The change of protagonist was the least of that game’s problems honestly. It could have been a good game with a totally different character.

Really it was supposed to be a sequel but it played like a bad commentary track on the first game.

The kid characters (more like bad clones) were uninteresting, they went to the exact same places, to meet the exact same people that weren’t doing anything but reminisce Okami’s events.

The very few new elements were so boring. New enemies were a brownish generic mess, made even more obvious during the time travel bit where we get to fight enemies with the old, vastly more creative designs.

And of course on the purely technical aspect, they fucked up by trying to replicate exactly the environments of the original on a DS, because the way they did it was hacking them into extremely tiny spaces with long loading times between them, ruining the pace. They should have made a game adapted to the DS to begin with, even if it meant scaling down some things.