Today I finished an adventure that I had started out on just a mere 24 hours or five months earlier: Okamiden.

My initial apprehension towards Okamiden rapidly faded as I began to get into the game and realize that in it’s complexity it was far more than just a scaled down rehash of the seminal PS2 Okami. From combat, to brush strokes, to atmosphere and plotting the game has nearly everything that it’s big brother has.  

Gameplay

My initial impression dwelt heavily on Okami’s scaled down gameplay at it’s lack of features. I now have to eat these words. Although the button-mashing aspects of combat are scaled down to just mashing A to attack, the ease of using brush strokes on the DS makes the spirit brush an integral component of late-game combat. As I began collecting slicing, lightening, fire, and wind strokes I soon found myself combining them into effective combos: wind to knock an opponent on the ground, rain or lightening to slow and trap them, then close in with a couple of bombs and basic attacks. I would say that by the end of Okamiden it had the combative depth of Okami.

Dungeons were likewise exemplar. Puzzles made liberal use of companions special abilities and combinations of brush strokes to activate devises. I found myself taking my time in many of these places to really explore all the rooms, solve the extra puzzles and pick up every last scrap of artwork I could find. I don’t think I have so thoroughly immersed myself in the exploration aspects of a dungeon crawl since Ocarina of Time.  

Aesthetics & Plotting

Okamiden is gorgeous and I am rather surprised that the aesthetics of Okami could scaled down so perfectly to fit onto the DS’s small screen. Yet, here it is completing with music, sounds and tantalizing natural scenes.

Okami suffered one issue. It jumped the shark in its plotting. The early gameplay introduces eight-headed dragon Orochi and for the large part of the tale we believe that we are somehow fighting against this beast. Yet, we defeat him two thirds of the way through the game and are suddenly a new demon turning the progression of the story completely on it’s head. The result is a feeling that the later half of the game had been rushed and lacks the detail of the first portion of the game. The ending seems a tacked on after-story to the quest to lift Orochi’s curse.

Okamiden, on the other hand, feels like a much more complete narrative. The major plot turns are well foreshadowed and we expect these surprises – Kurow’s betrayal and the appearance of Akuro make sense from a narrative perspective.

I feel that Okamiden is a complete adventure title. Unlike the DS Zelda titles which I think attempt to be minor iterations in the overall Zelda lineup – Okamiden simply feels like a full fledge title and not a scaled down hand-held port of it’s predecessor. I hope that it sees some good success on the handheld platform and look forward to the continuation of this franchise. Kuni’s tale deserves to be told.

Eureka! I’ve solved yet another odd puzzle of digital photography: easily making your RAW file look like what you see on your Nikon’s LCD screen.

Perhaps you have just made the leap from shooting with JPEGs to shooting with RAW. You’ve already read up on the various deficiencies of JPEGS: compression, loss of color data, difficulty of editing and the many advantages of RAW: ability to easily manipulate midtones, white balance and apply color filters in post production. Happily, you start shooting in RAW but there is a problem. The unprocessed photos lack the pop and vividness of your old JPEGs.

When you first open your RAW file in ACR or Lightroom there is a brief flicker as  your various in-camera settings (saturation, warmth filters, vividness) are  stripped away leaving you with a rather dull looking low-contrast image. This is because your camera saves a small JPEG thumbnail to showcase on it’s LCD monitor. This thumbnail contains all the post-processing features that your camera does on JPEGs to make them pop for the novice user.

The color calibrated image is on the left while the Adobe Standard is on the right. Note the added sharpness and warmth that calibration brings to the left image.

I used to spend hours messing around with the sliders in Lightroom just trying to recreate the same vivid colors that I saw on my camera’s LCD monitor and all the while cursing Lightroom, Picasa, or Photoshop for gimping an otherwise perfect shot. Only last week did I discover the easy, automated method in Lightroom 3 to bring back the beauty camera’s in-house processing performs. This method is camera calibration. Simply follow these steps:

Open Lightroom 3 and select the photo you want to restore to your camera’s settings.

Click on the Develop tab on the upper-right hand corner.

Below the histogram at the very bottom of the right toolbar is the Camera Calibration toolset

The Camera Calibration allows for manual adjustment of the Red, Green, and Blue values of the image as well as the tinting of shadows.  You will find something odd about this tool, namely: adjusting sliders in the Camera Calibration tool will not adjust the Hue/Saturation Sliders or Tone Curve of the image but rather defines a new “starting point” for post processing the image.

