Clover Studio’s Ōkami was one of the most critically acclaimed games of its day when it launched on PS2 in 2006 and Wii in 2008.
Despite this, Hideki Kamiya has revealed that its development team was, on the whole, pretty weak. This comes via a new video from ‘UNSEEN’ on YouTube in which Kamiya and Ikumi Nakamura sit down to discuss their history together, particularly Ōkami’s development.
According to Nakamura, Kamiya got pretty drunk during a late-development party and exclaimed “This team was the worst!”. Kamiya didn’t deny this but explained that Ōkami was intended to be Clover Team’s signature title, and so he wanted to gather the best staff members from every section.
However, he states that although several team members were crucial to the development of the game, including Nakamura, the team as a whole was “frankly weak”. Pointing to Viewtiful Joe and Devil May Cry as examples in which the development teams were equally enthusiastic across the board, there was a “huge difference” with Ōkami’s team.
He goes on to say that the scene in the video should probably be cut, as “all the users who played and loved Ōkami probably all think there was a great team behind it, but actually, that wasn’t the case”.
It’s worth checking out the whole discussion in the video above, as Kamiya and Nakamura also discuss Bayonetta and Kamiya’s love for blocking ‘insects’ on social media, but the Ōkami section is conveniently timestamped at the 20.13 mark. Toward the end, Kamiya also ponders whether Ōkami made it to 150,000 sales, regarding it as a “huge failure” (Capcom’s investor site now puts it at a total of 4.1 million sales across all releases).
