Okage: Shadow King

"Whimsical... but oh so mediocre."

Okage: Shadow King is an oddball of an RPG. In a kind of Earthbound fashion, there's a lot of humor and nonsense thrown at you. In Okage's case however, that's all the game has to offer. Sure the story is funny, the characters are quirky, and the game definitely has style, but the gameplay is totally empty. That didn't prevent me from enjoying some key moments, but it was also one boring game to go through. It honestly felt like a struggle. If it wasn't of the game's unique presentation, there would be absolutely nothing.

Okage starts with Ari, a no-personality boy who is almost invisible to others because he is so blank. That's exactly the reason why the Shadow King Stan chooses him to be his body host and slave. From there on you're on a quest to defeat all the Evil Kings who stole Stan's power, so he can regain his true form and conquer the world at last. As you see, this time it's not about saving the world, but destroying it. Five characters in total will join you, all more quirky than the other, resulting in a party of some of the strangest characters ever. The game is filled with crazy humor, and although not much of it makes sense, you're carried around by that band of peculiar protagonists.

Visually, Okage looks like a blend of Nightmare Before Christmas and Shaman King. The game is definitely stylish, but the graphics fall short. The towns look really good, with building interiors that are very detailed and all unique. Unfortunately, as soon as you step outside the villages, the overworld isn't so good. Close-ups are as good as the towns, but the draw-distance is blurry, which makes anything 10 steps ahead of you appear as if your character forgot its glasses. This is dizzying and isn't helped by the camera which is far too close to your character to let you get a good grasp of your surroundings. Thankfully, you don't spend much time on the overworld as the areas are rather small.

And that's one of Okage's biggest flaw. Most of the game is spent reading countless of endless dialogues. These conversations between the characters can be funny at times, but they lead nowhere and sometimes get very irksome. If only the game had voice-acting, these dialogues would be a lot more lively and entertaining, but unfortunately the characters feel one-dimensional and stale despite the humor. It's good to know the developers worked on the script, which isn't too bad and actually has a decent storyline, but they completely forgot to work on the gameplay. There is a lot of wandering around towns wondering who to talk to in order to proceed, and often the game forces to talk to every single character in a village before moving on. Needless to say, this is infinitely tedious.

In fact, in Okage you spend more talking to NPCs and aimlessly walking around villages than exploring the overworld and battling enemies. Instead of simply being a halt from the adventure as in most RPGs, the towns are the center of the game and the overworld is simply a transition to go from a town to the other. The areas you'll explore are nothing original and don't stray from the usual forest, plain, beach, desert, snowfield and mountain. These areas are extremely limited, although not totally linear. You can still go around and explore, but there isn't much to see. The game also forces a lot of bracktracking on you, but thankfully some warp portals help you quickly move from a place to the other.

Another of Okage's major flaws is the enemy encounters. They aren't really random as you can see the enemies on the map, but you can't really avoid them either. Usually with random encounters, you'll only run into an enemy once every steps, and if you stand at one place, you won't get attacked. With not-random encounters, you can usually walk around an enemy and once past a point, it won't chase after you. In both ways, you're left alone at certain spots. In Okage, the enemies literally run after you. There is absolutely nowhere you can stand and not be attacked. Worse, three or four enemies will chase you around at the same time. You just cannot escape them. Sometimes they even appear right in front of you. If you do manage to avoid one, another will simply re-appear and three others will try to get you. There are so many enemies on the map at the same time that it's really hard to walk forward, even less to try to explore. This is infuriating and quite simply the worst enemy encounter system in any RPG.

This generally doesn't bother me as you can escape the fights once they start, but in Okage everything is way too slow, even the simple act of escaping a battle. The game is plagued with frequent loading times, which are everywhere. Entering a building takes 30 secs, starting a fight takes 30 secs, looking at the battle result screen takes a minute, the fights are sluggish, everything is just too slow. So think about traversing a very small area, but with all the enemies stopping you, all the escape commands, you could easily spend an hour on something that should take 5 minutes. And if you're wondering why you'd be escaping the battles instead of fighting, it's for the simple reason that the battle system is unexciting, boring, and flawed.

It's traditional turn-based, but somehow Okage manages to make it worse. Although I love turn-based battles, I simply loathed the battles in Okage. After you've assigned the commands to your three party members, there is no way to know who will attack next so no way to plan ahead or make up a strategy to win. Sometimes your character will act right after you've ordered the command, sometimes it won't attack before the next turn, which give the enemies several shots before you even do something. Let's say you want to heal a dying character. The character won't be healed right away. Sometimes the enemies will have three turns before the healing takes place, usually too late, after the character has died. The actions are also stopped everytime you assign commands, so right in the middle of an attack, the screen freezes to let you assign the commands for the next turn (before this turn is even over!). This means you won't know how much damage was made before the next turn, once it's too late. Your strongest character is the only healer, so he never gets to attack as he's always busy healing other weak characters. The battle system just makes no sense and everything feels chaotic. There is nothing fun about it at all and what they tried to change to make it different only hurts it even more.

The game also has some of the most dull dungeons. All the dungeons in the game, aside from the last one, have the exact same look. They all have the same wall and floor textures, the same similar colors, the same feel. The only difference between them is the number of floors and the layout of the paths. You also do the same exact thing in each one of them. Your job is to work your way around the maze layouts and find some urns that you must all defeat. The urns are the same in every single dungeon. Some of them have some slight puzzles where you must step on a switch to open a door "somewhere", but it doesn't cut from the monotony. The dungeons have confusing designs and it's very hard to navigate through them. The map doesn't really help and the camera is once again too close to your character, resulting in angles where it's difficult to see where to go. Each dungeon usually has a tough boss battle at the end, that just isn't any less boring than regular battles.

There is just nothing very positive to say about Okage. Sure it has a peculiar style and some moments where you're carried along with the humor and funny characters, but a game can't just rely on that. It has to carry out the gameplay too, and in Okage's case, the gameplay is too poor to support the rest. There are just too many frustrating flaws to make Okage a good game. It also doesn't try anything new and just contents itself of sticking to the same old RPG formula. The only thing I really enjoyed was the brilliant soundtrack, which is catchy and captures well the tone of the game. Fortunately, Okage isn't that long of an RPG, but all the pointless dialogues, dreadful battles and clueless wanderings make it appear a lot longer than it actually is. It drags on and on, and I was actually glad when it finally ended.

Pros
+ Charming, stylish presentation
+ Amusing dialogues and characters
+ Entertaining soundtrack

Cons
- Dialogues drag on, game pace is slow
- Too much time lost wondering what to do next
- Overworld is too small and limited
- One of the worst and most unoriginal battle system
- Too many encounters with enemies
- All dungeons look the same and offer nothing new
- Nothing to back up the script; gameplay is boring
- No voice-acting, foggy graphics

Overall 5/10 Playable - nothing special about it

Reviewer's Score: 5/10, Originally Posted: 05/06/08

Game Release: Okage: Shadow King (US, 10/01/01)