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In the early days of the PS2 good RPGs were tough to come by. Okage: Shadow King was enough to feed starving gamers until the release of Final Fantasy X, but now that the PS2 has plenty of good RPGs, is Okage worth playing?
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The story follows a young boy named Ari. One night his sister was attacked by a ghost and cursed with the “Pig Latin Curse,” which forces her to forever speak in Pig Latin. To save her, Ari and his family strike a bargain with the Evil King Stan, who will cure Ari’s sister of the curse if Ari agrees to become his slave. After being trapped in a bottle for years and drained of much of his power by “fake evil kings,” Stan is unable to take his normal form and instead possesses Ari’s shadow. Immediately after curing Ari’s sister, Stan and Ari begin a quest in an attempt to help Stan regain his former power. As their adventure progresses they’ll run into all sorts of funny characters, as the game has much humor in it. The dialogue is some of the best I can remember in an RPG, and the character interactions are often times absolutely hilarious. Stan and Ari will end up recruiting several other characters, such as the heroine Rosalyn. Rosalyn and Stan will spend nearly the whole game bickering back and forth, and it’s really quite amusing.
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You’ll spend most of the game searching out evil kings and returning their power to Stan, but as the game progresses you’ll discover that there’s a greater evil than Stan, and everyone will put their differences aside to save the world. The underlying story of the evil villain doesn’t come into play until pretty late in the game, and it almost seems like it was added as an afterthought so there would be a final boss to kill. Not to say that the villain and his evil plot were bad, but it took a back seat to Stan’s attempt to regain his power.
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When it comes to gameplay, Okage: Shadow King just falls flat on its face. Combat is painfully dull, and offers nothing as far as originality goes. Combat is very basic: you’ve got magic and you can attack. That’s pretty much it. Unfortunately, your party has shared LP (Labor Points, which is basically MP), so you can’t use magic too much or you’ll run out very quickly. As a result, combat generally consists of pushing X during your turn to make your characters attack…and then hoping you don’t fall asleep before your next turn. Even worse, if Ari dies, you lose. This wouldn’t be THAT big of a deal, but you often find yourself outnumbered by bad guys and if they get smart and all attack Ari, he’s as good as dead. Fortunately the game isn’t very difficult, so you shouldn’t have too much trouble. As horribly dull as combat is, it can sometimes be avoided. As you run around the world map or in a dungeon, ghosts will appear and if you run into one you will enter combat. You can fairly easily dodge these ghosts to avoid combat, but there are too many of them to completely avoid it. It doesn’t help much that the camera, although fully rotatable, isn’t very cooperative at all, which means it’s sometimes hard to see the ghosts coming. On rare occasions, Stan will randomly aid you in combat, and at the beginning of some battles, by answering questions, you can convince Stan to attack the enemies for you. Unfortunately not much was done with this, and Stan’s contributions to combat were underdeveloped.
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Things aren’t nearly as bad outside of combat, but that doesn’t mean it’s good. You end up running back and forth between the same few towns constantly and the bad guys don’t get any harder, which means you end up having to fight dozens of battles that are a complete waste of time. As the game progresses you’ll activate teleportation points, which will allow you to teleport back and forth so you don’t have to wander around so much, but the pointless battles will still annoy you. Somehow, it gets worse. The dungeons are almost all completely the same, and you spend your short stay there running from floor to floor destroying urns, which are basically mini-bosses, that unlock the door to the next floor. This goes on for hours and after a few dungeons, the game just becomes a horrible bore to play.
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How you see the graphics is completely a matter of taste. The game shares a look very similar to the movie, The Nightmare Before Christmas. Overall, the look works pretty well, but Kingdom Hearts has proven that similar graphics can be done much better (remember Halloween Town?). The world in Okage: Shadow King is full of bright colors and interesting character and town designs, but the dungeon backgrounds are very repetitive and the loading times are awful!
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The music in the game isn’t bad but actually quite good, but there’s just not enough of it. The voice acting is pretty much non-existent, and the sound effects, like footsteps or swinging of swords, aren’t well done at all.
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I would not recommend Okage: Shadow King to anyone. It’s really not a horrible game, but there are better RPGs out there. On the positive side, if you’re interested in playing it, you can probably pick it up for around $15 now, but the real question is whether or not you want to spend 30 hours playing it instead of excellent games like Suikoden III or Kingdom Hearts.
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