Curous. I must admit, I've been watching this title for awhile now, but I hadn't heard that it had bombed in Japan.

It looks neat, so I queued it up on Gamefly. I suppose time will tell. Or maybe gameplay will.

Or souls: they generally eat those.

I loved the visual style, and I loved the demos. This is good news. I'm buying on release day.

Impressive. Most Impressive.

Is she a jedi?

The supposed 50 hours play time puts me firmly in the "own" camp.

Yup. The game has quite literally gotten nothing but brilliant press. I just hope it shows at my Gamestop this afternoon rather than tomorrow. I just completed Saint's Row last night and I'm ready for a new game.

I'm picking it up this weekend. I've been trying not to read the reviews, since I plan on writing one of my own. I'm trying to pitch a column to my local paper as part of my attempts to get out of mind and soul-numbing technical writing and into games journalism.

Not supposed unless you want to ignore the side-quests and Stray Bead collecting. I essentially finished the game with 100% of everything and clocked in at 58 hours. I imagine sticking strictly to the story and not doing the sidequests or any of the revisiting to use new brush powers, the game would still probably take you about 40 hours or so.

Who am I kidding, ten hours of this game would put me in the own camp.

I'm kinda hesitant about this one... I walked back and forth and eventually just got Kirby Curse of the Paintbrush thing for the DS (which is a blast!) for $20. Any solid GWJ impressions on this one posted that I missed?

A quick note about the brush techniques: they say there are 13 because they are based around thirteen gods from Japanese mythology, but there are actually 15 techniques that get listed in your menu (three get combined together under the influence of one god, but have entirely different uses). Also, I have already found one hidden technique that builds upon one of the powers I already had.

In any case, I am now about 30 hours in, and I have met all but three of the brush gods. Judging from some of the other measures of completion, though, I am probably about 2/3rds of the way through the game, and the game continues to impress me greatly. In fact, in a great many ways it sort of out-Zelda's the Zelda games. I think that the simplest way to put it is that the game is permeated with a level of creativity and variety that is rarely seen in games, and it truly does some unique things within the genre.

Here's a quick brain dump of some (but certainly not all) of the things that have impressed me so far. I'll try my best to be general and avoid spoilers, by the way, but be warned that I might talk about a few things that you might enjoy discovering for yourself as you play the game.

- While many of the brush techniques are analogous to the weapons/items/tools you would find in other Zelda games (bombs, hookshot, etc), at least a few are stunningly unique, or have uses that you just wouldn't see in other games. Much of this is thanks to the game's premise; after all, you are a god that can effect the world around you in miraculous ways, so the game is much more free to let you do outlandish things with your powers. Also, it is a refreshing change to be able to use any of your powers at will without changing equipment in a menu.

- A few minor camera quibbles aside, the combat is extremely fun. There is a nice variety of techniques to play around with outside of the paintbrush, but playing with the many options that your brush techniques offer you keeps the fighting fresh even when fighting a monster you have battled dozens of times before. Of course, if you are clever in your use of the paintbrush the fights are usually pretty easy, but they still feel rewarding thanks to the fact that you had to use the brush well to make it easy.

- The developers really seemed to have gone out of their way to make the game feel like you are always doing something new. Every environment you encounter has a unique (and almost always beautiful) visual style without resorting too much to the standard cliches (okay, you just finished the volcanic mountain dungeon so its time to go to the desert region, and then the ice caverns). More than that, though, it seems like the game is always providing a unique kind of objective for you to accomplish. Sure, in general you are always working to break curses on a region and restore health to nature, but you are doing so in a variety of ways.

- There are a few repeated quest formulas, but they are by no means the rule. You won't find the classic Zelda quest mechanic of: people of a region ask you for help --> travel to dungeon --> find new item --> use item to get through dungeon --> use item to defeat boss at the end of the dungeon --> collect 1 of X holy relics needed to confront an evil that you've known about the whole game --> curse on people of the region is lifted. For one, that annoying mechanic of X number of useless artifacts are hidden and guarded in X number of dungeons for no apparent reason doesn't exist in Okami. Many times the problem solving doesn't involve a traditional dungeon, and sometimes a dungeon won't have a boss (shocker!) if it doesn't fit. Sometimes you will learn a new ability (or two or three) in the process of a quest, but sometimes you will just have to use the ones you already have in new and different ways. The end result, however, is that (at least so far) they find ways to make you feel like you aren't doing the same thing over and over again.

The only real gripes I have are fairly small. For example, it would be nice if the enemies felt a little more integrated with the environments. The majority of the time when you encounter enemies a large glowing energy barrier is erected around the battle. It is there to confine the space the the battle can occur in, but it kind of makes every battle feel like it is happening in the same place, even though the terrain under your feet is from the environment you were exploring when the battle started. Also, the system by which you learn non-brush skills is a tad dissapointing. Basically, you go to a dojo and pay cash to learn new skills. It would have been nice for those skills to have been spread out as rewards for some of the side-quests and mini games you encounter. Given the amount of creativity and variety that is found elsewhere in the game, though, this is quite forgivable in my book.

EDIT: One other gripe. The opening is too long and it takes too much time to get into the action. I wanted to show the game to a friend this weekend, and I timed it: 17 minutes before you get to do anything but read back story.

You did. Thanks! I'll be picking this up the next opportunity I get.

Another (better one) comes along later in the game, but the thing that I found interesting about the world design is that even though the regions are huge, it actually doesn't take to long to navigate them due to the how the doors are placed.

Heh, well, wait until you get the second level of taunt. I'm pretty sure you won't be happy about it. That said, though, the game does have a decent amount of base humor other than that. It doesn't shy away from a lot of allusions to drinking and sexuality, which is actually quite interesting since usually this type of game would have that stuff edited out in the translation (ie, sake would have mysteriously become hot cider or something).

Be sure to check every merchant as you progress through the game. They all carry some of the more basic items, but sometimes they will have one or two unique ones, including weapons. It sounds like you found one of them, though. A bit more about weapons though:

I played for an hour this morning and although the opening backstory is well-written, I as really annoyed with the way the text was slowly displayed with weird sounds and there is no way to skip forward. Other than that, I'm really diggin the art style and the game seems like a lot of fun - can't wait to play later.