Oh man, great thread. I've been wanting to get this one off my chest for awhile:
Okami. Good lord I thought that game sucked. It's an action-adventure game, right? It was slow and repetitive in combat, which pretty much bored me of the "aciton" part. It didn't have any nifty puzzles or an enjoyable story, which bummed me out on the "adventure" part. It was long, arduous, and unrewarding. They stuck a Jiminy Cricket type character in there, but managed to somehow make him even more annoying and persistent. I hated going into the little arena thing every time I had to fight one of those battles with identical enemies. The brush stroking was repetitive and lacked novel use - you just did the same stroke to do the same thing in any obvious place. It's not like you were really using it to interact with the game in a unique way - there was no freedom. You just wave the right brush stroke and something appears, or disappears, or whatever, but it was all canned and scripted. It's not like you were cleverly chopping trees on an enemy, or damming rivers to flood an enemy, or plonking down stairs wherever you want to explore secret, optional areas.
It was boring, unfun, and I hated every minute of it. Everyone else seems to love it, for some reason that I really can't fathom at all. Frankly, I think it's no better than some bottom-of-the-barrel JRPG.
Whew, I feel better.