Ōkami 2 is happening and the original director is making it for Capcom-GameCentral-Entertainment – Metro

Thank the goddess she’s back (YouTube)

Devil May Cry and Bayonetta creator Hideki Kamiya is returning to work at Capcom, as his dream sequel to Ōkami gets its first trailer.

There were many surprises on Thursday night’s The Game Awards 2024 ceremony, from the first The Witcher 4 trailer to Naughty Dog’s next game, but while some did at least guess (or rather hope) those might be featured we doubt anyone had a sequel to Ōkami on their bingo card.

Presenter Geoff Keighley almost seemed to tear up as he announced the game, which only got a very brief teaser trailer – of Shinto sun goddess Amaterasu running across the world in wolf form (the name ōkami is a pun on the Japanese words for wolf and great god).

The game was never actually referred to as Ōkami 2, so the actual name will probably just involve a subtitle of some sort, but the other shock news was that original director Hideki Kamiya will be working on the game.

The original Ōkami was one of the last games Kamiya made before helping to co-found PlatinumGames, which he left under fairly mysterious circumstances in 2023, with one game still in development.

Whether he jumped or was pushed isn’t clear, but he’s been on gardening leave ever since and the Ōkami sequel will be his first new project since then.

He’s not actually joining Capcom though and instead will be developing the game at his new studio Clovers (a nod to Clover Studio, which was the name of the internal developer he worked on at Capcom when he was making Ōkami), which also employs other people that worked on the original game.

External studios M-Two (who helped out with Resident Evil 3 remake) and Machine Head Works (who did the same for Resident Evil 4 remake) will be assisting with development as well.

An Ōkami sequel has been a dream project of Kamiya for many years now, in fact he hinted about making it to us all the way back in 2016, when we spoke to him at E3. A month later we spoke to him again and he was talking about wanting to collaborate with Capcom for a new project, which may well have been where all this started.

Despite being one of the best Zelda style games not made by Nintendo, and ported and remastered on every format under the sun, Ōkami has never been financially successful.

Even so, it’s clear that Kamiya is not the only one at Capcom with a soft spot for it, as it did get a Nintendo DS sequel already, called Ōkamiden, made by a different team – after Kamiya and co. had already left to form Platinum.

The art style is based on traditional Japanese sumi-e techniques (YouTube)

When will Ōkami 2 be released?

The only problem with the Ōkami sequel annoucement is that not only did the trailer not reveal anything, other than the graphics will still be amazingly beautiful, but Capcom has warned that the game is ‘still a while away from release.’

Kaimya has only just started working on the game, so you’re probably looking at 2028 at the very least before it’s going to be ready, which is going to be a very painful wait.

If it’s that far out then it’ll probably be a couple more years until anything else is shown or said, although perhaps Kaimya will explain a bit more about what’s happened to himself in the meantime.

Hopefully the wait will be worth it (YouTube)

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