Okami

Hold the right trigger and the world stops, drains to the texture of aged paper, and hands you a brush. Draw a circle in the empty sky and the sun rises. That single gesture — the Celestial Brush, the game's one great idea — does more work than most action-adventures manage with a whole inventory screen. A horizontal slash cuts an enemy. A vertical line fells a tree or shatters a rock. A loop of blue restores a withered cherry blossom, and the colour bleeds back into the countryside around it.

Amaterasu, the sun goddess reborn as a white wolf, travels an ancient Nippon that has been leached of colour by the serpent Orochi. Structurally this is Zelda by way of Japanese folklore: regions gated behind brush techniques, dungeons built around the technique you just learned, a talkative sidekick in the flea-sized artist Issun who never once stops narrating. Clover Studio were open about the debt and unembarrassed by it, which is fine, because the framework is a sturdy one and the mythology hung on it is genuinely unusual. Kaguya, Susano, the Tale of the Bamboo Cutter — these are not the usual borrowings.

The presentation is the reason it survived the generation. Rather than chase realism the PS2 could not sustain, the art team leaned into ink wash: hard black outlines, visible canvas grain, flowers erupting under the wolf's paws as she runs. It is a solution to hardware limits that became a style, and it has aged better than almost anything else on the machine.

What has not aged as well is the pacing. The opening hours are choked with tutorial, Issun repeats himself constantly, and the brush occasionally refuses to recognise a stroke at exactly the wrong moment in combat. Later stretches sag under fetch work. There is a version of this game an hour shorter in setup and considerably tighter that would be near-perfect, and this is not quite it.

It sold poorly. Clover was dissolved within months of release, its staff scattering to found PlatinumGames, and the game acquired the reputation of a masterpiece nobody bought — later ports and a sequel eventually found the audience the PS2 release deserved. Play it now and the frustrations are real but small next to the thing it gets right: a game where the act of drawing is also the act of healing the world, and where every restored field is proof you did it.