I've finished Okami.

8D

And it was awesome. There were, overall, things that irked me (about which I've ranted already), but honestly? The story is so fun and everything -- landscape, characters, the gameplay -- are so charming and alluring that those failures are easy to cope with. Only during long cut scenes it gets noticable.

The magic system needs a moment of familiarisation, but afterwards the drawing of the symbols is easy. Especially since often enough you only need to connect two "dots" (like drawing a line between a fire and your target). The vine magic is the only one that's tricky sometimes, because even though you seem to have done everything correct, it doesn't work (very frustrating if you try to fly from flying downwards-looking flower to downwards-looking flower).

The riddles in the dungeons are often very well constructed and relatively easy to solve if you remember your magic. Sometimes jump passages are a bit tricky because the camera refuses to move every now and then or because Ammy´s jumping is a tad hard to estimate (god, those papers you had to blow up in the air so you could walk over them ><)

The dungeons themselves are not just beautiful but really diversified. One is underwater, in one you're shrinking to the size of Issun, another one is a plant and one even the innards of a human! The dungeons are definitely one big strength of the game.

The enemies are neither too hard nor too easy and some of them are really mean :> Sometimes it'd hard to guess how to kill them because they block all your standard attacks. Good thing; you can find tipps in the bestiarium after you beat the first monster.

The best part, imo, are the sidequests and searching for the clovers. It was just so awesome to suddenly spot the green light and all get excited because "Digging! 8D" and "Yay, Soon better stats 8D"

Also, pretty music. I'm not much of a fan of game music, but it was pretty and never annoyed me. :3 Definitely a beautiful, great and worth to play. I would always recommend it.