Okami is in the Guinness Book of World Records twice.

"Least commercially successful winner of a Game of the Year award"
"Most critically acclaimed video game starring an animal character"

One of the best games I've ever played and I immediately started it again after beating it to find all the stuff I missed.

It has flaws. Its overly verbose at times. The opening is is 20 minutes of yakking before you're given any sort of control. Sometimes the drawing doesn't come out and you have to try again. If you want to 100% it there are a lot of excessively long & difficult mini-games. None of that comes close to hurting the overall experience.

It is a pretty blatant copycat of the mid 90s to mid 00s Legend of Zelda games. If you never enjoyed any of those games then this probably wont change your mind. If you did ever like those types of games, you might find this to be one of, if not your all time favorite Legend of Zelda game.

Ammy truly is the greatest ♥♥♥♥♥ in video game history!

Amazin

Imma preference this review with saying I know everything about the DRM and no i do not care about it.
This review is purely about the game itself. So let me start this review off with why i don't recommend it with a list of annoyances i developed whilst playing this game. One last note: I have not played this game back in the ps2 era so their is no nostalgia with this review.

1: This is a 2006 era game: meaning very dialogue, exposition heavy, with those annoying "banjo kazooy" sound effect gibberish everytime someone talks. It works in undertale cuz the characters are personalized, had different roles, and designs and are specific to their area. It does NOT work here because alot of NPC have similar pitches, designs, or even roles making their voices sound similar and mix together till it gets ear grating. Plus, most of the time, the NPC's don't have anything interesting to say outside the main story cast like Oki, or wakka.

2: Extremely hand-holdy. I fixed 1 by simply turning off the volume for the characters dialogue but that doesn't mean getting stopped in my gameplay every two seconds to see a dialogue box show up for something i probrably already know is fixed. In fact, this happens throughout the whole game. Even with Issun's annoyying voice turned off this little guy really REALLY wants you to do things HIS way. In fact, alot of characters repeat verbatim the same thing they said in their main dialogue exposition when you go back to talk to them, as if they fear you'd already forgotten or as if you went off to do something else. Seeing the same dialogue pop up over and over again drained any patience I had with these characters besides the ones i liked. As soon as one of them repeated themselves i ussually skipped since they all followed the pattern of exposition dumping then repeating while adding 1 thing new to progress your main story or side quest each and every time.

3: Non-existant difficulty, repetitive combat: The only good thing this combat gets is speedrunning how fast you can kill enemy waves. Cuz items and celestial brush techniques reduce ALL bosses and enemies to ashes in seconds. Inkfinity stones, talismans, attack up sake, and celestial brush spam reduces most enemies to nothing more then your personal floral garden in a matter of seconds. Especially cherry bomb spam and celestial slash. Cherry bomb easily being the most broken brush ability in this game. Most enemies don't have "armour" to tank the blast so they either take damage and get stunned or get put into a stunned state for you to simply throw another cherry bomb on them or celestial slash them. And celestial slash does its job but in such a monotonous way.

4: The game overextends its welcome: I had a good time with the 1st and 2nd arch just fine. I liked the build up to orochi and enjoyed ninetails manipulating Amaterasu throughout the story, however the 3rd arch with the mechanical owls had none of that same cool build up besides one to two moments. Those moments being going back to the past 100 years ago and of course Amaterasu teaming up with her past incarnation: Siranue. By the 3rd arch i was sorta done with the same song and dance of going to a village with trouble, helping it, then waltzing through the open area segment outside the village to get to the next objective. What had burnt me out of this sort of loop was finding the 7-9 warrior dogs without mermaid coins which was just a big fat ♥♥♥ you when i saw how you get them almost right after you get to the bird clan and gain access to them. Add a needless endgame boss rush that makes you repeat bosses AGAIN when most of them are a joke (especially orochi omg and blight being able to be taken out in one stun cycle) and i was rolling my eyes at just how repetitive the whole process was.

5:Non-existent payoff: As i was building my brush techniques i was sorta hoping their would be upgrades for them. Their were, but they were small upgrades: celestial slash can cut through harder and harder objects (which means maybe attack power up on it as well), you can throw more cherry bombs on the field, etc. I was hoping that these powers would eventually evolve into something CRAZY and i saw a brief glimpse of that with siranue. He had a judgement cut like celestial slash, a nuke of a cherry bomb. If he connected the clouds with thunder to the birds they called down lightning instead of drawing a line of it like Amaterasu did. His basic attacks where also hyper powered with unique animations that staggered bosses. His brush techniques and special attacks were what I was hoping would be Amaterasu's evolved brush powers once she got to Yami but no, even when she is in her god form and her power is fully relized she is nothing but a new coat of paint. Her powers don't change, her attacks aren't enhanced. It was a prime example of a checkov's gun underutilized and not used in a gameplay sense. As i played i felt my arsenal consisted alot of redundant "connect element and draw a line to enemy/object" making my arsenal feel a bit redundant outside of exploration. I never felt i "mastered" them. They never evolved besides if i payed money to upgrade them at a spring.

6:Supremely basic story: This story tries to go for the premise of, "you THOUGHT this was the big bad, but no THIS one is now the big bad" untill it reveals the actual big bad, Yami. This goes into my problem of it overextending itself, but also creates the problem of it being extremely predictable; what's going to happen next. Same gripe i had with the predictable and repetitive dialogue boxes and characters. Maybe that was the point to be a more beginner friendly for people getting into zelda like games or the genre, but its done in such a monotonous way to make me sigh. Big bad appears, big bad wants to rule world, Amaterasu comes in to save the day. Now this SIMPLE premise could be good if we had a look at what orochi, ninetails, blight, and some other bosses where thinking. Their dynamics and how they were created. All that is said however is that they were on the arc as the celestials boarded it to then be met with their swift extinction besides wakka. The only way i could fill in these questions was: bosses are an extension of yami's will, the "darkness" that flows out of them after they die all eventually comes back to yami, thus they aren't even their own personalities, they're just puppets the dark lord uses. Which makes for a very basic good vs evil plotline. At least in zelda their is nuance to the good vs evil trope. And here, when a game is basing its whole identity off of folklore, the reason why bad things happen is usually simple. That's typically the jist of folklore: simple stories that teach nuanced life lessons. However, theirs a reason im flipflopping between basic and simple. Okami's story is at best simple, and at worst "basic." With the same tired tropes of good always triumphing over evil being played out, except with a Japanese folk lore twist.

Conclusion: I was hyped up by my step sister and others saying this is a great amazing game. But besides the novelty of playing as the goodest girl in gaming, pissing and ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ on enemies, and the art direction I found nothing "wow" inducing about this game. Its art direction can only hold up this game for so long before the death by a thousand cuts sets in and the monotony of it all comes crashing down.
I highly highly suggest you look at the art for okami. Even watch it on youtube as, like i said, you'll learn a bit of japanese folklore. However, if you don't like handholdy, monotonous, and repetitive gameplay then i suggest you steer clear from this game. I understand it's cult following and i genuinely HOPE that their will be another triple A okami game made in the future but this game is too dated and flawed for me to ever come back to it.