When I think RPG games, three consoles come to mind: The Super Nintendo, the Sony Playstation and the PS2. The SNES was the first console to have a very large number of RPG games that had well defined stories, the original Playstation was home to Square's greatest achievements, while the PS2 had more variety from many different companies. This one is brought to us by Sony and is a rather fun tale of a boy and adventure, originally called Satan and Me in Japan. Not sure where the heck the Okage portion of the title in America came from and not sure what it even means as there is nothing in the game called this, though the Shadow King subtitle is appropriate.
The story, a boy's father finds a bottle and when opened a entity known as Stan (Satan in Japan) is released and he curses the boy's sister into speaking pig Latin. So of course, the boy's parents give up their son willingly to be a slave to Stan so that Stan can acquire more power to take over the world! Rosalyn the hero wishes to defeat Stan and help the hapless boy and he will also be joined by a professor and a few surprise figures as he tries to find evil kings so that Stan may grow in power and also maybe figure out the mystery of the strange land they inhabit.
The game play is standard for the day featuring villages to explore, lands to traverse and dungeons to conquer. The combat is turn based which is like taboo now, but quite frankly, my favorite format for combat in RPG games. It is more like chess and is more strategic than action based where you spam the super powered attacks and repeat. This game is one of the few RPG games I know of where sleep spells and defense spells are actually very useful thus adding to the strategy. The game can be one in just under 30 or just over 30 hours, harking back to a time it didn't take forever to get through a game, but still long enough to entertain for a good bit of time.
So, a fun game, it is not without its flaws though as for some reason as with other games that are a bit more on the humorous side as far as narrative, the game can be very challenging and difficult at times meaning lots of grinding for experience and money. There is also no voice acting other than a narrator that comes in here and there, this leads me to almost believe that this game was being developed for the first Playstation as voice acting in a game on PS2 was commonplace. Still, overall it is a fun game and the world in it is very reminiscent of Tim Burton's Nightmare Before Christmas as is the art style of the characters.
