Hideki Kamiya is in a rather interesting place right now. If you recall, the former lead at PlatinumGames left the company and now has to deal with a massive 1-year non-compete clause. As such, he’s been doing various other things to keep himself busy. One of those things is making YouTube videos and answering questions about various things in his career or the industry as a whole. In his latest conversation, he talked about the cult classic Capcom title Okami, of which he was the game’s director. What might surprise you is that he feels there’s a key reason why the game failed: he didn’t get the team he wanted.
Okami was made back in the days when Hideki Kamiya was a part of Team Clover, which is no longer around. In a chat with environment artist Ikumi Nakamura, who also worked on the game with Kamiya, he revealed that there was supposed to be a “dream team” of people working on the title, but they didn’t get everyone they wanted, and that led to many internal clashes:
“It wasn’t a dream team. There was a very drastic contrast within. There were certainly people without whom there would be no Okami. Those members shone brightly. Some of them really shone stronger even more than ones I had worked with previously. I’m not saying this as flattery, but you [Nakamura] certainly did. Naoki Katakai and Keniichirou Yoshimura, Sawaki Takeyasu, Mari Shimazaki, Hiroshi Yamaguchi. I’m really grateful, but when viewed as a whole, it wasn’t a dream team.”
He even went so far as to label the team as “weak” as a whole, which isn’t what you would expect to hear from a leader of a team. However, Kamiya is nothing if not an honest man, even to a fault.
He also lamented the game’s poor sales, which he contributed heavily to the closure of Team Clover:
“The initial shipment was 90,000. It was a huge failure. If it had been successful, Clover would have probably continued.”
The irony, of course, is that while it was a failure on the commercial level, it was a success critically. Many people praised the game for its unique visuals and gameplay mechanics. The title was so popular that the main protagonist of Okami Amaterasu was featured in Marvel vs. Capcom! Plus, Capcom itself kept porting the game to different systems to try and boost sales, so it did gain sales over time.
Still, Kamiya probably still wonders what would’ve happened if he had gotten the team he dreamed of.
