LostWinds: Winter of the Melodias - Game Review

Pros: Innovative control scheme, very pretty
Cons: Control scheme hard to get the hang of, needlessly aggravating

I hate this game. I hate this game so much. I just want to make it absolutely, positively clear: I hate LostWinds: Winter of the Melodias.

I don’t often hate games. If I don’t like a game, I stop playing before I grow to despise it. But Melodias looks like it should be fun, and it is a very popular sequel to the very popular original LostWinds game, and because of that, I played it enough to really hate it.

Melodias is an unusual platformer in which you move a little guy around using wind. If you want him to jump up to a platform, you press the A button and flick your remote up to create a gust that carries him higher. A few flicks done in quick succession will, if you’re lucky, get him to where he can grab onto a ledge and pull himself up.

The game seemed fun at first, but it became very frustrating almost immediately when the little guy reached Summerfalls, an icy wilderness. There I had to get him up a series of cliffs. It would take me a few tries to get him to the first cliff, and then I wouldn’t quite get him to the second. Sometimes I would get him to the second, but not quite to the third.

This was quite frustrating, but what made it virtually intolerable was the little guy’s susceptibility to the cold. Melodias has many torches and stone lantern-like pillars, but if you move away from them, your avatar will begin to freeze and lose health points. So every time I failed to make it to a cliff, I had to run back to a pillar to warm up. And every time it took me too long to reach a cliff, I had to drop back down to warm up before starting over, because otherwise I would die.

I’ve been told this cold mechanism is not in the first game, and I think it is a terrible, terrible idea.

After about 40 minutes of this I emailed the developer asking for advice, which wasn’t very helpful, and then asked for advice on gamefaqs.com, which helped a little. Finally, I made it up those cliffs.

As I played, there would be places where I had a choice of ways to go. Some would lead me to special items, but usually I would get an item and then freeze to death before I could get back to a fire. Once I died, I would go to one of the game’s few checkpoints and have to replay a big chunk of the game.

Even recovering health was annoying. Occasionally one could find fruit that would restore some of your health, but these often weren’t near a fire, so you could eat fruit while your health was steadily draining. And for some reason the game insists that eating fruit should take a considerable amount of time.

I struggled with the game for probably a total of 3 hours, and just really hated every minute. The controls were frustrating, and the constant need to warm up made every little mistake extremely costly, and made exploration deadly. I wanted to explore, look for items, check alternate paths, but even though the game offered the opportunity to do so, it penalized players severely for trying it.

This was working me into an intense fury when suddenly my guy was given a really good coat and the whole warming thing was over. And I thought, okay, now that I’m getting the hang of the controls, now that I can explore without penalty, now that I don’t have to deal with the cold, maybe this game will pick up. Maybe it just started bad.

For a while, this seemed possible, and I had a little fun exploring the world and solving some puzzles. But then I was given the task of collecting fruit. This doesn’t sound hard, but it involves using the wind to hurl fruit up a series of ledges. This is difficult, and made more so because it is possible to break the fruit.

One needs three fruits, and the third is quite far away and has to be blown a great distance and, if destroyed, replaced by another fruit equally far away. To make matters worse, at one point I accidentally walked past the invisible border that separates various sections of the game and resets everything, thus losing the two fruits I had already collected.

What makes this so infuriating is that there is a lot in this game to like. It’s got original game mechanics that lets you create gusts and cyclones or whirl the snow into a destructive snowball. The graphics are gorgeous. Everything about the game seems polished.

That’s why I hate it, because it so seems like a game I should like that I kept on playing long after I would have quit another game. And with every passing minute of aggravation, with every time I just missed a cliff ledge and had to run back to warm up, or died and had to start the whole level over, I hated the game a little more. I just feel like the designers purposely set out to create something irritating.

I don’t care that Melodias has received rave reviews, nor that it is one of the top selling WiiWare titles. I don’t care if it wins awards, gets celebrity endorsements or is turned into a movie. Whatever anyone else thinks, I hate, hate, hate, hate this game.