https://noahsbarks.com/reviews/okage-shadow-king/

I recommend reading this review at my site, linked above, for proper formatting and images.

NOTE: This is a review I wrote in 2016 that I edited in 2025 for improved syntax and clarity. I apologize for any discrepancies caused from misremembrance.

Okage: Shadow King had been on my radar for a long time—possibly before I even owned a PlayStation 2. I saw a handful of people online gassing it up as a hidden gem, and the art style of the 3D models stood out to me enough for it to remain in the back of my mind for years. Come early 2016, I found a new independently-owned retro game outlet.

As always, I scanned the shelves for cult PlayStation 2 games. One title was Drakengard. Not extremely rare, being published by Square Enix, but worth the small price to finally get a look at it. The real find was Okage: Shadow King. I lit up upon seeing it. Not only was this the first time I recalled ever seeing a physical copy, but it was in mint condition. The box, instruction manual—it was as if the plastic was unwrapped and the game was otherwise never touched. At $20, I considered it a steal. I really, really wanted to mine that outlet for more games, but fate had other plans. I forgot the location and name, struggled with disposable income, and now I no longer have the heart to search it out and discover if it survived the COVID pandemic. I can't help but feel a kind of guilt for not supporting it more. But I digress...

Okage: Shadow King is the third game developed by the even more elusive Zener Works. Their first two games were Little Master and its sequel for the Game Boy, the first of which would be remade and published by developer Tokuma Shoten. I played a bit of that remake a long time ago and recall it being a cute strategy RPG with a fun monster-collecting element, but I abandoned it after discovering its fan translation was never finished. Zener Works somehow had a nine-year gap between Little Master 2 and Okage, and I don't know how they kept their business funded. It appears they've failed to do so as of 2012, with their final titles being on the Vita. Truly a rough existence. So as far as English audiences are concerned, Okage is the only thing of note they ever made.

Okage: Shadow King is a traditional turn-based role-playing adventure in which you control Ari, a village boy with a personality so dull that he's ignored by practically everyone, almost as if he didn't even exist. When his father finds a mysterious old jar, an "Evil King" named Stan (a humorous localized censoring of "Satan") appears from it and binds himself to Ari’s shadow. With Stan now referring to Ari as his slave, Ari’s only hope of getting Stan off his back is traveling around the world and defeating "imposter" Evil Kings that have obtained fragments of Stan’s evil power after he was sealed. Also, Ari's sister has to be cured from a curse that has turned her shadow pink lest she become a social outcast. Needless to say, stakes are high.

Okage’s writing and story is similar to the Mother series in that it is a mostly lightweight coming-of-age fantasy with a lot of warmth. Ari’s journey is analogous to the metaphor of “stepping out of one’s shadow." Though he’s mostly mute, there are frequent dialogue options that allow passiveness, aggressiveness, or an often bizarre third response. There’s frequent details establishing how pathetically passive Ari is, such as his own party members literally walking over him, and Ari himself becoming transparent when he’s under the shadow of an enemy during an attack animation—cute reference to him always being stuck in someone else’s shadow.

Stan serves as a nice foil to Ari, being an egocentric and childish creature that gloats about his evilness and power, often berating everyone else in the party, and even rare moments of praise are backhanded at best. While on the field, the square button can be pressed to call him out and talk to him, which adds some nice flavor text in addition to reminding you of where you need to go in the story. During battles, there's also a random chance Stan helps the party by delivering powerful attacks, being most likely to happen when Ari’s HP is low.

One of the more interesting applications of Stan's combat presence is how he will occasionally appear at the start of a non-boss battle and ask you a question. You're given three dialogue prompts, and if you string them together into a response he likes, Stan will deliver one of his powerful attacks and potentially end the battle immediately. Unfortunately, due to the poor translation making many of the dialogue choices sound redundant, I was only able to make a sentence he liked once throughout the entire game. Still, it’s a cute idea, and one might consider its purpose is not to be useful so much as it is to give Stan more of a presence during combat.

