Okage: Shadow King

In Okage: Shadow King, the player character Ari proceeds through the game by visiting towns, traveling across the overworld and exploring dungeons. The game contains warp pillars that can be used to quickly travel to other locations once they have been discovered.

The turn-based combat is similar to that of many role-playing games, with characters having health points (HP) and magic points (MP). Battles generally commence when the player touches an enemy on the overworld. In addition to party members engaging in combat, Ari's shadow Stan, although not playable, may use powerful magic attacks on the enemy. Each fight is turned based, and a character can opt to wait in order to perform a more powerful combo attack with other characters.

Ari is a 16 year old boy who lives in the village of Tenel with his mother, father, grandparents, and his little sister, Annie. Ari is often described by the various people in his life as being overshadowed, constantly being ignored or talked over without regard. One day, when the circus arrives in town and Ari misses it due to his father talking to him for two hours about a bottle he brought home the previous night, Ari finds Annie passed out after being attacked by a ghost, cursing her to speak pig latin. Distraught over what happened to her, Ari's father brings the family to the basement to perform a ritual that he believes would open the bottle and cure her.

However, after reciting the incantation, he unknowingly releases the spirit of a 300 year old "Evil King" named Lord Stanley Hihat Trinidad XIV, or "Stan" for short, alongside his butler, James. Though Stan agrees to cure Annie, he only does so under the condition that one member of the family must give their shadow as a vessel for Stan and serve as his slave for all of eternity. Ari is then selected after a contest comparing the family's shadows due to his personality and overshadowed status.

Okage: Shadow King was developed by Zener Works and published by Sony Computer Entertainment. Programmer Yasushi Takeda, one of the founders of Zener Works, recalled that the company was producing a game for the Panasonic M2 prior to the system's cancellation. Sony contacted them in June 1997 about making a game for the original PlayStation. Okage thus began development but the project was moved to the PlayStation 2 when Sony requested Zener Works do so the day before it announced its next-generation console on March 1, 1999.

All the graphics and coding was redone in order to be compatible with the newer console's Emotion Engine. Takeda stated that debugging was a challenge due to the company working with the console in an early state and the absence of such tools.

The PlayStation 2 version received "average" reviews according to the review aggregation website Metacritic. In Japan, Famitsu gave it a score of 30 out of 40.