Last December’s announcement at The Game Awards of a sequel to the 20-year-old Ōkami surprised many – not just because of the original game’s age, but also because of impressions of its popularity. While it has been thought by many that Capcom considered the original game a commercial failure, our recent interview with the project leads suggests Capcom came around on Ōkami’s value a while ago, and has been waiting for the right opportunity ever since.
The impression of Ōkami struggling comes from a number of sources over the years. Back in 2006, we reported that Ōkami had sold 270,000 copies on PlayStation 2 in its exclusive launch on the system – not exactly a milestone figure for a major publisher. It’s also been suggested in multiple interviews with key team members that Ōkami’s lack of sales success contributed in some part to the eventual closure of developer Clover Studio.
However, over time, Ōkami’s fortunes have turned. It’s been released on a number of other platforms since launch, with each new port slowly ticking up awareness and sales to a present-day figure of 4.6 million across all the different version, including HD. That long tail is rather unusual for a game, as Capcom producer Yoshiaki Hirabayashi points out in our recent interview with him:
“I know specifically that people are still enjoying this game, just from the numbers. Normally when we look at games, the sales sort of slow down and they decrease steadily. Sometimes they jump up and down, but normally they go down. But for Ōkami, we see that it’s been a steady stream of people always enjoying the game. So in that way Ōkami is a very, very unique IP.”
As a result, Hirabayashi says that Capcom has been considering a sequel to Ōkami for some time. However, as Hirabayashi explains, the publisher “needed to have certain key people in place” and “it took a bit of time for all of the stars to align.” He’s alluding both to Machine Head Works, which features a number of Ōkami veterans including Kiyohiko Sakata, and to director Hideki Kamiya, who left Capcom to found PlatinumGames in 2006 and recently departed in 2023 to found Clovers, where he’s working on the Ōkami sequel alongside Capcom and Machine Head Works.
As for Kamiya, he says he’s always wanted to do an Ōkami sequel. But while he’s had an idea in his head for years, he tells us he didn’t leave Platinum with the thought of making his own studio and working on Ōkami. Capcom’s desire to revisit the IP was a key factor in his decision, but there was one final key: the devotion of Ōkami fans. Just as the great god Amaterasu thrives on praise, the Ōkami sequel came to be thanks to ongoing and growing love for the original game:
“Just hearing all the cheers from the fans pushed me,” Kamiya said to IGN. “Going back to PS2, PS3, PS4, Switch, and then the later versions of the games, we can always see that there’s always merch going out there that the fans like. You can always see the love of the IP is something that’s still spreading amongst fans.
“And so, with everyone cheering on and our desire to create, it was that that led us to the actualization of this project. So without everyone’s voices out there, without everyone cheering us on, we wouldn’t have moved forward with this. So thank you so much.”
You can catch up on our full interview with the leads of the Ōkami sequel right here.
Rebekah Valentine is a senior reporter for IGN. You can find her posting on BlueSky @duckvalentine.bsky.social. Got a story tip? Send it to [email protected].
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