Okami Done?

We've mentioned before how we're slaves to progressing our Backloggery scanning the glut of games that we own but haven't beaten, let alone mastered. But we can't be alone in looking at 'the collection' and thinking "there's nothing to play". New games keep coming along and tempting us with their sexy new concepts, big graphics and face shooting shenanigans. But we've still got thousands of hours of untapped gameplay that won't cost us a penny. 

However, some of those games we'll probably never finish. take Okami for example. Released over 15,000 times, Okami is a beautiful game. Virtually every screen (outside of the menus) could, nay should be printed and adorned on all the surfaces of abodes. But there's a problem.

It's too big! Back in the day, when we had hundreds of hours to dedicate to games, this wouldn't have been a problem but these days it is literally too big to play. Here's how my last couple of playthroughs have gone.

Load the game up, think gosh this is pretty, spend ten minutes working out the controls again (the combat in the Wii version isn't the best), spend ten minutes refamiliarising myself with what all the calligraphy powers are, spend 15 minutes trying to work out which direction I was headed. Spend seven minutes checking the area just in case I missed feeding some local wildlife, spend five minutes going through the menu keeping a list of all the macguffins I need to pick up. Spend two minutes contemplating if it's worth it. Spend three minutes cursing at the next to useless map.

AND THAT'S IT FOLKS. That's my gaming allowance for a month or so (on the family TV anyway). According to the excellent Nintendo Channel stats I've played it 9 times and for a total of 13 hours. The average global play time is 23 hours but I can't see that this is enough time to play it to completion. Not when in my measly 9 hours I've barely picked up any stray beads or rare treasures, from the space on the save file screen it looks like I've still got another 9 celestial powers to pick up, tons more enemy types to discover, all but one of the named enemies to beat and a lot of animals to feed. There's also a tonne of areas I clearly don't have the tools to access to return to once I've got the appropriate tool technique. 

I might have to book a week off of work just to play it through without forgetting how the game works and areas I have to revisit.

It's not like I want my hand holding all the way through a game but some concession to the score of gamers who don't play games for weeks at a time are nice. Xenoblade Chronicles managed to keep us going with its very helpful checklist of quests that still left a lot of exploring to resolve. 

So it's one of those games we probably won't be finishing before out time is up. Which is a deeply depressing realisation to have. Most people don't obsess about the games they've never finished but a widely touted factlet is that most gamers don't finish games anyway. Shame.