this game is nice looking and has nice music and all. But how fucking long is this fucking game. Every aspect of this game waste your time, combat are long winded, every move you make has this long winded animation, when it loads a battle arena the camera pans everywhere and take like 5 seconds to load every time. The pacing is shit, theres moment where it's only story story story and then batle batle batle. The story it's fine and the characters are charming. But it doesn't compute why it has to be in 4 discs, it's not that complex of a tale. And near the end all of a sudden they exposition dump you with lore of the two worlds and yitan's origins, all of a sudden. I dont know, even the story doesn't seem really well told.
Overall, its not a bad game, not at all. Visually and presentation wise it's among the best of psx. Funny how it has a backwards logic where its one of the few games that aged in gameplay rather than grapics where usually in that generation its the other way around.
Btw what it baffles me is that when you ask fans of FF where do they rank this game, they put it up there and on the average they put em over FFXII, a game where almost in every aspect is a better game than FFIX.
Im not playing this shit again i swear

Horrible game with few redimable qualities:

-unskippable cutscenes: even if it's cleare it takes a lot of japanese folk lore, the game takes it's time with the story with unnecesarily repetitive long winded dialogues and "cutscenes" (which consist on waiting for a dialogue to finish so you can press circle and keep going with the next dialogue) at the end i check out and end up pressing consistently circle with one hand while i check my phone with the other. A lot of exposition, horrible story telling.
The game starts up with 20 MINUTES of unskippable cutscenes of a narrator building up the "main" boss of the game. It works to create expectation, but is tiresome. Later in the game you wonder why you spend so much building this boss when you are faced with the fact that there are two bosses that are bigger and badder (with not the same hight and expectation as the first one)
There's also event cutscenes, where you perform an action and a short cutscenes plays out. Those appear when you feed animals (a repetitive and pointless task you carry on but i get to that later), clean up poluted water or make bloom trees with your brush. There aren't that much of a drawback but these are action you do a lot and it only purpose is to unnecesarily lenght the game even more.

-Issun: debatably the worst aspect of the game is your companion. He's even a worse companion than Navi in Ocarina of Time. His quirk is to be blatand, irreverent and horny to any woman. Which it gets old pretty fast. In any type of interaction, he has to contribute with some sarcastic comment. An example is when you reach a statue, examinate it and you read "description of the statue", soon enough issun informs you with "description of the statue" the same thing you just read. He never shuts up. At times he gives up on his personalities quirks and ends up throwing you an exposition dump. Later in the game there's development in his backstory, but it gets too little too late.

Missions and exploration: The only thing they could blatanly copy zelda and get away with it is the exploration aspect of those game. But in Okami you find out a watered down, bland version of it. The world consist on big chuncks of map but not much to explore (and it doesnt help the collectables are near useless), mostly you will be exploring the map by doing errands or uninteresting fetch quests being very same-ish all of them. One example is when you have to look a total of eight sacred dogs, five in a town, three in the overworld ( three in a specific order mind you). The missions end up being uninsiring, monotone, repetitive, mindless and frustrating at part. Nothing that challenge your wit or creativitive like a decent zelda game.

NPC: very chatty, part of the chores you carry on. The art style makes them kinda charming but you can only go so far if you fill your game with characters that interrupts the flow of the game

collectables: There are tons of collectable but nothing that improves the gameplay in any form. They are the plain definition of collectables, something you see in a menu with a 100% collection and a existencial crisis where you ask why you waste so much time in this

Time: For young kids this might no be an issue. But the game is overly lenghted by aspects i mentioned before. Is not necessary for a game to waste 60hs of your time in order to be good. If anything if it lasted 12hs it might encourage me to replay it and improve my skills, like a devil may cry game (another hideki kamiya game which is actually good).
Doesn't help the game keeps going even after appareantly beating the "final" boss of the game.

combat: is good, something that kamiya exceeds at, making fighting fun. Too bad he forgot to make an interesting world to explore.

Art style: beautiful.

Music: Nice.

Core mechanic: using your brush to interact with the world. Is an awesome idea and this games i'll say it takes total advantage of this mechanic. But it can get very finicky. You can cut bamboo doors with your brush stroke but there are moments where you find other doors that you can't cut because the story doesn't want you to go there yet.

Overall, the few good things this game has is overwhelme by the awful aspects of it. It could have been better if this game straight up ripped off ocarina of time. It would have been obvious but the end product would have been a fun game. Something that this isn't.