Following the announcement of a sequel to cult favorite Ōkami at The Game Awards last year, fans immediately began speculating that the game would be developed in RE Engine thanks to Capcom's return as publisher. IGN can now exclusively confirm that's the case, after speaking with several leads on the project.
In a lengthy interview, the use of RE Engine was confirmed by Machine Head Works producer Kiyohiko Sakata. When we asked him about Machine Head Works' role on the project, he responded as follows:
The way that Machine Head Works is involved now, working together with Capcom and Clovers, is that of course we have Capcom as the major IP holder of Ōkami, deciding the major direction of the games. And we have Clovers as this development lead for this project. Machine Head Works comes in by having the experience of both working with Capcom previously on several titles, so we know what Capcom needs to create the game. That's something that Machine Head Works has the experience and knowledge of. We also have the experience of working with Kamiya-san before as well. So we have both experience of Capcom and Clovers, and we're acting sort of like a bridge between Clovers and Capcom.
In addition to this, we also have the experience of working with the game engine that we are using for this project, RE Engine. So Clovers' developers haven't had any experiences with using this engine, but Machine Head Works have experience of using it. So we're aiding them. Also under us, Machine Head Works, we have people who have actually had experience of working with the original Ōkami game and also will be aiding us with the development of this title.
Later in the interview, we asked what it was about RE Engine that was appealing to the teams, and if there were things they could accomplish with RE Engine that were specifically helpful to an Okami sequel. Capcom producer Yoshiaki Hirabayashi responded quite simply: "Yes."
He then elaborated just a little: "However, of course we cannot go into much detail at this point in time. But we from Capcom, we believe that without RE Engine at this point we wouldn't be able to realize [director Hideki] Kamiya-san's artistic dreams for this project."
Kamiya also interjected: "So RE Engine is of course famous for showing the best of the games that they have. Very, very good expressively. And so we believe people are also expecting and awaiting the RE Engine level of quality now for this game."
Later in the interview, the leads teased RE Engine again, with Sakata noting that it may enable the team to do certain things with the Ōkami sequel that they had wanted to do with the first Ōkami, but couldn't. "With today's technology, we are able to achieve all of this that we were trying to achieve back in the days and perhaps even greater now, now than what we have the RE Engine as well working with us," he said.
RE Engine, short for Reach for the Moon Engine, is Capcom's proprietary engine that was originally designed for Resident Evil 7: Biohazard. Since then, Capcom has used it in all of its major games, most notably the Resident Evil series, Monster Hunter, Street Fighter, and Dragon's Dogma. Most of the games made in RE Engine thus far have a fairly realistic art style (with a few smaller exceptions), leaving it exciting to imagine what might be possible with Okami's particular art style. Capcom is currently working on a new successor engine, known as REX. Its technology is supposedly slowly being integrated into the existing RE Engine, meaning we may see some elements of it in the Ōkami sequel as well.
You can catch up on everything else from our interview with the leads of the upcoming Ōkami sequel in the full Q&A 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 rvalentine@ign.com.
