Okage: Shadow King

"The best RPG on the PS2, FFX included! Okage just doesn't get the recognition it deserves..."

It's hard to not give this game a perfect 10, but it DOES have flaws. The thing is, the flaws are very, very minor -- much moreso than EVERY other review of this game makes them out to be.

And I'd just like to point out, right away, that the challenge level in this game is NOT a flaw. For some reason, it seems a lot of people have had a lot of trouble with this game, claiming it to be near-impossible, or marvelling at how they BARELY made it through after dying dozens of times.

To these people, I say: what's wrong with you?! (: I died FIVE TIMES over the course of the game... count 'em, FIVE. And only ONE of these deaths occurred during a boss battle (IMHO, the Big Bull Evil King is the hardest enemy in the game) -- and of the other four, three of them occurred because I pushed my luck (I had an inkling that I might die, but I pushed on anyway rather than being cautious or running from battle).

The challenge level in Okage is actually one of its best parts. Not only is this an RPG that ISN'T pathetically easy, but it achieves its challenge through STRATEGY. If you'll note, everyone who claims that Okage is too hard also claimed that the battle system is poorly designed and uninteresting. And these two things ARE related: if you don't make full use of this game's wonderful battle system, you WILL die a lot! The key to surviving -- and I'm NOT just talking BOSS battles here -- is to learn how your enemies work. Learn which enemies are the biggest threats, learn which enemies are the strongest and have the most HP, and plan your attacks accordingly. One of my deaths occurred because I fought a group of strong cactus-like enemies who all ganged up on Ari and killed him instantly. So, I learned that whenever I fight these enemies, I need to finish them all off within one turn (or at least cut their numbers down to one or two). And from that point on, I never died in battle against them again: I would just have Ari cast Friendly Thunder and Rosalyn cast Crystal, and bam, they were all dead!

And for REALLY strong enemies, the key is to use the game's wonderful COMBINE feature, which allows 2 or 3 party members to gang up on one enemy for an insane amount of damage. In the final dungeon, I learned which enemies were threats and which weren't, and I just COMBINEd away all the threatening enemies first, then tackled the easy ones with weaker skills and such.

The problem is, people have gotten too used to the Final Fantasy games, where random battles are nonthreatening and your party is significantly stronger than your foes. The fact that this game is balanced, and relies upon your brains being the only advantage you have above your enemies, makes these battles much more threatening, and thus much more satisfying as well.

But battles aside, the real meat and potatoes of this game lies in its wonderful plot and characters. It manages to succeed on virtually every level in this aspect: it's a brilliant parody of the RPG genre, a wonderfully original tale, fantastically retro in all the right ways (hooray for using a music box as a metaphor! Haven't seen that since Chrono Trigger!!), and surprisingly deep and moving as well (yeah, I know it doesn't seem it at first, but just wait: this game's plot twists into something truly unique about 20 hours in -- something which ties the whole game together and answers many of your questions, while raising still others!). It's a world where everything is different from what you're used to, but yet somehow familiar as well. A world where a weak passive little kid with an Evil King in his shadow is the hero (as the instructions say, ''defeating evil on behalf on evil''), a parasol-wielding self-declared hero(ine) is the heroine (and, consequently, she's one of the COOLEST RPG HEROINES EVER!!), and the most hyper, insane RPG character ever is one of your tag-along buddies (and he's a PARANORMALIST, which is SUCH a cool profession for an RPG character!). I'd tell you about the other three, but I wouldn't want to give anything away! (:

It's also a world full of RPG stereotypes come to life: a world where ''classification lists'' come from the royal city, detailing what kind of person everyone in the world is; a world where ''Hero'' and ''Evil King'' exist as full-time jobs; and a world where the townsfolk just go through their lives, never questioning anything (though they'll sure bring up some good points for YOU to question!). But the best part is, as funny as these facts are for their satiric value, they're also fully explained -- slowly -- over the course of the game, working themselves into the plot in ways that make them not just more acceptable, but actually BELIEVABLE... well, as believable as you're gonna get in a game like this, anyway. (: Everything from the gravestone near your house that marks the body of someone who ''got too close to the knowledge of the library'' to a constantly recurring joke with no punchline called ''The Tortoise and the Pebble'' makes perfect sense in the end, and adds a level of detail to the game world that's fairly hard to find in RPGs nowadays. The result of this is one of the deepest, most involved plots I've encountered since Final Fantasy VII, with THE absolute COOLEST town I've ever encountered in an RPG. Heck, the game's even got a cool final boss, who could quite possibly hold his/her own against Sephiroth (though this final boss is, unfortunately, a bit too easy compared to the rest of the game!).

