LostWinds shows the high level of quality and creativity that can be put into WiiWare games
The game's story is actually pretty generic, but as Mario himself showed us that games of this type barely need a deep storyline to be a lot of fun and apparently the team behind LostWinds knew that. The game begins when Toku, a young boy, is awakened by the wind and all of a sudden, due to some misfortunes, ends up on a dark cave. On this cave he finds the chest guarding the spirit of wind, Enril. The spirit goes on to tell a story about another Spirit initially created to protect the land, however such spirit decided to rule it instead. Enril then joins the boy to fully regain its former glory and strength while trying to save the world.
Toku isn't the kind of character you would expect to control on a platforming game as he moves slowly and is barely able to jump, but that is exactly where all the fun comes in. The Wiimote's pointer represents Enril and its windy powers therefore Toku gains better jumping abilities and running skills when aided by the wind as players hold the A-button and move the cursor to control the wind and make the main character move.
The wind's powers are not limited to moving the character though. Through your journey Enril will gain new abilities that will allow Toku to go through puzzles and reach places he couldn't go to when the game started. Some of Enril's powers include manipulating water and fire, and creating drifts of wind to move objects and beat enemies. The list of wind uses goes on and on which obviously allowed developers to create a nice range of different puzzles.
Playing LostWinds requires a lot of movements, but all of the Wiimote's implementation hardly feels like it has been tacked in, on the other hand the game's main appeal is actually its use of motion controls to manipulate the wind and get to new places. All controls work quite nicely even though there will be one or two moments of frustration. LostWinds is one of those games that could only have been made compelling on Nintendo's platform.
The game's main world works pretty much as a Metroid map where everything is connected. As it happens on Metroid games backtracking is usually necessary so the character of Toku is able to get to unexplored places by using his newly acquired abilities. The main difference perhaps is that LostWinds' game world is fairly smaller than one you would encounter on a game featuring Samus Aran.
In fact length is the game's only major problem. Overall the game will last 4 hours at the most as some players will be able to complete it in about 3 hours, which is only decent for a ten-dollar game. However, the game tries to make the adventure last a little bit longer with twenty-four collectible items that can be found throughout the game's world, but chances are by the time you finish you will have already collected a big part of those items.
LostWinds' amazing creative controls are powered by the game's astonishing presentation. While character movement happens on a 2-D plane the entire scenario, character models and enemies are in beautiful 3-D. The scenarios through which you will travel have amazing depth and detail with many objects and landscapes hiding behind the first layer of objects. The amazing graphics are only made better by the astonishing art the game features, everything has a lot of personality and fits perfectly with the colorful stylized world on which the game takes place.
The game's soundtrack also falls perfectly into place because it suits the relaxing slow pace of the game. The songs have a very high level of quality and the instrumentation is adorable, adding a lot of charm to the whole package. Sound effects have also received extra care immersing players even more on the entire experience.
In a nutshell, LostWinds makes very good use of the system's capabilities and even though it is a short game it deserves attention from gamers due to its high production values and irresistible charm.