March 29, 2011
It Was Cute, Though.
I think I’m still pretty sick of the Zelda formula.
I was playing Okamiden, which I got from Gamefly, and I was having a pretty good time. The game struggles to do all the things in 3D that the developers wanted it to. The combat is not all that fluid, for instance. But it was going pretty good so far and, of course, the brush skills worked so, so much better with a stylus. I beat the first boss, and I’m like, “This is going great! What a nice little game.”
Then I put it down and had no need to continue playing it. When it became obvious I wasn’t going to pick it up again, I sent it back.
Seriously, Okamiden is cute as fuck and seems like it would be a really enjoyable game, but I also felt like I was, in many ways, going through the motions. Here’s the puzzle dungeon. Here’s the puzzles one can do with this power. Here’s a bunch of really, really slow cutscenes with dubious entertainment value. I knew most of what was going to happen before it happened. The boss I fought was really the highlight: he was pretty fresh. Everything else was pretty standard stuff.
I feel this way every time I try to pick up a Zelda-like game. Darksiders did the same thing to me, though admittedly I stuck with it for longer than this. I just can’t keep going with it. I guess I just don’t feel that the time investment I have with those games are worth the enjoyment I get out of them anymore. Fair enough, I suppose. I should really just stop trying them. Maybe I’ve just moved on from them, much like I have the RTS genre. Is that really so bad?