In the final months of 2006, the IGN editorial team heatedly debated the pros and cons of several meticulously handpicked Game of the Year nominees. Included in the list, two titles that seemed strikingly similar at first glance for they shared many winning design and gameplay fundamentals: The Legend of Zelda: Twilight Princess and, the underdog, Okami, a beautiful cel-shaded adventure outing from publisher Capcom and now-defunct Clover Studio. After much back-and-forth, name-calling, and death threats, IGN ultimately selected for top honors Capcom's stylized title, which starred a god-wolf on a quest to restore beauty and peace to a vast world. And we were by no means the only outlet to shower praise upon the surprisingly adept affair -- it also took home awards from a variety of fellow online and magazine publications.
But when Okami finally released exclusively for PlayStation 2, it only enjoyed mild success. It wasn't the hit that it could and should have been, by all accounts. In fact, since its release in September of 2006, the game has amassed about 270,000 in sales -- certainly no retail bomb, but hardly the success story that such a product might have enjoyed. By comparison, Twilight Princess, which shares much in common with Okami, quickly become a million-seller on Wii. Indeed, even sales of the downplayed GCN version outperformed Capcom's ambitious adventure by a wide margin.
Of course, it's unfair to compare sales of a new IP with one of Nintendo's biggest guns and it must be noted that while Okami sales aren't epic, demand for the game hasn't entirely fallen off even now. "That 270,000 figure is a very organic figure. Okami's day-one figure was nowhere near that," explains Capcom's vice president of business development and strategic planning, Christian Svensson. "It really speaks to the quality and the word of mouth and the effort of places like IGN to get the word out there. We are still selling PS2 copies of Okami. It's not huge. We're not shipping 10,000 a month of everything, but from distribution channels, we still get orders of a thousand here, a thousand there, and we're still selling it from the Capcom store. So it still has legs even now."
Call it a cult hit then. But why didn't Okami for PS2 sell even better? "New IP is always hard," says Svensson. "I think that the mainstream doesn't see cel-shaded titles as super appealing. If you look across the slew of all cel-shaded games, developers sort of have an inside joke, saying, 'Okay, it's cel-shaded -- it's going to be sent to die.' Believe it or not, unfortunately the mainstream doesn't react well to the 'games as art' pitch and to do big numbers sometimes you have to tap the mainstream."
Some critics said from the very beginning that Okami was merely not the right game for the PS2 audience and had it appeared on a Nintendo console, it might have performed better at retail. (The same suggestion has been made of the stylish LocoRoco for Sony's handheld -- that were it a DS game, it would've been a blockbuster.) So it should come as little surprise that no sooner than Okami was announced for PS2 did Nintendo fans beg and plead for a version designed to take advantage of the Wii controller. After all, in addition to employing a cel-shaded style similar to that in Wind Waker, Okami featured a gameplay mechanic called the celestial brush, which enabled players to execute actions in the game world by painting on-screen with the PS2's analog stick. Imagine the possibilities if the analog stick were replaced with a Wii remote, said fans.
"The PS2 game was a big labor of love for those guys, and at the time that Okami was started, I don't think anyone at Capcom internally knew much about Wii," said Svensson when asked why the publisher didn't start work on a Wii version right away. "The prospect of it ever even existing was never on the board, it was never a possibility, it was never contemplated. And when you ask somebody, 'Well, this thing that you've been working on for two years, how would you like to start over and put it on something else?', it probably just sets people off thinking the wrong way."
Also, only two months after Okami debuted in America to less than stellar sales, Capcom's board of directors elected to dissolve Clover Studio, whose founding members disassociated themselves from Capcom and started an altogether new software house, Seeds. Although Capcom kept all of the intellectual rights to all of Clover's projects, Okami included, it no longer had access to or the cooperation of the development members who founded the franchises. A big problem, to be sure, and one that lessened the chances of an Okami port to Wii any time soon.
But outspoken Nintendo fans refused to go unheard and they drove the point home -- bring Okami to Wii and do it now -- via online petitions and even on Capcom's U.S. message boards. A year after Wii's release, Nintendo's console was a huge success with no sign of slowing down, and suddenly the chance to revisit the Okami brand seemed like a good one, perhaps even a marketable one.
"You referenced earlier all the petitions of people screaming for us to do Okami Wii, and we had so many posts on our message boards about it, I think we had to seriously consider what could be done. Being honest, revisiting Okami for Wii was kind of a sensitive thing internally with Clover's past]. But I looked at it as, the fans want it, the fans deserve it, we've got to figure out a way to do this," explains Svensson. "And I thought there was a commercial value to the company in doing this and frankly that's how we got it sold through. The company will do well to do this -- to address the needs of what the fans want."
By chance, Svensson bumped into some movers and shakers at development studio Ready at Dawn and pitched them on the idea of translating Okami to Wii. They were enthused and more serious talks began. Eventually, a real plan to bring the game over progressed and that's when Capcom's American subsidiary and Ready at Dawn hit something of a brick wall. Clover Studio no longer existed and the assets needed to make the game for Wii, code and art included, were somewhere back in Japan, and very probably not compiled cleanly and orderly.