Ari and Stan are joined by even more colorful characters. For Rosalyn this is somewhat literal, fighting to cure herself of the same curse as Ari's sister. A "professional hero", Rosalyn travels and fights with a pink parasol that she uses to hide her pink shadow. Her sense of justice often puts her at odds with her arch-nemesis, Stan, and she's generally the moral compass in lieu of Ari's passivity. They're aided further by the eccentric ghost researcher, Kisling, who rarely gets to put his intelligence to much use due to speaking in technical word salads. Big Bull is a less relevant party member, a husky bull-horned ghost who loves fighting for the sake of it and values strength. Linda is a ditzy teen idol with a crush on Stan, and Epros is a magician who speaks in Elizabethan-esque rhymes.

It’s the good-humor, creative writing, and character designs of Okage that largely make it worth mentioning. In addition to the likable main party, the NPCs are often even stranger, with most babbling vague yet entertaining nonsense. It’s unfortunate, then, that the strongest element of Okage is weakened considerably by a fairly awful translation. I really need to stress this: Okage doesn't just have a bad translation—it’s one of the most baffling I’ve ever seen. The script's extensive vocabulary contrasts with the nonsensical syntax surrounding it to such an extent that it may suggest a literal or automated translation.

It’s as if they hired someone who knew every word in the English language that had also somehow never read an English sentence in their life. There are countless cases where appears that the inverted sentence structure between English and Japanese sentences was ignored. There's an endless onslaught of excessive commas that disrupt the flow of dialogue. The poor grammar inserts unnatural pauses and sentence fragments that shouldn’t be there, and even word choice is always at least slightly off when considering synonyms that would have more appropriate connotation.

To give an example, near the end of the game a character says the final boss is going to be a “real tough nut.” They omit the "to crack" part of this expression, which is already awkward phrasing as it's almost never spoken without it. But immediately after this line, a voice recording of the same line is played where the expression is changed to “tough cookie”, which works much better. Considering that it’s a recording and thus should be using the same script, you can get a nice taste of the lack of care that went into this eccentric script.

Although you can almost always discern what’s ultimately being expressed in each dialogue box, the unnatural way it’s delivered requires you having to frequently pause and decipher the true tone and purpose behind every sentence, ripping you entirely out of a scene's context and the potential immersion in Okage’s world. I don’t even know if the editor or translator is more responsible for this disaster, or if they’re both equally as bad, but this is unacceptably poor even for a budget title. It's almost enough for me to discourage others from playing the game until it's retranslated. It's that bad.

Despite the total mess of a script, the humor and (intentional) quirkiness comes through and Okage still manages to be a charming, funny, and sometimes downright insane adventure. The bulk of the story can be described as vignettes introducing new party members and minor NPCs, with Ari and company stumbling through insular, humorous situations surrounding each Evil King.

While this is entertaining enough on its own, Okage is not without its twists and attempts at a more ambitious, thematic overarching narrative. I was impressed with certain meta elements, especially those seeming to explore the very concept of a role-playing game. I appreciated the attempt to elevate the narrative's value beyond that of comedy.

Here's some further analysis of the story, but be warned that it contains heavy spoilers:

It's revealed the reason the character designs look so much like dolls is because they functionally are: beings of a manufactured world with roles assigned to every person and object in the kingdom. Throughout the game, NPCs have names that literally describe their purpose, and now it's more than just another odd gag. As NPCs start developing self-awareness, they realize that even though they recognize Marlene as the princess, nobody knows where the royal kingdom even is, and it’s indeed nowhere on your map. Because Ari is forced out of his role, or “classification” by Stan, he’s the only one who can break from his narrative binds and save the world. There’s an excellent part in the story where Ari is separated from Stan and becomes so unnoticeable that everyone forgets he exists and won't acknowledge him. In order to progress, the player has to go around talking to people and choosing assertive dialogue responses until Ari stops appearing transparent. It’s possibly the most clever part of the game.

