Fragile Dreams (Wii)

This game isn't for everyone. The camera is a bit slow to turn, and the combat isn't the best. But that isn't the point of the game.

The game focuses around Seto, a boy who, just after the death of his grandfather, is lonely. But you would be in a world where most people died long before. After reading a letter from said grandfather telling him survivors may be found if he headds for the red tower. And with this he does. Before long, he notices a silver-haired girl. When he tries to approach her, however, she runs off. Now knowing that he isn't the only person left alive, he chases after the girl.

The story of this game is it's undoubted strong point. It is very touching as you progress, and the way it fills you in on the backstory of the world has to be one of the best storytelling elements that I've seen in a game. You could find newspaper headlines or old adverts on the walls, or even messages wrote by the deceased, but the best is the items found on the ground. You see, if you oick these up from the ground, and then take them to a fire (save spot) these items (which can range from rubber ducks to bells) will play memories, which can be about anything, and none are really useful, but they're really beutiful and deserve to be listened to.

The gameplay is, I admit, not it's strongest point. You do wander round a bit, so if you like going from point A to point B then this isn't the best use of your money. The combat is mainly focused on timed attacks (not that the enemies are that difficult) but, while it didn't annoy me it could get a bit frustrating, sometimes your weapon will break, meaning that you will do significantly less damage until you can replace it. And unless you have a spare weapon in your bag (which has limited space, but it makes a nice managment system and is a refreshing bit of realism in a time when people can hold RPGs in their trouser pocket) you will need to get to a save point to change weapon. Like I said, it didn't annoy me, but I could see it being a bit of a turn off for some.

But it makes up for it graphically. Perfectly matching the world and the feel of the game, these are some of the best graphics on the Wii. The cutscenes, which some of them are given an animated treatment, are also a joy to behold.

Like I said at the start it ain't for everyone. But if your willing to play something different, you will find it becoming one of your favourite games in your Wii collection. Maybe to others it won't be a 5 star game. Maybe you might hate it. But for me, it deserved all 5 of those stars despite it's flaws and takes pride and place in my Wii collection. You should really give it a go

I really liked this game.

It's not like i hate having to fight monster and so on but in most RPG games i just think you have to spend hours and hours on levelling and trying to get enough money. In this game you really don't have to worry about that. If you just attack whatever comes your way you will level up and earn enough to buy new weapons.

I don't know the right term for it but when you come to a new area, the monsters appear and they can move around there freely and they can choose to attack you all at the same time.

Seto doesn't learn any skills to kill the monsters with but he does get different weapons that can break over time. He can't hold that many things in his hands so you have to think about what weapons you have with you and how many healing items too course they don't group together. Plus you have to make room for the items and money you pick up.

At a bonfire you unwrap what you pick up and can move it to your bag. You can transfer what you have in your bag to your hands too. You save your game and get fully healed there too. Some times a weird guy comes and you can buy things from him. I never really used any healing objects be course there are a lot of bonfires.

I liked the story and the graphic very much, that's why i gave it a high score but i just think the game was too short. I looked for every little thing in like every corner to make sure i didn't miss anything and it still only took me 20 hours to finish the game. You can do it a lot faster if you don't care about the small stories from the objects you pick up. And most of these stories are boring too and don't effect or help the main story at all.

It's quite tricky to pigeonhole Fragile Dreams (the closest I can manage is a cross between the Zelda and Silent Hill series), which is part of what makes it interesting. In a nutshell the story follows a boy who, after recently burying the old man he was living with, ventures out into a post-apocalyptic world in search of other survivors. On the way he runs into various characters (not all of them human) who join him for different parts of the journey. Bizzarely he seems to form the biggest bond with a dozy girl he meets for about a minute, and most of the game is spent tracking her down.

Gameplay takes the form of wandering through the decaying environment and clobbering the ghosts (or 'thought-entities' as the game likes to call them) that occasionally pop up. The story breaks this linear progression up by occasionally blocking your way with a locked door or asking you to backtrack to fetch some items, but running around thumping ghosts is pretty much the meat of it.

Unfortunately, given how much fighting there is to do, the real-time combat feels quite clunky and unbalanced. There are a number of different weapons, but the 'pole' variety has a wide-ranged charge attack and packs the biggest punch, so there's little point in using anything else other than to inject some variety. Projectile weapons are largely pointless as they can't be used in tandem with your torch, which is the only way to reveal the majority of them. Limited inventory space and slow menus discourage you from carrying more than one weapon at a time. Most enemies are quite easy to pass by without fighting though, so I found myself just carrying close-range weapons and jogging past the annoying birds.

There are some neat ideas. The Wii Remote's speaker is used nicely to locate moving enemies (and other characters) in a 'hot-and-cold' style way - when you're pointing in the right direction, the sound will be louder. But most of the good points about the game come from the beautifully realised world. This is definitely one of the nicer looking Wii games, and deserves points for injecting its dystopia with some colour (the sunsets and sunrises are its biggest trick, but the ruined train stations and malls also crammed with detail and dripping with atmosphere). It's just as well, as you spend a lot of time running back and forth through it without a lot happening.

The story won't set the world on fire, but the theme of loneliness and loss comes across well - some of the items that you find have 'memories' attached to them, which are surprisingly poignant little snippets of dialogue detailing someone's last hours before whatever disaster it was occurred. I played it through with English voices, which were generally pretty decent in an above-average anime type way (aside from the main character's painful campfire whimperings - "I hope I'm not getting sick", "This is so soothing" etc), but the game has an option to turn them to Japanese which some may prefer.

Overall I found Fragile Dreams a decent story, but mostly in spite of the game itself. Combat gripes and other design niggles persist (the randomly-appearing and time-consuming merchant at save points, for example - why not just have an option to call him? Also, the hand-drawn map adds a nice touch of realism to the survival, but is next-to-useless in terms of functionality as it doesn't show your location), but I found myself perservering to see how the story would turn out. With more satisfying combat and a bit more polish, I'd have no trouble recommending this game, it's really just a question of how badly you want to find out if Seto ever finds the silver-haired girl again.