I think it's a combination of this and the unique - love it or hate it - art style.    People don't mind playing as anthropomorphic animals or bugs or blobs or whatever but when you ask them to play as an actual animal (or insect as in the sales disaster Deadly Creatures) people are turned off.   Probably as you mention, they just can't relate to it.

Shame because there's obviously a lot of love for this game.

Zelda games have a lot of text too, but I don't remember those being particularly wordy.

Games like Okami or any of the Mario RPG's just throw WAAAAAAAY too much text at the player in the beginning of the game.  Just like how the first 30 minutes of game shouldn't be cut scenes about characters you don't control or care about (hint hint FFXII), the first few hours of a game shouldn't be walls of text. 

At least in the Paper Mario series the writing was interesting enough for the most part to keep your attention, though if you've played one then the tutorials for every other one will bore you to death.

-edit-

I REALLY wanted to like Okami, just ugh, in that first two or so hours I was just going through text block after text block.  I probably only actually played the game for 15 minutes.  That's just an all around shitty way to get someone into a game and you'll lose most of your audience right there.

I finally got to a point where I was just bored to tears and didn't want to read anymore, I wanted to play my damn game.

have it. love it. can't wait for okamiden.

I feel bad. I have yet to finish the game. It has just lost my interest at about 30 hours into the game.

The biggest thing for me was just the large learning curve of the game. Took me forever to figure out that combat was a lot more concerned about timing than Twilight Princess. Also, the celestial brush took a while to get used to, but after a while... everything just clicked.

Also, I loved running around as Amaterasu in the game. You know a game is great when just running around is fun in itself.

And yes, the Blockheads were just awful. I actually had to record the last one because I just could not get it. And I wanted that bead!

Smeags said: The biggest thing for me was just the large learning curve of the game. Took me forever to figure out that combat was a lot more concerned about timing than Twilight Princess. Also, the celestial brush took a while to get used to, but after a while... everything just clicked. Also, I loved running around as Amaterasu in the game. You know a game is great when just running around is fun in itself. And yes, the Blockheads were just awful. I actually had to record the last one because I just could not get it. And I wanted that bead!

Congratulations! You are now member of an extremely select group of people who managed to spell this name correctly. Well done.

Ah, To me at least, this is such an underrated and undersold game. I remember playing it along with Twilight Princess for hours.

Thanks man! Yeah, I just love Amatersu... er... Ameriasu, Ammeratersu...

Ammy.

It's a game that I wanted to love, but couldn't. I played it pretty seriously for a few days. Then, I quit. Several months later, I tried it again. I couldn't make it past the 30 minutes of text at the beginning of the game, and turned it off. It's been on the shelf, ever since.

Too bad (for me) because I KNOW it's a great game. Just too many other games on my plate, I guess.

^^^I sound like Twesterm.