding it languid at times.

  On PlayStation 4, Ōkami HD sold 16,536 copies in its first week in Japan. As of the 31st of March 2024, more than 2.40 million copies had sold on PlayStation 4, Xbox One and Nintendo Switch. The Windows and PlayStation 3 versions had sold 1.065 million as of 2020, for a combined 3.365 million by June 2023. In 2018, Guinness World Records gave Ōkami the title of most critically acclaimed video game starring an animal character.

  3639525356

• 8. Legacy and Return

  ›

  In July 2009, Christian Svensson said Capcom needed "a lot more people buying the current version before we seriously consider a sequel". Two months later, the September 2009 issue of Famitsu announced Ōkamiden for the Nintendo DS, made without the Clover staff. Producer Motohide Eshiro called it a spiritual successor rather than a full sequel. It takes place nine months after the first game and stars Chibiterasu, a wolf cub with Amaterasu's powers who has not yet reached his full potential. It reached Japan in September 2010 and North America and Europe in March 2011.

  Ben Mattes, producer of the 2008 Prince of Persia, cited Ōkami, Ico and Shadow of the Colossus as influences on that game's play and artwork. Street Fighter IV has character designs influenced by Ōkami, with hand-drawn images and brushstroke effects. Epic Mickey lets players draw and modify parts of levels, much as the Celestial Brush does. Yami returns as the final boss of Tatsunoko vs. Capcom, and Amaterasu is playable in Marvel vs. Capcom 3, Ultimate Marvel vs. Capcom 3 and Teppen.

  Bayonetta, one of PlatinumGames' next games, nods to Ōkami when its heroine becomes a panther and leaves a trail of flowers and plant life, as Amaterasu does. At the 2010 San Diego Comic-Con, Capcom raffled T-shirts that placed Amaterasu, Shiranui and Chibiterasu in a homage to the Three Wolf Moon shirt. In 2015, Amaterasu appeared in Archie Comics' Worlds Unite crossover. Monster Hunter Generations includes an Ōkami costume. Capcom also created an Amaterasu courier for Dota 2, free to those who bought Ōkami HD on Steam around its December 2017 release.

  In 2009, GamesRadar listed Ōkami among games with untapped franchise potential and asked why Capcom could not release Ōkami 2 if Nintendo could keep making Zelda games. The wait was long. In October 2019, Capcom said it wanted to revive some of its dormant properties. Soon afterward, Kamiya and Ikumi Nakamura wrote on Twitter that "Ōkami is going to be back". In June 2020, Nakamura said she planned to approach Capcom, insisting only that Kamiya lead the project.

  At The Game Awards 2024, in December 2024, Capcom announced a sequel with Kamiya directing at a new studio called Clovers. Two other studios, M-Two and Machine Head Works, both with former Clover Studio staff, will support him. Kamiya had left PlatinumGames in October 2023 after conflicts with Inaba. Kento Koyama founded Clovers in Tokyo and Osaka while Kamiya sat out a one-year non-compete agreement. Capcom producer Yoshiaki Hirabayashi said the company had considered a sequel for some time, because the game has a steady sales record rather than a dwindling tail. The sequel will continue Amaterasu's story, since Kamiya did not feel it was complete, and it will use Capcom's RE Engine.

  Capcom ran a celebratory event for the game's 20th anniversary in April 2026.

  7682878891