telophase: (gojyo screw you // yomigaere)
telophase ([personal profile] telophase) wrote2007-06-08 09:38 am
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This 'n' that

I've got over ten hours of Okami under my belt, and while the graphics aren't quite as stunning to me as they are to most people*, it's been interesting. I'm not giving it an unqualified Yes! because I'm finding certain aspects of gameplay highly frustrating, and I don't know if it's because my controller is b0rked or if it's just designed that way. The dance that Mr Orange does where you have to circle the cherry bud to get the tree to bloom? Took over an hour because I couldn't get the stupid thing to circle fast enough. And there was no option to skip the whole "It didn't work! I won't give up! blahblah blah blah blah Ammy, you should help him!" talky section, so I had to wait through it every. single. time. I'm glad that I have an option to bite, because the next time I see Mr Orange I'm going to bite the hell out of him.

And then there was the first fishing game, which took me close to two hours to powerslash a fish. That's one fish. And when I was eventually able to do it, I couldn't figure out what the difference was between the powerslashes that worked and the ones that didn't. And then the evil trees that throw fruit at you? How do you get the fruit to go back at the tree? I can't ever get the powerslash to work with that.

I have screamed more obscenities at this game than I have anything else, and considering my lack of ability at Crazy Taxi, that's saying quite a lot.


* Mostly because of my lousy TV, which makes it a bit hard to focus on things, and it always takes me a while to figure out where any particular character's face is.
chisotahn: Firebird with the text "Firebird's Child". (Default)

[personal profile] chisotahn 2007-06-08 04:13 pm (UTC)(link)
Uh, wow. It should NOT take that long. The fish thing is challenging the first time you do it, but... not THAT challenging.

I woudl definitely have someone who knows what they're doing take a whirl on it with your controller and see what's up.

[identity profile] telophase.livejournal.com 2007-06-08 04:42 pm (UTC)(link)
There's always the option that I just suck that badly, but it's nice to have confirmation that it's maybe the controller. :)

[identity profile] helen-keeble.livejournal.com 2007-06-08 04:37 pm (UTC)(link)
I had exactly the same experience as you. Then I went and got a new controller, and all was well.

Okami is a game that _demands_ a fresh, virgin pair of analogue sticks...

(I think the PS2 controllers only have a good lifespan of a year, after which they go downhill in small-but-increasingly-cumulative ways)

[identity profile] telophase.livejournal.com 2007-06-08 04:43 pm (UTC)(link)
I think a trip by Best Buy on the way home may be in order...

[identity profile] helen-keeble.livejournal.com 2007-06-08 05:02 pm (UTC)(link)
Oh, and two things that you may not have noticed that make life easier... (I got 15 hours into the game before I noticed either of these, but I am supremely unobservant)

1. You can rotate the camera for a better view while you are in brush-drawing mode. It's deeply frustrating fighting the first boss is if you don't realise this can be done (I nearly threw the controller through the screen)

2. "Magic smoke" appears around the tip of the brush when you are hovering over something you can draw on. Makes those "where exactly do you want me to draw this circle??" puzzles actually possible, and is particularly helpful in the fishing minigame.

For what it's worth, I think that the oddities of the control system become easier as you play; I recall being utterly unable to make the cherry trees bloom in the first village, and spending ages working out how to draw them. Now I can just casually flick the brush in a fluid oval without really thinking about it. :-)

On power slashes - the game seems to favour slanted slashes ( / ) drawn top-right corner to bottom-left corner in a quick, clean movement. It's also pretty good at picking up horizontal slashes drawn right-to-left. I don't think it picks up vertical slashes at all well.

[identity profile] telophase.livejournal.com 2007-06-08 06:41 pm (UTC)(link)
I noticed the camera-rotation thing because I always use the wrong hand when trying to control things, but I didn't notice the magic smoke.

Thanks!

[identity profile] marith.livejournal.com 2007-06-08 06:00 pm (UTC)(link)
Mr. Orange's dance is the most frustrating thing in the entire game, hands down. I seriously wanted to smack the designers with trout at the time. (In hindsight, I just want to ask them what the hell they were thinking, and make *them* play it while I watch. With an old controller.)

[identity profile] telophase.livejournal.com 2007-06-08 06:42 pm (UTC)(link)
Yup. And it was so frustrating to get through four of them, bomb on the fifth, and not know if there were any more, or if that was the last. *twitch*

[identity profile] readsalot.livejournal.com 2007-06-08 09:45 pm (UTC)(link)
Horizontal powerslashes work best for me. I'd forgotten that it took me forever to figure out that that was the only way to fight the imps with lutes (or whatever they are). Also the fish.

Sometimes the slash needs to go all the way across the thing, so if you don't start far enough to one side, it won't work.

I'd been thinking that all of my problems were due to my own awkwardness, but my controller is quite old, so I may try getting a new one, too.

Time stops when you hold down the R2 button to draw; knowing that helps me a lot, because it means I can just mash that button, then look around to figure out what I want to do.

[identity profile] rushthatspeaks.livejournal.com 2007-06-09 06:52 am (UTC)(link)
Mr. Orange's dance was the one point at which I went from really enjoying myself to swearing and then whimpering and then just going 'I *will* get through this fucking thing'. Seriously, designer-people? MAKE THE 'FAIL' CUT SCENE SKIPPABLE KTHNX.

It never did anything remotely that annoying again, though.