Explains Svensson: "The first drop of assets we got from Japan were incomplete. Very incomplete. So we had to ping the powers that be to go prodding through old hard drives and old computers to see if the assets could be located anywhere. We got a second asset drop, which got us most of the missing stuff back, but there were still a few bits missing. The Ready at Dawn team really kept trudging ahead even when stuff was missing. Even after the second asset drop, they still had to create stuff from scratch."
Clover Studio also developed Okami very specifically for PS2, streamlining code to take advantage of the system's capabilities. Wii, of course, was an altogether different beast requiring a very different approach. Even as Capcom officially announced to the delight of fans that a Wii version of Okami was underway, these issues persisted behind the scenes. "There was some PS2-specific code that had to be rewritten and optimized for the Wii and part of the reason we didn't show it until we started showing it was because, if we showed it in a form that was anything less than near-perfect, people were going to freak out," said Svensson. "Earlier in development, because Ready at Dawn had redone a lot of the code as general C code, the game was running in very un-optimized form. As they did more and more optimizations, the framerate got higher and we were able to add 480p and widescreen."
Sounds like a lot of work, so would it have been easier to start with a blank canvas and create an altogether new Okami game for Wii? "Absolutely not," according to Svensson. "The game is so huge and there are so many assets, and then there's the asset conversion process -- there's just no way this could have been done without the assets we had." Consider that it took the original Clover Studio development team well upward of two years to create Okami from the ground up. The 20-plus-hour game was Zelda-esque in scope and not easily re-constructed from the ground up.
Capcom and Ready at Dawn eventually overcame all hurdles to deliver Wii owners a very competent and in many ways improved version of Okami. Certainly, the additional graphic modes, enabling a crisper picture and true 16:9 support, are welcomed. And the Wii remote-controlled celestial brush is so well done that it actually changes the pace of the title, transforming a once-slow mechanic into something that can be executed in a second flat. Even with a questionable nunchuk-mapped dodge gesture, the title will debut on Wii as one of the very best hardcore experiences and a must-buy for system owners. But will anybody care?
Capcom is prepared for the possibility that Okami Wii may, like its PS2 predecessor, fall well short of retail blockbuster status, but it may not matter. "If it did the numbers that we did on the PS2, I'd be very happy. This doesn't need to be a mainstream success for this to be a success for the company," says Svensson.
Svensson recently stated that Capcom would not support the Wii game with TV commercials, at which point some fans suggested that the publisher was going to bury the release altogether -- just put it out there void of any promotion. Not true, according to the executive. "All I said was that we weren't going to do TV. This is one of my pet peeves. Believe it or not, there are very few games that get TV," he clarifies. "Just because there's no TV happening, though, doesn't mean there's not going to be a media spend."
Asked for specifics, Svensson elaborates: "Obviously, we'll do a fair amount of online marketing. We've got some interesting promotions coming up. Some art contests coming up that actually involve and engage the community. One in particular I'm really excited about. You're going to see a special site launch in a few weeks. And on that site there's going to be all sorts of things for fans to use to make stuff -- I'm going to be vague. And that still hopefully will filter everywhere. It will have value to a lot of different audiences. Not just the Wii audience, but anybody who is a fan of Okami and its look and art, because it is beautiful."
Okami is set to debut for Wii in mid-April with a reduced price tag of $39.99. It is a game that IGN's editors hope readers will support in full, as it deserves the attention. And what will happen if the Wii iteration actually does outperform expectations, perhaps selling much, much better than anticipated? We posed the very question to Svensson.
"I'm going to be careful with what I say here. There are no current plans for a sequel on the books," he says. "But -- and this is sort of a 'duh,' -- if it wildly exceeds our expectations, we have to think about what's next. It's a pretty obvious statement to make that if something is successful, we're going to want to do more of that thing that was successful."
What then, does that mean for Resident Evil: Umbrella Chronicles franchise, which, Capcom recently announced has shipped more than a million copies globally. Might there be a sequel in the cards?
"At some point, maybe. Time will have to tell. I have to be careful with this one, too," adds Svensson. "I think it's fair to say that the brands which are successful on a given platform, you will continue to see more of that."
Zack & Wiki. Resident Evil. And in mid-April, Okami. Big games, but just the beginning of Capcom's Wii support. It seems obvious that Wii owners can expect more traditional games from the third-party studio, but brand new works designed to maximize the strengths of the console are also on the horizon, according to the executive.
"We're one of the more successful third-parties on Wii as far as sales go. Some of that is the strength of the Resident Evil brand and some of that is the Wii audience eager for that type of content. We're looking at a number of existing brands coming over. Obviously, Monster Hunter has been announced for Japan, and I think you're going to see that be a much larger factor in western markets as well. I also think you're going to see a lot more support from us than you have in the past in a marketing capacity on Monster Hunter," Svensson says. "Our brands are all well and again, but what I think is more exciting, at least to me, is some of the new stuff that you're going to be seeing from us that is entirely new. You'll be hearing more from us on that a little later in the year. For me, the Wii is about new experiences -- not about pushing polygons and textures. I think that some of the things that you're going to see from us announced later in the year will illustrate that strategy a bit more."
Note: All screens above are the demo version sent to retailers before the rice paper texture was added in. It is in the final version of the game.
http://wii.ign.com/articles/861/861215p3.html
