For those of you that haven’t played Okami (which is a fantastic game except for this glaringly broken element) the game has a feature called the celestial brush. You use the Wii remote to draw symbols on the screen and it has an effect. Most of the time the symbols you need to draw are very simple, only straight lines and circles.
SO WHY THE CUNTING FUCKING SYPHILITIC WHORE IS IT SO FUCKING IMPOSSIBLE TO USE???
Drawing a circle isn’t hard, I learned how to do it when I was about 3 and have been doing it throughout my life ever since. However it takes me between one and 10 attempts to get the game to recognise that I have drawn a circle. This started out as simply annoying, until I got to the Kohana Shuffle sequence. Oh the Kohana Shuffle, it’s going to be a long time before the awful memory of you is excised from my mind, I can tell you. This part of the game requires you to use the celestial brush’s “bloom” effect five times in a row, again, it’s only drawing a circle so in theory should be extremely easy. The catch? You get one chance to do it right each time, and you have to do it five times. Fail, and you’re treated to a two minute sequence of dialogue which you have to sit through hitting the A button to progress the dialogue before doing it again. No opportunity to stop and try again later, you’re just forced to do it over and over again. To add insult to injury, several times I succeeded in drawing a circle that the game recognised, except that it decided that I actually wanted to use the “sun” stroke (also a circle) rather than the “bloom” one. So I got it right, but I was wrong, because the celestial brush is a cunt.
I’m not exaggerating when I say it took me 20 minutes and 10 attempts to complete the sequence - it should have been no more than 90 seconds. I told my Wii “Right, this is your last chance - if you don’t work this time then I swear to god I’m ejecting the disc and sending it straight back to Lovefilm”. Fortunately the Wii seems to be susceptible to threats and it worked, but not before I was ready to throw the fucking thing against the wall.
Why? Why would a feature of a game so perfectly matched to the Wii’s control system be so flawed as to actually be accurately described as broken? And why build the game so that this broken feature is rubbed in your face constantly by putting unskippable, boring sequences on either side that you have to go through over and over again if you get it wrong? Games are supposed to be fun, not the equivalent of writing lines. If I can use the Wii remote to perform surgery on someone in Trauma Centre, why can’t I use it to draw a circle in Okami? This is a stunning game with some of the best art and music I’ve ever encountered and I’m really enjoying it, yet the game wants to make it an uphill struggle to play it and keeps kicking me in the balls whenever I try and use an integral game feature.
I had some trouble with it initially myself but I found that you almost have to hold the Wiimote so that the top surface points up to get it to register with Okami. For those of us who hold the Wiimote more casually it can take getting used to.
Quite - as I said the Wii controller is perfectly suitable for conducting precision surgery in Trauma Centre, so there’s really no reason why basic shapes should be so hard to recognise. This problem has been mentioned by every review of the Wii version of Okami that I’ve read. It’s a crying shame because it stops a great game being a perfect game.
The mother-fucking Kohana shuffle!!! God, that made me so angry! I stopped playing for a week since I couldn’t get past it. Finally, went back and made it through, but jesus it made me angry. Of course, what was worse is that I have a friend who has no problem with the Celestial Brush on the Wii. I don’t know what he does differently, but he made it through the shuffle the second try, and it always works for him.
Oh, Autoclys, a quick tip. I had alot of trouble with the slash until I read a tip. If you use the Z trigger when in drawing mode, it will draw a straight line. So I always use Z to slash.
Other than that, I love the game. So close to greatness. Except for bloom and gale.
It’s not about the shape recognition, it’s that Capcom didn’t take into account controller rotation. It’s something that too many developers have done with the Wii.
Do this simple experiment: Draw two circles. Do the first one with a careful motion so that the Wiimote is always perpendicular to the television screen and has the control surface pointed straight up. Do the other one holding the Wiimote sideways so that the infrared sensor is still facing your television but the buttons are on the side. The first will work and the second won’t.
I couldn’t even do a slash until I realized what Capcom had done since I tend to hold the Wiimote sideways. It looks like no matter what controller I use I don’t hold them right.
While we’re ranting about wiimote crap, I STILL get frustrated at Twilight Princess deciding that the spin attack was “shake the nunchuck” and the shield bash was “thrust nunchuck forward”–if you’re not staying in a perfectly straight line, you’re getting a spin attack whether you like it or not.
BoomBlox. Enemies are closing in on your fort. Hurl bombs at them as quickly as possible. To do this point the wiimote to move the cursor where you want to hurl the bomb, hold down A, point the wiimote at the ceiling then back at the screen releasing A in a throwing motion. To be sucessful means throwing them as qucikly as possible.
It sure doesn’t help that after every damn throw the cursor disappears somewhere offscreen and your left shaking the damn wiimote trying to get it to reappear.
If you can get the PS2 version instead, go for it. There are some occasional hiccups using the joystick to draw circles (tip: make sure you actually close the circle), but in general, it works well.
More importantly, on the PS2, the attack function is assigned to one of the regular controller buttons. On the Wii, it’s assigned to shaking the controller. This difference is quite significant, especially when you start doing multi-hit combos on monsters. It was enough of an issue that my girlfriend happily abandoned a few hours of progress in the game in order to play the PS2 version, once I showed it to her. Thank goodness the Wii copy was only a rental.
Anyway, if you’re at the Kohana Shuffle, you’re really just getting started. It’s worth switching now rather than trying to power through another 40 hours of shitty controls.