Sadly, when the story's themes begin to blossom is also when things begin to feel very rushed. Instead of prolonging events after this twist to properly incorporate and address loose sub-plots such as the legend of Hopkins, Gohma, and how the villain managed to create this world in the first place are either unsatisfyingly touched upon and incomplete, or delivered unnaturally in optional, isolated exposition dumps from NPCs, such as those you can talk to in the final dungeon. Thus, the peak of Okage's story wraps up rather weakly and doesn’t deliver on the potential of its ideas. It would’ve been to its benefit to bring in parts of the main plot much sooner into the early chapters, which are currently only about their respective Evil King storylines. The second to last chapter consists of nothing other than a single boss fight. The ending scenes are also incredibly brief to the point of being depressing as you see some beloved characters walk off forever after just two lines. Okage seems like a game made with a lot of heart and love, but it somehow doesn’t love itself enough. It reeks of time and/or budget constraints. If that's the case, I truly sympathize, but I can only comment on the final results.

Frankly, the entire construction of the game is downright weird. There are a few factors that may be related, such as this being made just a year after the PS2 was released, and Zener Works being an inexperienced company without a large budget. This isn’t like Hal and the Mother series, which had talents that went on to become prolific as well as financial and technical support from Nintendo.

I'd say the general polish isn’t even on par with Atlus’s more budget-minded days. The graphics are... acceptable? The game certainly struggles to justify its placement on contemporary hardware, but it's not for nothing. The lack of the first PlayStation's heavily pixelated textures is appreciated, but on the other hand, the character models are heavily polygonal in appearance. The game gets away with much of its lacking technical prowess due to its exemplary art style, obviously influenced by the works of Henry Selick and Tim Burton. The plump doll-like characters evoke somewhat the duo's iconic stop-motion figurines. There's impressive variety in both character and monster designs, and the geographical terrain is occasionally interesting, sometimes featuring things such as looping cliffs like those of The Nightmare Before Christmas's iconic poster or the fantastical locales of a Dr. Seuss book.

For the most part, though, the environments are the stereotypical RPG biomes like prairies, snowy mountains, and deserts. The dungeons are the biggest disappointment in the game, almost always being made out of identical brick textures and lacking individuality. The content of dungeons is equally dull. To progress to the next floor, you have to defeat every Urn on the current floor, which function as mini-bosses. All Urns in the game look and fight identically, lacking the creative charm present throughout most of the game's designs. Defeating an Urn rewards massive experience points and money, while normal encounters reward so little that it’s almost not worth fighting them, as the (very easy) Urn battles will make up for everything you lost.

I can’t help but wonder what they were thinking with the Urn idea, because it’s technically innovative and yet adds nothing interesting to the standard RPG structure. Therefore, I suspect the motivation is to prolong the time players spend In dungeons without needing to code, design, and program more areas and enemies. Defeating all the Urns on a floor causes all encounters to stop spawning, which is nice for exploring and finding items, even though there’s rarely anything to find by that point. Overall, dungeons are just the typical bland mazes with switches to hit in order to open doors. You don’t even get to the first real dungeon until chapter 3. You're going all the way back to 8-bit RPG dungeon design with Okage, so be prepared.

The overworlds have a lot more going on visually, but are still pseudo-linear pathways like those seen in Final Fantasy X, and there are unclear invisible walls blocking you from traveling too far outside the paths, which is a frequent annoyance. There are no random encounters. This might sound like a positive, but you'd be horribly wrong. On the overworld, little ghosts will spawn as you walk around, and they always gun right for your ass.

You can technically avoid them, but it’s borderline impossible in practice. The longer you avoid these ghosts, the faster they spawn, and you eventually have them pursuing you from every direction—frontwards, backwards, the sides, and even sometimes directly on top of you. They can appear and move so quickly that the “no random battles” moniker is essentially an illusion. You will enter battles constantly, and you can only hope in vain to avoid one out of every ten ghosts for a scant few seconds.

This is never more irritating than during the many times you need to backtrack either for the main plot or a sidequest and you’re forced into battles with enemies far below your level. The longest sidequest in the game involves finding key items called Tiny Gears, which are spread across the world in unmarked locations. Examine the correct empty spot on the map and you find a Tiny Gear. You've almost certainly played games with this type of quest. I reached the end of Okage having done everything other than finding all Tiny Gears—a worst-case scenario for a completionist too stubborn to use guides. I faced the prospect of scouring the entire game at least one more time, mashing the A button all the while, just so that I could say I had done everything there is to do in Okage. I was extremely lucky in that the final Tiny Gear I needed was in one of the game's first areas, and I was searching chronologically.

