This all pretty much chimes with my experience of Okami. Behind its elegant art style it simply wouldn't stop talking at me and making me collect things; I'd hoped the game would be as formally interesting as its aesthetics. While I stopped playing it for a few hours (and correct me if it suddenly becomes amazing later on), it reminded me a little of Psychonauts, which has a similar problem, only less extreme: beneath its joyful invention and sharp writing it is on one level a fun but merely competent platformer with an extremely inelegant reward system involving way too many random trinkets to pick up and way too little to do with them.

Ultimately, for-profit game companies are not designing for people who read game blogs, let alone for people who write for them. They're designing for the median gamer. The median gamer, it turns out, enjoys a constant stream of rewards (even if they don't go completionist on finding all of them), and often needs reminders and instructions. I appreciate it when a game gives me the option to nuke some of its hand-holding — e.g. Skyward Sword at least let you kill the giant representation of the controller that hogged a big chunk of screen space — but I can't get too upset at the designers for doing what lets them sell more copies. They're trying to make a living, as well as making art. And Okami was some pretty spectacular art.