Okami stuck to these rules, strange characters and humor, beautiful cell shaded graphics and gameplay with the added angle of an open world, featuring a traditional Japanese story line and back drop based on their gods, warriors and legends. The cell shaded style was not a new idea for the PS2, it had been done before with an FPS called Thirteen which was pretty standard but visually a joy to look at. Okami took this to another level, critic's and myself still today comment on how much effort went into the games style, it was quite frankly stunning and lush loud colour. The environments stood out, gorgeous pink blossoms combined with waterfalls, plants and flowers gave it life way beyond anything I thought possible on the system. If you have never seen its visuals just check out the screenshots, in motion the game looks even more spectacular. So what has it got to do with Zelda? Well it’s a questing action RPG deep down, there was quite a lot of player choice. The plot is that evil spirits and demons had taken over the land, turning everything from an alive vibrant forest to darkness and gloom. You play as a wolf, called Amaterasu and if it wasn’t that Clover made this, I am sure as hell I won’t have given it the time of day as wolfs can’t hold guns of fly helicopters so there wasn’t that initial appeal. Anyway it turns out that Amaterasu is a total badass and beats the crap out of anything unfortunate enough to get in her way, so it all worked out in the end. Your mission was to reclaim the darkened zones and take back and restore the forest to its former glory. Enemies roamed the various locations in symbol form, they looked like wandering scrolls cloaked in dark smoke, scattering the landscape and often stood between you and progression, it was only when you touched the drifting package that you were transported into a combat arena. This is when things went mental, the game flipped from a laid back exploring affair to a lighting quick reaction based fighting arrangement. The enemies spawned in to the zone with you which was quite small but not constricting, there were an incredible amount of different types of foe to deal with depending on what stage in the main story you are to. Now so far apart from the graphic's this game hasn’t really broken any molds, well that is all about to change because the combat was totally white knuckle. You could pause the fight at any point and draw a brush stroke over the screen and paint different symbols to execute a  special attack, while the game is paused in this mode you could rotate the screen 360 degrees to get a better look at things, like a Matrix style slow down mechanic. Some attacks needed you to paint the brush on a certain area like the strings on a goblins guitar, that they would use to block until you cut across the fret board rendering the instrument useless leaving them open to attack. You also had real time slash and jump moves that played out in the usual flawless Clover fashion. It was a brilliant idea that looked and played amazingly well and worked even better on the later released Wii version with the free hand remote.