Graphically and musically, this game is pretty solid as well, with a look that (and you're going to hear this from EVERY review of the game, but it's so very, very true!) was quite obviously inspired by Tim Burton's ''A Nightmare Before Christmas'', and which is pulled off quite well, with a very high resolution (higher than that of Final Fantasy X!) and virtually no traces of draw distance getting in the way (with the sole exception of ''Curly Cliff''). The music, too, is very catchy and atmospheric (and includes a new music box piece! Yaaaaaay music boxes in RPGs!!). The graphics and music aren't without their flaws, though: the dungeons, while not as ''drab and boring'' as some people make them out to be, do suffer from paper-thin walls, view-obstructive ceiling beams, and poor camera movement. And yes, they're a little unrealistically labyrinthine, but this IS a game after all, and they WERE pretty fun to explore. (: I also would've liked to see more variety in the characters' movements, which are well-detailed but very limited (anytime Stan gets angry, he flails his arms in exactly the same way as the last time he got angry!). Still, considering that the game is CD-based, and that every story scene is pulled off with NO FMV WHATSOEVER (also done well in Dark Cloud, though Dark Cloud was DVD-based, so it seemed a bit more out-of-place), the graphics are handled quite remarkably well, and depict the writer's vision exactly as I'm sure it was intended.

The music fares less remarkably, though. Though the sheer quantity of music in this game is wonderful (whoever said that the game doesn't have enough music, I'm wondering how long you had the mute button pressed!), and the music itself is very good, it's also very low-quality, with instruments that sound like they're straight out of mid-90s Super NES games (Linda's song in Okage and Celes's opera theme from FF6 come to mind as a pretty good basis of comparison, considering that both songs use an organ-like instrument to represent a human voice!), which is pretty unforgivable from a CD-based game -- especially since there are no FMVs, and the only voice-acting in the game comes from the humorously unnecessary narrator (who does his job very well, actually -- amazing, considering the poor-quality voice acting from other more high-budget games, like Final Fantasy X). There are certainly a goodly number of winners in the soundtrack, though, including the absolutely BIZARRE ending credits theme, so I really can't complain too much about this... and I DO plan to buy the soundtrack, after all (if one exists, anyway!). (:

One of the coolest parts of the music, actually, is the fact that a song is ''dimmed'' when you enter a building in a town or are near-death in battle... certain layers of the music are removed entirely, leaving you with a less ''full''-sounding song that almost seems like another song altogether. And speaking of battles, this is one of the precious few games to contain TWO REGULAR BATTLE THEMES -- one for the overworld and one for the dungeons. And there are multiple boss themes, as well. And absolutely EVERY town, EVERY dungeon, EVERY character, and even every separate chunk of the overworld has its own theme music, giving this game a soundtrack that's CONSTANTLY changing!

Well now, with only these minor flaws, how could this game POSSIBLY receive a 9/10 and not a 10/10? Simple: there are a few more. And among the biggest (and most annoying) is the fact that the survival of Ari, your main character, determines whether or not you stay in the game. If Ari dies, you get an immediate game over. Yet if anyone ELSE dies, you can just revive them and get on with it. This fact alone accounts for a lot of the challenge in the game, and I must admit it was handled about as well as I think it POSSIBLY could've been (there was only one spot in the whole game where I felt I had unfairly received a game over as a result of this), but it's still remarkably annoying to have to pay so much attention to ONE CHARACTER like that.

The game's loading time, too, is rather trying -- especially after battles, when your victory/exp/sukel screen is delayed as the current area is reloaded, without musical accompaniment of any kind, and with no indication as to when you should press a button to continue. After a few hours of play time, you'll probably get used to just hitting X over and over again after each battle until the game resumes, but for a little while at least, this can get VERY trying -- especially if you're trying to find that 30th tiny gear, or explore the land for treasure, when battles are nothing more than a distraction that occasionally cause you to lose your place.

The other major flaw -- which applies to the English release of this game ONLY -- is the translation. Yes, admittedly, it DOES manage to capture the feel of the original very nicely, and each time Ari got a choice of three things to say I found myself laughing hysterically, but it also has an inexcusable number of errors. These include several important story dialogues which, while comprehensible if seen more than once, may be confusing the first time you read through them due to poor pronoun usage, non-sequiturs, excessive spelling/grammatical errors, etc. The most glaring example of this (which should NEVER have made it through playtesting!) is a word puzzle (Cyphertext #6) which was DIRECTLY translated from the Japanese, even though the solution consists of a homonym-style Japanese play on words, rendering said word puzzle UNSOLVABLE in the English version except by random guessing.

All in all, though, Okage is not just worth playing, it's one of the best RPGs I've played since Chrono Trigger, and has made it into my upper echelon of role-playing, alongside such masterpieces as Final Fantasy VII and Popolocrois II. Everything about Okage is wonderful, and the plot is such a change from the norm that I ended up losing sleep in favor of finding out what would happen next. Okage may not be for everyone (as evidenced by its slew of mediocre reviews!), but in my opinion, it's crossed the boundary from ''pretty'' RPG (Chrono Cross, Final Fantasy VIII, Final Fantasy X) to GOOD RPG -- and I can only hope that future games follow its example.

If Okage were to receive a classification from the royal capital, it'd be classified as a ''must-play''. Or maybe it wouldn't be classified at all...

Reviewer's Score: 9/10, Originally Posted: 01/22/02, Updated 09/03/02