Despite this being a mercifully short detour, I was still bombarded with so many time-wasting battles and load screens that I was seriously considering giving up on completing the quest within two hours of my exploration. There is no item, no magic, no anything to remove encounters or decrease the rate of them. With the simplistic, sluggish combat and long load times this quickly becomes incredibly frustrating. It takes a lot for me to give up on stupid bullshit in a video game, so Okage coming close is an accomplishment of a bad kind.

On that note, the slow pace of Okage is what comes closest to killing the whole game. To have your game constantly interrupted by pathetically easy random battles only to have to wait literally somewhere around 10 seconds for the results screen to even clear is infuriating—but that doesn't even cover all of it. There’s also the battles themselves, which are dragged out by the same, repetitive special attack animations, accompanied by the knowledge that once this 3-minute battle is over you’ll have gotten a complete and utter pittance of EXP and money. I fought every battle in the game before I wised up and started running as much as I could just to save time, and even before doing that I could still almost never afford more than two things from the next town's shop.

Naturally, loading times between screens are also very long, and they add up like nothing else. Okage actually forces you to spend a lot of time exploring towns and gathering information. This would normally be enjoyable because the writing is the best part of the game, but between how big some of the towns can get and how random the required NPC needed to progress can be placed, you’ll be running in and out of buildings constantly and racking up load screens like you're in debt to Father Time. You’ll eventually get so restless you’ll start accidentally walking into the same places and wasting even more fucking time. If it weren’t for the load times and slow pacing, this 25ish-hour RPG would’ve probably gotten down to 15-18 hours, and it would’ve been far, far better for it.

Combat is as simple as your average 16-bit RPG, if not older, which is very disappointing. You have an ATB system ala Final Fantasy, and MP is shared between all party members. You can attack, use items, use magic—the works. Magic costs either HP or MP, and what’s nice is that HP is always a percentage rather than a flat rate. Every RPG should do this for both HP and MP skills instead of always introducing redundant new moves, but that's neither here nor there. Characters can also choose to “wait” which keeps their ATB gauge full. You can either move them later or have another character with a full gauge do a combo attack with them for major damage.

Since magic damage is always very low, at least from what I saw, combo attacks are the best way to fight in Okage, which means the battle system greatly favors physical fighters. There’s almost no need for support spells in normal encounters, so characters like Linda have trouble contributing, but they’re practically essential for the game’s bosses, which are several times more difficult than any normal battle to the point of being an unreasonable difficulty spike. Each boss always has a gaggle of minions to support them. It’s often their five against your three party members, and the minions are powerful enemies in their own right and can quickly gang up on and demolish your party if you aren’t lucky with getting your stat boosting abilities off immediately. There’s no strategy to those either, because they seem to be permanent until someone dies, unlike certain games such as some of those in the Megami Tensei franchise where they’re temporary.

There’s also elemental weaknesses. Fire beats thunder, thunder beats ice, and ice beats fire. This goes against conventional wisdom and took me almost the entire game to internalize. Also, everyone in the game except Ari has an innate elemental affinity, and their basic attacks carry that element as well. You always have to plan around elements because a mismatch will deal useless damage, and battles take too long as it is. It’s just strategically dull, superfluous, and when it comes right down to it, luck-based. It’s not your fault if you just happen to not have any attacks of the right element for a random battle, and players shouldn’t be discouraged from using a desired dedicated party for such shallow payoff.

Of course, you can also equip a weapon, one piece of armor, and an accessory, the latter of which can bestow the only passive abilities in the game. I do, at least, like that each party member has completely unique skills to them rather than pulling from the same pool of offensive and supportive magic spells and such, something I really dislike about a lot of RPGs. Okage also does a great job conveying character personalities through their assorted moves and their effects.

