Following the recent announcement at The Game Awards that Okami will be getting a sequel, Hideki Kamiya has been active on Twitter/X answering some questions from fans about the popular action-adventure game.
This has led him to share some lesser-known facts about the game's origins, including what the original idea for the game was, as spotted by VGDensetsu.
Responding to a question about whether the developer decided to pick a wolf as the playable character, due to the similarity between the pronunciation of the Japanese word for "great god" (大神) and "wolf" (狼), Kamiya (who served as the game's director) provided an account about the name came to be.
And, in doing so, he revealed an earlier outline for the game that was based on players taking control of the leader of a wolf pack:
"Okami originally started out as a project for a game in which you become the leader of a pack of wolves living on a deserted island and have to survive in the wilderness.
"From there, it developed into a play on "the power of the gods to control all things in the universe" and the brushwork was born, and I gave it the title "Okami"..."
According to Kamiya, this vision for the game was inspired by a book that he read during his university days based on the work of the photographer and environmentalist Jim Brandenburg. This book had apparently inspired Kamiya to write an earlier unrealized proposal for a sidescroller sometime around 1993/1994, similarly based on the idea of controlling a white wolf surviving in nature.
It's been known for a while that back when Clover Team (the original developers of Okami) started work on Okami, the game didn't feature the iconic art style that is now known for, which is inspired by Japanese watercolors and Ukiyo-e wood printing, but was instead targeting a more photorealistic look.
Kamiya has also gone on record in the past, in an interview with Famitsu, as saying that the game's early development wasn't exactly a breeze, with the team initially lacking a story and gameplay system.
Instead, the only guiding principle was to make a game that depicted "a lot of nature", which ended up causing Kamiya a lot of stress and leading the project to go so far off track that it became a simulation.
In the end, as you'll no doubt know if you've played the game, the version of Okami we got was vastly different from what is being proposed here, introducing a more fantastical story that combines elements of Japanese mythology and folklore.
It sees players take control of the white wolf Amaterasu, named after the Shinto Sun Goddess, who must bring life back to the world using a celestial paintbrush.