Once upon a fish, in a land far away (yet closer than you think), a scatterbrained father decided to sell his son’s soul to an evil demon king named Stan in order to save his daughter from speaking Pig Latin for all eternity. The evil demon king Stan, being evil, attached himself to the boy’s feet, made the boy his evil demon king slave, and turned the boy’s sister’s shadow a lovely shade of fluorescent pink. Eventually, the boy teamed up with a girl with a fighting parasol and an unusually insane scientist with a penchant for ghosts and not making sense, and together the three of them went to the big clock in the middle of the sea. Ay-yup. If you think non-sequitur madness is something sorely lacking in today’s RPGs—and don’t really care about stuff like “deep gameplay” or “logic”—then Okage: Shadow King is the game for you. Okage: Shadow King is what would have happened had Tim Burton grown up in Osaka, Japan instead of in Burbank, California. It’s a weird, whimsical, and frequently insane RPG fable overflowing with personality, populated by entities torn from a mushroom-fueled Nightmare Before Christmas sequel that never happened. Its main character—a young boy continuously ignored by his friends and family—has conversations with himself and his shadow that flip-flop between hilarious and unintelligible (and, ergo, also hilarious). Its towns and outdoor locations are frequently stunning in their scope, and the game occasionally astonishes with how much personality, variety, and color it can cram into a single frame. Alas, it doesn’t take long for you to realize this RPG coach is going to turn into a pumpkin. Once Okage’s creative charm wears off—a thing which takes about four hours—the game reveals itself to be a straightforward, entry-level RPG with very few character customization options and not much incentive to play aside from seeing just what darn thing will come along next. A prime example of Okage’s depth of challenge: Four crates block a doorway, arranged in a Box-Pushing Puzzle for Dummies pattern. Instead of assuming you have at least the intelligence level of a stupid mushroom, perfected capable of pushing those boxes yo damn fungal self, you just watch as your character does it for you automatically. Whether or not that’s actually a blessing in disguise is another matter entirely. The rest of the game is a mixed bag of good and bad: The game’s battles look nice and move quickly, but the character animation is stiff, and the menu is too clunky and confusing given the limited number of battle options at your disposal. While wandering around outside is certainly scenic, you’ll often wonder why you can’t go past certain invisible barriers in the landscape. The game loads too frequently, and often for too long. The main theme is very cool indeed, but most of the other music is annoying. The sound effects seem like they were torn from a CD of stock RPG noises, but a charmingly inept kindly old voice-over man appears now and then to save the day. With its wealth of visual inventiveness and whacked-out creativity, Okage is one of those games you really wish were more than just a console RPG starter kit. Don’t be surprised if you see Okage walk away with top honors at this year’s PS2 Weird Awards—just don’t expect it to have much of a shot at Game of the Year.
