I’m never going to beat Okami, am I?

I’m never going to beat Okami, am I?

I played a good portion of it on PS2 back in 2006 when it launched, but I never finished it. Not for any memorable reason. I just didn’t. Then, I picked it up again on the Wii in 2008, thinking that would be the time I would complete it. Nope. I think I stopped even earlier that time. I think I bought it on PlayStation 3 at some point? I could look it up, but the point would remain: I didn’t beat it there either. Then, late last year, I picked it up again on Steam with the idea that it would be a great game to play and beat on the Steam Deck. I started it again in December. This would be the time, I thought. This will finally be the time.

And yet, here I am, hat in hand, having once again not beaten Okami.

I could conceivably still do it. And yet, I don’t think that I will. I’ve been down this road before, and I know myself. I’ve moved on again. I gave it the old college try. Well, strictly speaking, the Wii version was the old college try, in terms of my personal timeline. I guess this was the early career try. The mid-30s try.

I’m sure we all have a game like this in our backlog. The one you played enough of to remember fondly but never got around to actually finishing. In fact, most players don’t “finish” games—period. Peruse any game’s achievements or trophies, and you’ll find that a minority of players ever see a game through to the credits. In Okami, at least on Steam, only 13.1% of players have seen the game through to completion. So, to a certain extent, my experience with Okami is the definitive experience with Okami: seeing some, but not all, of what the game has to offer.

When I write about a game for Backlog (or, obviously, for a proper site like Polygon), I try to complete it. Very rarely will I 100% a game before writing about it, but at the very least, I try to experience the entire arc of the core experience. I view it, from a critical standpoint, as doing my due diligence in assessing the game in its artistic merit. It would be strange to review a book, for example, without knowing how it ends. Obviously, the same mentality can be applied to film and TV. If you haven’t read or watched the whole thing, how are you going to comment on it?

Now, before I accidentally back myself into unintentionally supporting the worst denizens of the internet who bloviate about “journalistic integrity” any time a freelance game critic who has two weeks to play an 80-hour game and write 1000 (intelligible) words about the experience rightly decides to write a draft before completing a game most people will play over the course of a year, I want to be super clear: You do not have to complete a game in order to have an opinion on it. In fact, arguably, commenting on the experience of playing a portion of a game is more valuable than commenting on the experience of completing a game, since that will not be the experience of the majority of players. Weird, I know, but that’s our beloved medium for you.

And still: Okami. Long, unevenly-paced Okami. I keep coming back to you. Maybe it’s your gorgeous art style that somehow still looks modern almost two decades later. Maybe it’s the fact that no one really makes this style of Zelda game anymore, least of all Nintendo. Maybe it’s the foolish belief that, if we all just keep buying and playing a portion of you, there might one day be an Okami 2.

Really, though, I think it’s because, despite my acknowledgment that I am clearly not alone in starting Okami and never finishing it, I’ve always felt a little ashamed that I haven’t. When I started Backlog, it was one of the first games to come to mind for this format of retrospection. They quite literally don’t make them like Okami anymore, so there’s no reason to play a later title in the series or a spiritual successor, because, Okamiden aside, there really isn’t an example of either.

But I think it’s time to be real with myself: I’m never going to beat Okami. As I watch it drift further and further to the back of my mind, waving to it from the shore of my more current media obsessions (no, I am not playing Balatro again), I wish it well. I think, perhaps, this will be the last time I see it. The journey it’s going on now seems more permanent. I’ll never know what lies beyond the 15-hour mark, and I’ve made my peace with that.

Some games stay on your backlog forever. Some games just drift away.

Okay, I don’t tend to do this kind of comment bait, but I’m curious: What’s your personal Okami? What’s that one game you’ve started a few times but never finished? What title can you never seem to cross off your backlog?

Sound off in the comments. See you all in a couple weeks.