Fans of the PS2 version of Okami noticed something strange about the ending of the Wii version: the original staff credit roll was completely missing. Instead, the only credits on the game were for Ready at Dawn, who produced the port.
This eventually came to the attention of original Okami director Hideki Kamiya, now at Platinum Games. He blogged about it, and translations of his posts riled up fans enough that Platinum felt the need to publish their own "official" translation of the blog post on the Platinum Games Facebook page.
Since Im sure there are plenty of people who will still be playing Okami, I wont go into specific details... However, it was the first time for us to make a long adventure, and so the staff roll was filled with all of the omoi appropriate for the end of a long journey. ... They were the omoi of everyone who worked on the project, put together in a moment of bliss held out just for those who completed the journey. It was a special staff roll for a special moment. And now it is gone. All of it.
Omoi is a Japanese word that roughly combines "emotions" and "intentions", which Platinum's translator chose to leave intact.
The translation of Kamiya's original post resulted in a comment about the situation from Ready at Dawn's Didier Malenfant, in the translated post's comment thread:
As was noted in many articles about this, here at Ready At Dawn we're huge fans of Clover's work and Okami in particular. We would never willingly tried to not give credit where credit was due and made a point, everywhere we could, in making the Wii version identical to the PS2 version (we even got sh*t for that with people asking for new content).
To be completely fair, while part of the issue seems to have been a legal one with Capcom Japan (I don't know the details of that), we did also have a problem with the Wii data being much larger than the original PS2 version. We ended up running out of room on the disc which would have made adding the staff roll back in the game a tough thing anyway.
Finally, Capcom USA also commented on the issue via their official forums, more or less confirming Malenfant's comments.
The credits were removed because they were a pre-rendered movie that contained the Clover logo. We have no legal right to use the Clover logo in a game they were not involved with directly. We also didn't have the source to the credit movie itself, so we couldn't just use it and remove the Clover logo.
So why didn't they have source video to edit out the logo, and what was Capcom Japan's problem? We'll probably never know. Suffice to say that if you want to know who did want in the creation of the content of Okami, you are likely going to have to find a video of the PS2 ending on the Wii, and that's pretty lame.
