This all pretty much chimes with my experience of Okami. Behind its elegant art style it simply wouldn't stop talking at me and making me collect things; I'd hoped the game would be as formally interesting as its aesthetics. While I stopped playing it for a few hours (and correct me if it suddenly becomes amazing later on), it reminded me a little of Psychonauts, which has a similar problem, only less extreme: beneath its joyful invention and sharp writing it is on one level a fun but merely competent platformer with an extremely inelegant reward system involving way too many random trinkets to pick up and way too little to do with them.

Ultimately, for-profit game companies are not designing for people who read game blogs, let alone for people who write for them. They're designing for the median gamer. The median gamer, it turns out, enjoys a constant stream of rewards (even if they don't go completionist on finding all of them), and often needs reminders and instructions. I appreciate it when a game gives me the option to nuke some of its hand-holding — e.g. Skyward Sword at least let you kill the giant representation of the controller that hogged a big chunk of screen space — but I can't get too upset at the designers for doing what lets them sell more copies. They're trying to make a living, as well as making art. And Okami was some pretty spectacular art.

I agree with Daniel's comment above, completely. Okamiden and Okami are completely different games, even if they are closely related. I enjoyed Okamiden (I know many did not), but not nearly as much as Okami, which is one of my favorite games of all time. In fact, one of Okamiden's primary strengths is the feeling of nostalgia for Okami.

I don't know how you can say Okami was a failure. Editing might have enhanced the minimalist aesthetics of sumi-e in non-aesthetic ways, but would that have enhanced my love for the game or enjoyment of it? I don't believe so.

The sumi-e aesthetic is only one aspect of the game. Another aspect, another goal that I felt Okami's creators aspired to accomplish, was to create a world that felt lush and rich and lived in and old, filled with beautiful vistas, grottos, animals, characters, habitats (be they landscape, cave, or building). The only game I can think of that accomplishes that goal as well is Beyond Good & Evil.

Now for artistic gamers like you and me, the beauty and the fun of exploration are probably enough to show us all of those things: we will seek out every secluded bit of scenery simply because we can, and because the developers were kind and hard-working enough to create it and include it. We will talk to every character because they seem interesting. But for the average gamer, this is probably not enough. There are likely many gamers who experienced truly beautiful aspects of the game because they were looking for one of the elusive 100 beads (which I treasured the heck out of, thank you very much). There are probably other gamers who care a bit less about the beauty of nature, and who would have been disappointed by discovering and following a hidden trail of sky flowers only to be rewarded by a pretty vista; for those gamers, having a chest to open adds a bit of reward.

Were too many of the treasures in those chests a bit lack-luster? Yes. I would have preferred if every bit of pottery or statuary was unique, so that I could be satisfied with completing my collection; when I already had a statue of that particular god, it didn't come with the same "ooh!" of delight. Of course, it did have a cash value, which was nothing to look down on, as some powerful techniques and rare items cost money. And that goddess in the well was pretty demanding. I also am cognizant of the fact that placing a unique item or character in/on _every_ one of those hidden caves, and cliffs, and holes, grottos, and islands would have added time, effort, and money to the developers' budgets unnecessarily, and those costs were real. I don't think it's possible to argue that all those caves, cliffs, holes, grottos, and islands were unnecessary. They added immeasurably to the aforementioned feeling of richness.

You complain that characters (and the game's interface) tell you what to do too often. I agree that's true for Okamiden, but not for Okami. I never felt like I was getting an irritating deluge of information. And I know there are other gamers out there who are either not as clever or not as patient (or who have stepped away from the game for a few weeks due to busy life schedules), who appreciate frequent reminders about their task at hand or how to do a particular move.

In short, I feel that you make the mistake critics are so often prone to making: you equate imperfection with failure or (just as sad) you equate _what you perceive as imperfections_ with failure, even though other users/viewers/players see those imperfections as strengths. For me, Okami (and I'll make the caveat that I played the original on PS2, and never played the Wii version) was a near-perfect experience. Heck, it's one of the few where the ending made me cry. I would be hard-pressed to think of anything about it I would fight to change.