Okami is pretty much what I was talking about with showing a lack of understanding in key areas. The items, overworld, and towns were arguably done better than some actual Zelda games, if you don't mind the weird drawing mechanics and constant load screens. The "dungeons" and combat on the other hand fall completely flat, and the tone can't decide if it wants to be Zelda or Conker's Bad Fur Day. You are a majestic wolf goddess on a quest to save the land from evil! Piss and shit on things in combat! Look, boobs!
It's the closest anyone else has come to making 3D Zelda, but depending on what you're looking for from the series, you could be sorely disappointed.
Is this about you disagreeing with Okami being similar to Zelda or being good? Or both?
Yes.
It was mostly a snipe against the game's quality, but I don't think it's a particularly good Zelda-like either. Okami has a lot of things that are theoretically better than classic Zelda games: Its focus on getting new main weapons seems like a missed opportunity for the older Zelda games as it's way better than just getting a lame bow or magic rod, its fields and level design works on a story-basis which means you don't just get one massive field / ocean in the middle of the entire map, and its use of a central mechanic to tie together all the mechanics and puzzles in the game is genius (Nintendo does this a lot nowadays, with the wall mechanic in ALBW, the starting tools in BOTW, or Cappy in Odyssey).
But the execution is largely bad all around. The combat in the game can't decide if it wants to let the player use their tools to make quick player-driven encounters (fun) or if it wants to restrict the player to treating enemies like puzzles where you need one specific brush stroke or weapon to dispatch them (not fun). This, of course, becomes excessively terrible when you realize your brush strokes won't land at least 15% of the time in combat, and when you realize you have to switch out weapons mid combat. I think it was a missed opportunity for the 3D linear Zelda games to build on their combat systems and require more from the player, but Okami proves why Nintendo probably had so many stipulations about it.
The dungeons are incredibly mid, so much so to a point that I can barely remember them outside of the most general of concepts / story beats. I don't think every dungeon knocks it out of the park in classic Zelda games, but I honestly struggle to think of a single great one in Okami outside of the one with the magical slip. I can remember very clearly how bad the pirate ship dungeon is though, which is very linear and way too easy.
Okami's central gameplay concept of using brush strokes also feels a bit at odds with the unlock structure the game goes for, too. You'd think a game about creativity and artistry would let the player guess what patterns you need in order to do certain puzzles, but instead you need to get ink scrolls to unlock new ink abilities ... even though you already have the ink brush. This in theory doesn't sound that bad, but in execution it makes the progression of Ameratsu so much more lame as time goes on, instead of unlocking new abilities by getting new items, you unlock abilities by gaining powers you had access to from the very beginning of the game. It's Zelda's problem of items (in this case brush strokes) being useless outside of certain contexts, only this time it doesn't even give the player the seratonin of getting a new item.
A lot of what Okami offers is sort of a monkey's paw situation. Sure, it's cool that fields are now more like hubs for specific story beats, but this ignores the fact that the game only needs multiple hubs because the game drags on so long. My favorite part of Okami is that if you mention how the game made the exact same conclusion at hour 15 that it did at hour 45, people will tell you that the fact that the same arc is repeated three times is intentional. As if that makes the game better. The only thing I can really give Okami is that the fact that the story evolves mid-dungeons is pretty cool, and I think it was a missed opportunity that older Zelda games didn't do that. Even if admittedly classic Zelda games always struggled to make good stories, Okami's story isn't great either and it was still cool to see the story doesn't come to a halt when you enter a dungeon.
It's honestly the worst Kamiya game I've ever played, and one of the worst Capcom games I've ever played in general. I can't even give it too much credit for its arstyle, because it has the same drab PS2 color palette that tons of games had back then. At least it's music is mostly good.
