Although the Japanese developer is known for banning a lot of users on Twitter (sometimes with snide remarks), he also has experience when it comes to his games.
Kamiya was the director of Resident Evil 2, and later worked on a game that was originally a concept for Resident Evil 4, but strayed so far from Capcom’s IP that it became Devil May Cry. Viewtiful Joe followed, followed by Ōkami. He then left Capcom to continue at PlatinumGames, first with Bayonetta and then with The Wonderful 101. But he left in October 2023, and by his own admission, he left because he had given it a lot of thought and wanted to continue working on games.
But the Ōkami sequel presented at The Game Awards surprised everyone. Kamiya’s biggest surprise was how the public received the announcement. He told IGN: “Even now, I look at the YouTube reactions to the announcement, and I look at the people reacting to the video, and I find myself crying with the fans. And I’m just so happy to see that, oh, people are so happy to see this game come true. To be there live in the audience and to hear people react there, and not only that, but to see people react on social channels afterwards, there are so many people waiting for this title. And I was very surprised and happier than I thought I would be to hear that people were so excited about this game,” Kamiya said.
We don’t know much about the sequel to Ōkami. It’s being developed by a new studio, Clovers, and Kamiya’s influence is quite strong: several developers from PlatinumGames have come over, so it’s essentially a return of people who left Capcom after a brief stint at the Japanese company. Kamiya suggests not playing the Nintendo Wii port of Ōkami, by the way, because it was developed by Ready at Dawn in the US… but there are ports (PS2, PS3, PlayStation 4, Xbox One, Nintendo Switch, PC…).
Let’s hope to hear more about Ōkami 2 soon.
