I have to counter one point above: no game ever sells well that "shouldn't", nor does any game fail to sell well that "should", in reality. Perhaps by personal standards these are true, but by market standards, what sells well is what does its job well. What sells poorly does not do its job well.
A lot of people misunderstand what "doing its job well" entails. Many believe that it's limited to gameplay alone, or graphics alone, or some combination of them. But it's not. Gameplay, graphics, sound, story, presentation, special effects, all of these are merely means to an end. A game that does its job well does not need any of these things in great quantities; it simply needs enough of them arranged thoughtfully enough to do the job that the user wants from the game.
The real reason why licensed games sell well while titles like Okami do not are because they do their job well. A licensed game is supposed to be about the product they're modeled after, that's their job. And they tend to do that very well, meaning they sell very well (particularly since licensed products tend to have very large customer bases to draw from, as well). What is Okami's job, though? And to who does it sell, exactly? Okami's job appears to be to deliver a distinctly Japanese-stylized Zelda-like experience, and very few people are interested in that.
Sky Render - Sanity is for the weak.
