The Many Colours of Okami
1up spent all last week looking at the upcoming PS2 title Okami. A truly original story, the game tells the tale of a Japanese wolf god. A distinctive art style and inventive 'drawing' gameplay has made it a highly anticipated release for this fall. Some of the features include a hands-on with the English version, a look at what went into the localization to make the game understandable for Americans, and a great look at the art and music in the game.
Technically Amaterasu is the sun goddess. The wolf form is from much more obscure mythology IIRC.
You missed the important part of that:
Although usually known and depicted as female
In modern Japanese culture, Amaterasu is shown as female, just as Susano is always male.
The Japanese people playing the game in Japan aren't that much more likely to be familiar with the precise historical interpretation of background material like this, so it makes little sense to go on about fiddly little points of dispute between specialists in the field.
Well for one, at 2000's SpaceWorld event, Nintendo showed a GameCube tech demo of a realistic Link and Gannondorf fighting, stiring up their fanbase into believing that was what the GCN Zelda would look like. The first screens and videos emerged with it being cel shaded, and they felt left down. Additionally, the style of cel shading in Wind Waker (while it doesn't bother me personally) was more like a Saturday morning cartoon, rather then the Anime style cel shading featured in oh say Dark Cloud 2, Dragon Quest 8, and now Okami.