The Mammon Philosophy

MadWorld isn’t out until March, but the developers are already talking sequels. Catch this exchange in an interview at That VideoGame Blog with producer Astushi Inaba:

TVGB: So if this is a big success will you move on to a different title on the Wii or are you thinking about sequels?

AI: Platinum Games has several rights so we’ll be developing something new after this, but if there is a lot of interest in MadWorld then maybe we will make another one.

Not to turn this quote inside out with meanings that aren’t there, but some of the usual suspects are already treating this as a given. What particularly stings is that the news is routinely paired up with a reference to “some of the developers” having been part of the team that brought us Okami, a game much more deserving of a true sequel (not just a Wii-make) than an as-yet untested new property. But even that would be pushing the prognostication envelope too far. Why can’t we ever concentrate on the games that are coming out now? Does the gaming news media machine really devour so much information every day that we can’t sate it with actual titles, forcing the invention of speculative products from thin air to keep the RSS feeds running? Surely someone has another set of panty-shot screens from Street Fighter IV or some more honed rage over allegations of racism in Metroid. (”Samus Aran doesn’t care about Elysians.”)

Of course, I have a vested interest in keeping this sort of Ouija-board reporting down, since I’m generally playing games after they’re released, so perhaps my own editorial bias should be critiqued as well. We’re none of us free from sin.

I was lucky; I decided to wait for the Wii version of Okami, so I didn’t play it until after Twilight Princess. This is a good thing because I would’ve been more disappointed with TP if I’d done it in the other order. I said while I was playing it that it would be better if you could just be Wolf Link all the time, and Okami proves me right.

If you haven’t played this wolf-hopping adventure yet, you owe yourself a treat. It can be best described as “beautiful,” perhaps. Flowers grow in your wake as you steer the sun goddess Amaterasu across the ground; trees blossom when you paint them with your celestial ink; the history of the land, taken almost verbatim (though with a few welcome liberties) from Shinto mythology, is retold in flowing style. But naturally, it’s the little details that make the game: for example, the handling of the cutscenes. I was caught off guard in an early sequence where a would-be swordsman attempts to slice through a training dummy. It turned out I had to take up the remote and draw a power slash to cut it down for him, since his own combat skills were rather subpar. This convention continues throughout the adventure, as Amaterasu surreptitiously aids villagers and travelers with secret manipulations of the environment. I’m continually reminded of a line from the end of Princess Mononoke: “huh, I didn’t know the forest god made trees grow.”

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