put Gerbil With Nine-Foot Sword in smash

Branching Narrative

I dunno if this'll be visible on twitter but the transparency effects around Sakuya's feet are dithered

Was this a useful trick on PS2 hardware?

Like it's either working around precision limitations somewhere, which seems odd, or it's an order-independent transparency thing, which seems even odder for a PS2 game

I suspect it's PROBABLY alpha-to-coverage since the HD port uses MSAA, but you couldn't do that on the PS2, and it seems pointless for a port to add it when the original art wasn't designed to require it

man now I want to fire up the original game and stare at pixels :/

tbh any kind of theorizing about the engine design is probably pointless here, bc AFAIK the HD ports are all derived from the Wii port, and Capcom reportedly lost most of the source data for the original game so Ready At Dawn had to reverse-engineer everything off the PS2 disc

(I dunno how accurate that statement is exactly; I'm going off memories of old kotaku posts and tbh news blogs have never been *terribly* precise when talking about serious tech stuff

suffice to say the port's development was extremely fraught, though)

One thing I've always been curious about is the paper-texture overlay looking different on the Wii version (and all subsequent ports)

At the time it was claimed that the Wii was *literally incapable* of exactly reproducing the PS2's effect, which... sounds like an an actually interesting tech nuance getting filtered through layers of PR aimed at non-technical bloggers

PS2 genuinely had some weird-ass capabilities; wouldn't surprise me if it really was prohibitively complex to port

PCSX2 devs have mentioned having to emulate a *modulo* blend mode, i.e. hardware additive blending but with mod 1 applied, so values loop around instead of clamping

I love this boss intro bc the whole game's been pretty slow-moving and chill up until this point and then it's like OH YEAH JUST A REMINDER HIDEKI KAMIYA DIRECTED THIS

put Bear That Really Likes Spheres in smash

man I forgot about the dog-collecting quest being like forty hours long

bayonetta has you taunt enemies to build magic or whatever but Okami has PEE ON ENEMIES FOR THE RAREST CURRENCY IN THE GAME

These tower things are great bc it's like... how do we gate stuff behind the double-jump powerup, when we already gave the player a wall jump

ANSWER: SQUIRREL BAFFLE

Okami is absurdly long, and that's a fairly central component of its overall tone/aesthetic

I love the game but replaying it is a weird experience; a lot of the sense of portent and foreboding that comes from its slow pacing gets lost, leaving an unfortunate amount of tedium

HI!!!

I bombed a rock and there was a hole underneath it and there was a LITERAL BOSS FIGHT INSIDE

this game is nuts

man okami really features nontrivial vore huh

so a while back I went on this short thread about Okami's ability to constantly subvert your expectations:



Been thinking about this a bunch while replaying it

I think a big part of the way it accomplishes this is that it takes the structure of a Zelda game, but rearranges all the rote components while refusing to provide any indication of how far along you are

so like a Zelda game has Zelda Dungeons, in which you get exactly one Dungeon Item, and it goes in a slot in the pause menu. You get told to do exactly three dungeons, then plot stuff happens, and then more get revealed

You pretty rapidly get a clear sense of how long a dungeon takes, how far apart they are, and how close you are to the final boss. You fill in the world map, fill the slots in the inventory screen, half the time the NPCs are like "ONLY THREE MORE MACGUFFINS TO GO" etc

Okami doesn't have a world map, doesn't tell you how many dungeons are left, obfuscates the UI so you don't get a sense of filling in slots, wildly varies the lengths of dungeons and the amount of gameplay time that separates them, and constantly rearranges plot goals

The longest-term goal that you're given is "find the 13 brush powers" but they're not *only* found in dungeons, sometimes you find two within an hour of each other and sometimes you go 10 hours without getting any

plus many (but not all!) have alternate versions that need to be unlocked but don't "count" as one of the 13, and some of them have weird secret upgrades, so even though there're 13 slots in the UI you still have no idea how close to finished you are

Plus the plot is CONSTANTLY faking you out in terms of goals. Avoiding spoilers here since it's a big part of the game, but a lot of things that SOUND like long-term arcs get resolved bizarrely quickly, and things that seem like the setup for the next dungeon can be 20 hours away

the definition of "dungeon" even gets weird bc some are super long and some take like ten minutes. They all have a Zelda-style Dungeon Item in them, but you ALSO get brush powers and key items unpredictably from NPCs and other overworld stuff

It uses environments in really unexpected ways too. It occasionally sets up a "hub" structure where you'll be venturing out from one area and returning repeatedly, but sometimes it changes hubs or discards the concept entirely for a while or does weird vania-esque backtracking

Result is that the game just constantly surprises you. Not in the sense of like "DUDE MIND=BLOWN" but like, at no point do you ever feel like you expect what's coming next

"Poncles" is a meme; the actual term is Pionicles

there are red-hot platforms in this dungeon as part of a puzzle. Earlier in the game I received an item that allows me to *swim in lava*

it doesn't work on the platforms

Anime: The Philosophy

it's honestly super interesting how much this specific sentiment runs through like... basically every piece of japanese media I've played/watched

it a v compelling approach to character arcs

Okay finished it

Legit one of the best final bosses ever

Play Okami yall