Gaming Target - PlayStation 2: Okage: Shadow King

Written by Omer Ali on October 15, 2001

Full Review: Translation: Tim Burton comes to the PS2

Well, Tim Burton doesn't have anything directly to do with Okage: Shadow King, but he might as well have seeing how this game looks and feels like one of his animated features such as The Nightmare Before Christmas, my personal favorite. At first this game was not even slated to come to North America, Okage: Shadow King was going to be another cool Japanese title that all North Americans hear about but never get to play. Seeing as how УHalloweenФ this game is, the people over at SCEI just had to dish out this little treat into our candy bags to rot our teeth with for the month of October.

The hero of our delightful little horror story is Ari, a young run of the mill boy who wants nothing more than to be able to chase anything in a skirt, Scottish men excluded. Ari also has a sister, who one day has the misfortune of having a curse put on her causing her to speak nothing but pig Latin. Ari being the good big brother that he is strikes a deal with an evil being known as Evil King Stanley Hihat Trinidad XIV, or Stan for short. Stan has a story of his own. It used to be that Stan was the most powerful Evil King in all the land, but none of the other Evil Kings liked him, so they took away his powers and trapped him in a bottle. That's just mean. Stan's deal with Ari is that Stan will become Aris shadow and help him lift the curse on his sister, and Ari has to help Stan get back his powers back, oh and help him take over the world.

At first Stan will just be a paper cut out looking shadow, but as the game progresses and Stan gets more of his powers back, Stan's real form will become more evident. Ari will be joined by a wide array of characters that will aid him and Stan on their journey. The supporting cast all have their own personal issues, most of them are kids that are Ari's age. The locals in the towns and villages all have funny names that the playable characters refer to them by, such as УThat guy with the problemФ or УThat freaked out guyФ.

The battle system is just like every other RPG, its turn based, no new RPG evolution here. Stan will act as a type of limit break ala the Final Fantasy series. Stan will aid Ari with more powerful attacks when Ari is low on HP. One cool feature during the battles is that Ari can combine attacks with other characters to execute even more powerful attacks and spells, kind of like the combine feature in the now classic Chrono Trigger. The enemies are not very hard to beat, that's if you keep battling them. In Okage you can run away from almost every enemy, excluding bosses, but doing this will cause the enemies to become more powerful and therefore harder to defeat. Also running away from battles will make enemies appear a lot more frequently. During the battles Ari, Stan and the other characters will face enemies the likes of evil cows and man eating giant onions, nothing out of the ordinary really, I mean I see that kind of stuff everyday, don't you?