Stephen Totilo: Please Cut Out Parts of Okami

I really like Stephen Totilo of the MTV Multiplayer blog. He’s always raising interesting points in his debates with Level Up’s N’Gai Croal, but today I really had my mind blown by Totilo. Whether or not you realize it, a lot of what you hear on gaming forums, and perhaps even from videogame journalists themselves, is what people want to hear, as opposed to what those individuals think. They figure that they need to fit in, and that if they disagree with the masses, they’ll be treated like a suspected witch would have been 1,000 years ago.

Totilo, like many others, seems to be very happy that Okami is headed to the Wii. But, he wasn’t so happy when he read the following excerpt from an interview with Didier Malenfant, who works for Ready At Dawn, the team bringing Okami to the Wii.

The game on Wii is going to be an exact port of the PS2 version and I think that’s what fans of the franchise want to see. This game has such a huge following throughout the world that people would probably send us death-threats if we messed it up by trying to add things that don’t have their place in the Okami universe. Being huge fans of the franchise ourselves, we made sure that Capcom also wanted to stay true to the original before signing on to do this.

Sounds all well and good, but Totilo isn’t upset for the reason you might think. He isn’t upset that there’s no new content in the game; on the contrary, he wishes that Capcom would have yanked out some of the more tedious and long-winding parts of the game.

I was hoping you would be bold, that you would make the first video game port that cut content, that trimmed the fat.

See, I completed “Okami” on the PS2, and I have a few suggested cuts.

You do agree with me that games are really long, right? And that they often have a lot of time-filler. And you must know that many of those critics who went ga-ga over “Okami” gave the game a pass, even though the game has one of the worst openings of any title published in the last five years. (Does anyone want to try to convince me that requiring the player to repeatedly tap a button to propel a 15-minute opening series of subtitled cut-scenes is a good thing?)

He’s got a point. I remember sitting with my GBA waiting what seemed like an hour to skip through an early cutscene in Golden Sun. It’s not fun.

Read the rest of his blog post here.