• By

A new trailer for Ōkamiden released at Gamescom shows the wolf cub Chibiterasu and friends helping villagers, performing magic with the Nintendo DS stylus, and exploring the ancient countryside.

What’s lovely about the trailer isn’t catching bits of plot or hints of gameplay features, but simply seeing the game in motion. Ōkamiden is the portable sequel to 2006′s epic Ōkami, a commercially overlooked adventure akin to The Legend of Zelda. As the powerful sun goddess Amaterasu, you traveled across classical Japan and revitalized the landscape from a demon plague. And you took the form of a wolf, drawn and colored in thick strokes like a cutout from a scroll painting.

Chibiterasu is the offspring of Amaterasu, and the successor to her game (released Stateside next year) makes an equally timely appearance. The cel-shading technique used to render Ōkami, a flattened and highly stylized world inspired by sumi-e, was a creative workaround for earlier videogame consoles that strained to generate convincing 3D places and people. At worst, your polygon body moved like a marionette, and the world around you resembled a house of cards. Cel-shaded games like Ōkami and Jet Grind Radio, like Eastern ink paintings, took flatness to be a creative limitation and virtue.

Flatness is rarely visible in today’s mainstream games. The Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3 easily contain spaces like the scorched Earth in Gears of War or the Himalayas in Uncharted 2, which appear drawn from life. Not so the Nintendo DS, whose distinctly limited hardware still encourages style over realism. It’s the ideal home for Ōkamiden.

The DS itself is starting to seem outmoded. With its stylus interface, the gaming device is the PalmPilot to Apple’s iPhone. But Ōkamiden already looks and sounds flawless from the trailer. Its colors spill out of the screen like crayons on paper, and the characters speak playful gibberish (for charm, and lack of storage capacity for actual speech). Ōkamiden looks about 10 years dated, and just in time. Games on the DS, like this and last year’s Might and Magic: Clash of Heroes, suggest that gaming still has time for the flat and retro. Yet it’s curious that we have to look for these experiences on the go, while our living rooms play host to increasingly cinematic spectacles.

For the latest entertainment news