As an aside, there’s something very strange with the game’s status menu portraits. Even in the correct aspect ratio and resolution, they’re incredibly blurred and pixelated. I wondered for a long time why they looked so shitty when no other JRPG I’ve played has had this problem—and then it dawned on me. When you save, you can see the same portraits shrunk down as icons on your respective file, and they look perfectly fine. Which means they drew the portraits intended for the save screen you almost never see, instead of for the status menu, and simply stretched the size of those textures for the menu. It just further shows Zener Works’ inexperience and lack of foresight. Or even worse, lack of effort. Would it have been too much time and effort to get six new portraits? They’re just headshots, for god's sake.

There’s also a terrible glitch where your newly written save file randomly won’t actually save, despite the game confirming it saved, but you won’t know until you open up the save menu again to look for it (which means more load times!) And by "won't save", I really mean it. Even if you had an existing save file, there is a chance that the game will delete it. You can save thinking that you’re prepared for a boss, die in the fight, and then find your save completely gone and your game’s over right there. I had this glitch happen to me once literally the day after I found out about it, but I got to the next save point in time and always double-checked from then on. Crisis avoided, but some people won’t be so lucky. This is an unforgivably bad glitch that ought to count as selling a defective product. I am not joking. If you don't double-check every single save you make, you risk losing over a dozen hours of your time in a game that already does not value it.

The game’s music is pretty good, but it's what you’d expect from an upbeat fantasy RPG (you’d know what I mean as soon as you heard it.) It’s instrumentally eclectic, and there’s a lot of variety in mood and tempo. It’s mostly acoustic with a lot of woodwinds, giving it a folkish, mystical property that’s suitable to the game's general, toy-like appearance and "storybook" vibe. The only bad things I have to say about the soundtrack is that the random battle and boss battle themes are both extremely boring and lack drive. It’s the only part of the soundtrack that basically has to be catchy, and it fails there, further cementing the tedium of this game's battles.

It’s probably safe to close out now, because there isn’t much to say about Okage’s game structure. It’s incredibly simple, and the best 16-bit RPGs still have it outdone in complexity. The writing would be enough to recommend it anyway, similar to how Earthbound is primarily enjoyed for its writing, but unlike Earthbound, the amateur foibles of Zener Works hinder the experience beyond the gameplay simply being archaic. It crosses the line from dull to tedium with the load times and exhaustingly long battles. Even the quality writing is handicapped considerably by the rubbish translation. The world design could go a long way too, but it's an element more reliant on the budget than something like the game's text, and thus it pales in several environments such as the utterly nondescript dungeons.

Okage is overall a good game—it has reason to exist and be played simply from how unique it is and how genuinely hard it tries to defy tropes. I’ve said it many times before and I stand by it: I’d rather play an extremely troubled game that’s interesting over a competently made one with nothing new to say. The problem comes with recommending it to others, as most people probably have even less patience than I do when it comes to putting up with big flaws for a diamond in the rough. It’s a shame Okage will likely never be retranslated or have its plethora of minor, moderate, and (in the case of the save glitch) severe problems fixed, because then it would undoubtedly deserve its reputation as a cult classic. As it is now, it’s just too rough to rise above its niche. For those still curious even after my warnings, this game might be for you. Despite all of my frustrations, I am glad to have experienced Okage: Shadow King.

This was one of my favorite games growing up and I haven't played it in so long that I decided to go ahead and give it a whirl. I still love this game for all the reasons I did when I was younger—the characters are silly and fun, the art style is adorable, and the story is original and interesting. However, the battles take forever to get through and that seriously becomes a problem after a while, namely because you have to do a lot of grinding when you get to new areas. I felt like I wasted so much time watching the little characters hop across the screen, do several attacks, and then hop back! Then the end battle screen takes ages to get through if you've collected items or leveled up, and you combine that with general PS2 loading screen times...

Overall, I still love this game. As an adult I found myself playing the story during my "game time" and grinding battles out while I was watching a movie or something so I wasn't so bored. I do think it takes away from the story itself and the overall enjoyment of the game, but it still stays on my favorites shelf.