The celestial brush was a really neat spin on traditional "magic" type powers, and of course you accrue more uses for it as the game progresses. Though it took a while to get used to, using a joystick to draw actually wasn't that bad (for me, anyway). In fact, that seemed like the most challenging aspect of the game: knowing how, when, and where to draw what, and then actually doing it. I knew when I had made a mistake before letting go of the R1 button, but you don't have any sort of celestial white-out, so getting it right in the midst of combat or a chain of midair acrobatics made the task more exciting. The game seldom misinterpreted my brushstrokes; sometimes I would start a power slash in fire, or fail to close a circle (the "bomb" technique always seemed to be hardest to draw), but I saw these as faults I had to improve, not as a shortcoming of the game's programmers. I suppose gamers that don't like to draw or are admittedly bad at it might feel differently.

The story was a bit frenetic, as though it was trying to cover too many stories in too little time, and at first I excused that as part of the mythological origins of Amaterasu and related Shinto/Buddhist tales. I mean, imagine if you had to make a game about a Greek god: you'd be very hard-pressed to include any significant amount of the mythology while remaining accurate to the myths themselves (unless, I suppose, you followed one of the epics) and still come out with a nice, cohesive narrative.

It was a little disappointing, then, when I read a bit about the Shinto origin stories and learned that Okami hadn't really remained very accurate either. At all. I may want to do a little more research--because I like literary comparisons, okay?--and write it up here later. But I suppose if I had been drafting the Okami script, I would have gone one way or the other: either you abandon attempts at accuracy for the sake of a strong, cohesive plot, or you ignore the integrity of the plot in order to faithfully retell the original mythology (God forbid gamers should actually learn something from the games they play). As it is, Okami doesn't really do either, taking a middle ground where the plot is just okay, but not particularly motivating, and where the supernatural elements you encounter do indeed feel ancient and exotic, but are in fact tame fictions having been merely inspired by their source material.

Am I holding Okami to too high a standard? Absolutely. There's explanatory material in the game manual that lists some of the changes they made, purely in the interest of bringing Okami more in line with what they thought their mainstream audience would expect. And that's fair. After all, the gameplay is fun, novel, and surprisingly long, and I would recommend Okami to anyone who likes a good adventure RPG with a strong stylistic twist. I suppose I just wasn't mainstream enough to fully enjoy it as that.