While the sliders can be used to make adjustments, the easiest method is to use the presets under the profile drop-down which for my camera (a Nikon d80) gives the options of :

• List item
•  ACR 4.4 and ACR 3.6 (this is Photoshop’s defaults)
• Adobe Standard (this is the ugly, bland default for lightroom)
• Camera D2X Mode 1, Mode 2, and Mode 3 (more on these below)
• Landscape
• Neutral
• Portrait
• Standard
• Vivid

The Adobe Standard which comes pre-selected for you also happens to be the blandest of all the profile options. I suggest trying one of the Camera Modes, one of which will most certainly closely match with the image your camera displays on it’s LCD monitor. My favorite is Color Mode 3 for it’s warmth and vividness when shooting nature shots, but it can be too warm and too vivid for portraiture or indoor shots and so this gives a good opportunity for overriding my camera settings to select Portrait or Camera Mode 1 on the rare occasions that I am shooting an event. The Vivid profile is also fairly interesting, but I would suggest using it on a case-by-case basis since it seems to blow-out already bright photos.

It was my luck that The Secret World of Arrietty came to Sioux Falls. This is my first Ghibli film that I could see in its proper setting: the big screen and I must say that it was a spectacular treat for the eyes, replete with stunning backgrounds and gracefully animated characters who play out yet another fantastical story. While Arrietty will probably not be my most favorite Studio Ghibli film, it does possess the wit, charm and magic that I expect from the creators of Spirited Away, Howl’s Moving Castle, and Princess Mononoke. It’s only real lack is in it’s pacing, which seems much slower than past fare and for some may be too slow.

I happened to watch Spirited Away the day after seeing Arrietty and it occurred to me how much sense of atmosphere Ghibli creates in their films through the deep sense of place and connection that chracters have with the environment that they occupy. Ghibli certainly pays very close attention to the details in it’s stories and illustrations and I think that this sense of environment is just one example of stroytelling that makes their films so tremendously delightful.

Environment in story informs the characters and plot, or at least it should if the author is paying any attention to their setting. A character who is actually living in their world will face the unique limitations that their environment creates – their culture, actions, and life will all be informed by this setting. Ghibli films realize this reality in a way that so many other films simply ignore. Their worlds draw upon the ambient emotions that nature’s many forms (violence, tempered, serene, and sublime) create in the human psyche. Let me take a quick glance at a few Ghibli films and illustrate how this plays out:

Princess Mononoke

The atmosphere of Mononoke drips of the time when the wilds were an alien and unforgiving place for mankind. Early on in the film we see the difficulties that civilization has sought to overcome: the danger of predatory animals (Moro), the difficulty in navigating the wilds (the muddy and treacherous caravan trips), and deadly weather. Yet, nature still possesses a sense of serenity. The Emishii peoples seem to live a harmonious existence with nature as does San.  The characters who find nature the most brutal are the ones who act the hardest to work contrary to their environment. Overall, the scenes create an atmosphere that mimics the internal difficulties of each scenes principal characters. For the caravaners the woods is a dangerous, frightful place but in the hands of Ashitaka the woods becomes a land of delightful and helpful spirits – the differences not in the woods, but in how the characters approaches dealing with their sense of place in the natural world.

Spirited Away

Since Spirited Away takes place in a bath house and not the wilds we see a very different approach to place. The bath house of Yubaba is a fusion of Japanese and Chinese aesthetics that exaggerates the more gaudi elements of Chinese style and completely abandons Buddhist simplicity in everything but its depictions of the natural world. The bath house is simply an extension of Yubaba, who is a greedy and gluttonous crone. We see these characteristics not only in her employees but reflected back to them by Noh-face who absorbs the essence of the place as he stumbles about eating the staff and flinging gold about. Not until he disgorges the filth of the bath house can he go back to his simpleness.

The Secret World of Arrietty

The world of the borrowers takes on a much more realistic charm that lies less in the fantastical elements as much as trying to showcase how the borrowers would interact with their gargantuan environment. Arrietty’s family lives in the walls of houses where they make their way about using ropes, nail staircases, and simple free-climbing techniques in an adventurous method that reminds me of real-world caving. They “borrow” from their environment as they take only what they need from the Beans who they both live beside and in fear of. I think in Arrietty we see a kind of modern Emishii where their lifestyle nurtures a kind of connectedness to their environment that emphasizes a sense of propriety over taking only what is needed while leaving the superficial (the gaudy playhouse) behind.