The announcement of a sequel to beloved adventure game Ōkami at The Game Awards last year was met with plenty of fan celebration, but we still know very, very little about what exactly the game entails. In a recent interview with project leads, IGN was able to confirm a few crumbs, including that yes, the "Ōkami sequel" is in fact a direct sequel to the events of the first game.
Speaking to IGN, Capcom producer Yoshiaki Hirabayashi confirmed that the Okami sequel is a "continuation of the story that we saw in the original game." We asked, as a follow-up, if the team could confirm that was in fact the great god Amaterasu in the trailer we saw at TGAs. While director Hideki Kamiya cryptically responded with "I wonder..." Hirabayashi responded moments later that it was.
While this news probably doesn't come as a shock to fans, there has been significant speculation about how an Ōkami sequel would handle successorship from Ōkami. Technically, there's already a sequel to Ōkami - Ōkamiden, a Nintendo DS game starring Amaterasu's child, Chibiterasu, and features a number of characters from the original game. However, Ōkamiden was met with mixed feedback, both for its release on the DS rather than on console and for its creation without key original team members such as Kamiya.
I asked the team about Ōkamiden and whether it would be acknowledged, and Hirabayashi had this to say:
"We know that there are fans out there that like the game, of course. And we also know the feedback on the game out there, of how the story was taken and now how perhaps parts of the story weren’t aligning with what people were expecting. With that, we also have the sequel now that, as we explained before, is a continuation from the story of the original base Ōkami. That's how we're going to phrase it."
The ending of Ōkami does invite a sequel, though, regardless of what happens in Ōkamiden. Without spoiling things too much, the end of Ōkami has Amaterasu and another character traveling somewhere new that isn't explored in the first game at all, and leaves plenty of room for that journey to include new struggles both for Amaterasu and the other protagonists.
Unfortunately, we're not going to get much more detail than this for a while. In the same interview, the team confirmed that the Ōkami sequel was in very, very early development, with the team announcing it so early simply because they were excited and wanted to. Sadly, per Hirabayashi, that also means "It might take a little bit of time before we might talk again."
You can catch up on our full interview with the leads of the Ōkami sequel right here.
Rebekah Valentine is a senior reporter for IGN. You can find her posting on BlueSky @duckvalentine.bsky.social. Got a story tip? Send it to [email protected].
