Broken Dreams

The divide between the artistic elements of a game (The Music, the direction, the voice work, the story) and the actual gameplay is a hard one to balance. Fragile Dreams: Farewell ruins of the Moon is a great example of this.

Released last month on the Wii, Fragile Dreams is a survival-horror esque game set in a post apocalyptic future devoid of human life, You play as Seto, a lonely young boy on a quest to find someone with whom he can share his life. Maybe an hour in, he runs across a scantily clad young girl who he scares the crap out of and runs away. Seto becomes obsessed with her and vows to find her, no matter what challenges he faces, Along the way he meets a few characters (None human, and thus not able to live up to our young hero's impossible standards) who tag along with him for a time and inevitably leave him and send him into yet another whirlwind of depression.

">
Presentation.
Simply put, this game is beautiful. The characters are mostly voiced and animated very well, each having their own distinct characteristics and style. The music reminds me of the works of Joe Hisaishi and the Anime series Mushi-shi. The story is a little vague and doesn't make all that much sense, but in a very anime kind of way. So if you're into that you will probably dig it. The story is presented in a very interesting way. Seto knows even less than you do about what happened to the human race, and you both have to piece it together as you go along. This is done mainly through finding Items from which seto can hear the last thoughts of the person they belonged to. Through the items you find that while most of the victims had no idea what was about to happen, some knew quite exactly what was coming.

Gameplay.
This is where we get to the downside of this game, The controls are just not very good, You control Seto in an almost shooter game fashion; the control stick on the nunchuck controls his movements while the pointer on the screen controls where he looks. while just walking around and exploring the world the controls feel all right, just not as polished as I would hope, it's the combat that kills it. You spend a good 75% of the game fighting some sort of evil dog or ghost child, so you would think that they would have put a lot of effort into making it an enjoyable experience. But alas... Though it is in a third person action game style, the system lacks a lock on, so you constantly have to point frantically at the screen in hopes of facing the right direction. Seto can't block, which would be okay if not for the fact that he is SLOW AS BALLS so you just have to take the hits and stay stocked up on items to boost your HP, and when you get further in to the game there are enemies who CAN block... WTF??? To top it all off, as your weapons are "old and brittle" They have a tendency to break. So you may be in a hallway full of wave after wave of enemies, and lose your weapon.

Verdict.
About 8 hours in, I was almost ready to call it quits, I hadn't had measurable fun playing the game since hour 4 or so and the story was starting to lose it's grip on me. I checked a walkthrough and found that I was pretty near the end, so I busted it out one morning and saw it through. What it really boils down to is this. If I had actually payed for this game, I would be pissed. But as a rental, it's almost worth it for the story. I honestly just wish that it was an anime instead.