Developer: Frontier Developments
Platform: WiiWare
Cost: 1000 Nintendo Points
Genre: Puzzle, Platformer
Acquired: Purchased from the Nintendo Wii Shop Channel
Pros: Looks great, the puzzles are well designed
Cons: The novelty wears off pretty quickly, controls seem clunky.
Verdict: If you can get past all of the cons above, then pick it up. Otherwise, you might want to skip on this puzzle/platformer.
Lostwinds: Winter of the Melodias is the sequel to the original Lostwinds released on the Nintendo WiiWare service as a launch title. Having not picking up the first one, I delved into this second title without knowing much of what was going on. Fortunately, I didn’t need to! The story of Winter of the Melodias is fairly simple. You take on the role of Toku and his “wind spirit” friend named Enril, who turns out to be essential to the way the game works (more information on that below). Toku finds out that his mother has gone missing with only one clue, a page of her journal.
During this quest to find your mother, you’ll go through very beautiful environments, including steaming, hot, and sunny jungles and freezing, negative-degree ice-worlds that are forever in Winter (hence the title). While these visually look very impressive and mesmerizing to look at, it doesn’t play as well as it looks. The controls are not executed to the best, and it seems as if the developers of this title wanted to cram in all this unnecessary arm moving that, to be honest, makes you look more like a man-man/woman than playing a game. This becomes most apparent in the way they added no attack or jump button, but for some reason decided to go ahead and add these, to be frank, contrived gestures that make the game feel floaty, clunky, and, unfortunately, shows lazyness from the developers.
Using the Nunchuk, you control Toku left and right, and by gesturing with the Wii Remote, you’ll control Emril, you wind spirit friend, who can do a variety of wind-manipulation moves to complete puzzles, and to make Toku jump. While some of these movements are easy to pull off, some can be more complex and it doesn’t help that the game doesn’t explain these too well. It might say shake the Wii Remote left and right, but it doesn’t explain this in the context of what item or items you’re meant to be doing this move on, which can really confuse you and make something that really should take ten seconds or so, drag on to a five minute session of figuring out what the heck you’re supposed to be doing.
The controls in Winter of the Melodias are very clunky. To control any form of the wind, you have to do gestures on the screen. This even includes making Toku jump. Instead of just giving him a jump button, you literally have to draw a line from below to above Toku for her to jump. It’s the same with attacking. Instead of just giving Toku an attack button, you have to draw lines to make the wind slam the “creatures” against the wall to defeat them. I will reiterate here, these movements after a while become real annoying to pull off, and can become tiresome having to hold the Wii Remote up to the screen just to do one small line for Toku to jump. Seriously, can developers start thinking of something a little different and not go with the standard of “OMG let’s like totally add some random gestures just ’cause it’s on the Wii!”
Some puzzles and gameplay elements are well thought out though, such as the use of the wind to spread fire around for the purpose of melting icicles blocking your path to lighting other torches to solve puzzles and to keep you warm, which brings me to my next cool gameplay element: the cold system. When you are near a torch, you’re nice and warm, but if you go out of that area to move up somewhere else, you have to constantly look for another source of heat (or create one through the method explained above) or face losing your health, and eventually, your life. I think this gameplay element is really well thought out and brings a dimension of hectically to the table, as you struggle to create or find another source of heat. There is a point in the game, though, where you collect a ‘costume’ of sorts that will keep you warm all the time so that element disappears.
All in all Lostwinds has a good idea, but it doesn’t execute it well enough to be something you want to keep playing through. While the game does include collectibles for you to go back and search for through the game, there’s really not much more that will want to keep you coming back. The price point of 1000 Wii Points seems reasonable for the amount of work is apparent went into the game, but there is no fun to it. If you can get past all the points brought up in this review, then definitely give it a go, but otherwise, I would recommend searching around for a more…well…better game to play. There are heaps of games on the Wii and elsewhere that can offer the same style of gameplay that you can find here in Winter of the Melodias, probably without the stupid arm-flailing action and better gameplay.
Popularity: unranked [?]
