Friday 10 November, 2006

For this entry I want to talk about a failed side mission in Okami. I received a request to kill 8 certain enemies. The problem arises in both the open world design and the design of encountering enemies. From the instructions given I believe that these enemies could be found anywhere within the world. This presents the issue of having to explore a very large area once again to find what I'm looking for. The issue of finding these enemies presents even more of a problem than finding the dog. At least when finding the dog I found the cave and it was very recognizable once I had done so. Enemy encounters occur when Ameteratsu collides with a ghostly looking rug-thing. The problem is that all of them look the same so finding the 8 enemies I'm looking for involves exploring all areas of the world and trying to encounter enemies hoping that I just happened to run into the right one. This became very frustrating very quickly and digressed into me just hoping I would complete the side mission as I traveled and completed the main missions.

I assume you are talking about the Hit List type side mission here. I don't know exactly how far progressed you are but I found it best to wait until you get the Cresent brush technique which will turn day into night. Since the enemies on the list only come out at night its easy to round up all the kills if you can ignore the wait to for day to naturally turn to night. Just go around and run from flying scroll to flying scroll and you will knock out the monsters on the list in no time. Also, if you didn't realize, the monsters on the list will only appear in the zone in which you got the list from, so don't run around a new zone looking for monsters that wont be there. Good luck.