In 2006 Clover studio released one of the greatest achievements on the PS2 console that the world had ever seen. The game known only as Okami was IGN’s 2006 Game of the Year. Okami took home several more awards that year, making it the eighth highest overall game of 2006 and second for the PS2, behind Konami’s Metal Gear Solid 3: Subsistence. Okami was a masterpiece if there ever was and it’s colorful sumi-e art style made for an excellent game. It is now the year 2008 and the game is still a masterpiece yet it is no longer under the name of Clover, but Capcom and Capcom has a whole lot of dirty laundry.

With the success of the first game that was released only two years ago, it’s no wonder fans demanded that it be put on the Wii. The Wii port was just as promising as the initial release on the Playstation 2, receiving high ratings just as before. The controls may be a bit harder and there isn’t any new content, but for those who never had the chance to play the first release it’s just as good.

The problem lies in the process of porting the full game onto the Wii console. Christian Svensson, Capcom’s Vice-President of Strategic Planning & Business Development reported that the original game assets given to them from Capcom Japan were incomplete, and even after requesting old hard drives and computers to recover more assets, Ready at Dawn were still required to recreate some from scratch. Furthermore, the game’s code to overcome optimizations that were made for the PlayStation 2 version that had to be overcome for the Wii that made the port difficult; Svensson stated that “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”.

After it’s release Okami suffered various blows by Capcom. The first mistake that was made was the box art for the new release of the game. It seems as though Capcom marking had not only been missing original bits of the game that needed to be rebuilt, but all of the original promotion art as well. Instead of creating new art the work was taken from original images posted on IGN back 2006. Without noticing the IGN logo is visible on the Capcom cover art making it one of the worse mistakes in game porting history. My guess is that whomever did this either lost their job as a “designer” or is now working in the basement at Capcom never to be seen again.

Here is the cover art with logo at higher resolution as well as the image that was used.

In part two of our journey through the life of a used and now abused game, developers at Capcom deleted the end credits from the game. Why was this bad? Developers at Clover studio worked a long time on Okami to simply have their names erased from the Wii port.

Hideki Kamiya, one of the original creators of the game found out about the deletion. He posted a public statement, “Apparently, in Okami for the Nintendo Wii, released last week in the US, the staff credits after the ending have been cut from the game… I don’t know the details behind why the staff roll was cut… But what do you all think about the issue? I’m not disappointed because my name was removed from the game. Of course, we all have pride in our work; we all want to stand up and say “I made this!” Yet more importantly, I find it extremely regrettable that the omoi that went into the staff roll is gone from the game as well. (Translator’s note: The Japanese word - 想い – omoi – is best defined as a combination of thoughts, emotions, and messages. I’ve left it in Japanese as I feel it better suits Kamiya-san’s intentions.). More of his translated statement can be found over at Platinum Games blog on Facebook.

What did Capcom have to say, “The credits were removed because they were a pre-rendered movie that contained the Clover logo. We have no legal right to use the Clover logo in a game they were not involved with directly. We also didn’t have the source to the credit movie itself, so we couldn’t just use it and remove the Clover logo.” Instead of recreating the credits with the original name they simply deleted them, talk about lazy. If Capcom cared they would have at least remade the credits on a different background.

With all of these “accidents”, the Okami port for the Wii had some pretty high expectations to meet. Fans everywhere waited for the game to come out with Wii motion based capabilities for the “Celestial Paintbrush”. The answer, after all the trouble the Wii port didn’t work so well. From 1up.com, “…Whereas drawing lines, symbols, and circles with the PS2’s analog stick was a slower, more meticulous process, it very rarely failed. Now, too many of those same actions take more tries than they should; drawing simple horizontal lines can cause headaches if you don’t have a perfectly steady hand. It gets easier over time, but the occasional failure never ceases to annoy.” It received the majority of the same ratings as before only to be let down by a half functioning brush in “paintbrush mode”.