Mmmm.... Lost Winds...
The story of the game isn't a complicated one, though decently executed. The jist of the story is that a boy named Toku, who you control with the nunchuck analog stick, finds a rock which ends up being the spirit of a wind god. The spirit goes on to tell you that long ago he was battling a great evil named Balasar. Certain events took place and the deity that you talk to explains how he trapped the evil creature into a large boulder or something but he could only do that by trapping himself along with it. Centuries went on and Balasar's rage and strength grew until he broke the sale that binded him to the whatever. It shattered the rock but the wind god was trapped within a small fragment. It is then "your" duty to help go find and defeat Balasar.
The boy isn't really useful to the story at all and instead is only used as a vehicle for the wind god. You use the Wii remote to make gusts of wind which you can use to blow the kid up into the air as a jump or to blow fire or water onto enemies (called Blorbs). You hold A to slow down time, then draw a line on the screen which becomes the direction of the air. Once you let go of A, the wind will follow the line you drew. As you progress in the game you develop more and more abilities. All abilites are simple and intuitive to use. The most complex move you can perform is the last one you get, which is to press and hold Z, then press and hold B and draw a line of wind to where you want to fly up. Holding Z makes Toku bring out his cape which makes him glide on your wind trails giving him the ability to fly upward for a long period of time. If you were to go try this on your Wii right now you will realize how simple it is to do.
The actual puzzle-solving is very shallow and easy. You'll rarely ever have a hard time solving the challenges in the game, but it's still a blast even if half the time you don't realize they're supposed to be puzzles at all. It's stuff like seeing a wall made of tree roots and torch hanging above it. You immediately know what you're supposed to do because "fire + grass" is a common gameplay element in video games, but that doesn't make it less fun to blow the fire around until it gets to the roots and watching it burn a new path into a cave mysterious cave, or blowing water onto a patch of dirt you just seeded and watching a plant grow that spits you 10 feet or so in the air so you can become an champion. The only hard part I could really think of was the final (and only) boss in the game. I won't tell you more about that though because anything I told you would be a spoiler.
Speaking of controls and bosses, I bet you're wondering about the combat controls. Fighting blorbs is pretty dang easy (and quick) once you get the hang of it. You can really just scribble wind all over your enemies until they die, but that takes longer. Usuaully it's a good idea to blow them into the air then create another gust of wind slamming them down into the ground which should kill them right away, or you can splash water on them, or fire, or throw rocks at them, or throw other blorbs at them... there's not a whole lot that the blorbs have a defense against. Unlike the simple yet fun puzzles, stumbling on a blorb is more annoying than it is exciting, often leaving you running past them hoping they won't follow you. The blorbs are pretty slow and week so there's very little danger in Lost Winds. The biggest threat you'll find in the game is accidently throwing boulders on Toku's poor head. For some reason, I did this way too much and the two out of three times I died throughout the game were because of my own rocks. The third time was on the boss. If you do happen to die, it's not really a big deal. You scribble frantically all over Toku and eventually he'll come back to life and your health will be full again. As for number of lives, etc. you blow wind over bushes and trees and tiny little fairs come out of them and start flying up slowly and in a straight line. You just wave your cursor over them and you collect them, and if you collect enough you get a life. This makes death penalties non-existent because you shouldn't have a problem with dying often (or at all, really) so you won't ever have to worry about collecting them at all.
The game can be finished in under, or around, 3 hours. There are no sidequests to lookforward to completing after playing through it once and there are no new areas to explore after beating it. Other than the main objectives, you have nothing else to do but take in the sights and collect 24 hidden shrines throughout the game, but that really doesn't take much time out because a majority of them are "hidden" along the path you take to the objective. I personally beat the game in exactly 2 hours and 50 minutes, but it would be plenty possible to take off 10-15 minutes of that.
All in all, you get what you pay for. It's 10 dollars 3 hours of some good relaxing fun. It's a pretty good value and a good start to what you can expect from future WiiWare titles. The ending leaves at a cliffhanger saying "to be continued..." and a sequal has been confirmed to be underway. It's a good start to a series and needs only to be made more difficult and maaaybe a bit longer. Other than that, it's a very good game that I would recommend it to anyone who is ok with something under their own difficulty level.