LostWinds: A Two-word Game Title Smushed into One

Pros: Exploding with potential

Cons: Nobody was around to clean up the mess

That, my friends, was an ejaculation joke. If I were starting this article in a more serious manner, I may have written:

Pros: gorgeous visuals, innovative take on the puzzle-platformer, genuinely good use of motions as the primary means of control

Cons: only two environments and one of them kinda sucks, music was clearly written by a "special needs" six-year-old, combat is pointless and annoying, shorter than the attention span of the composer, easy enough for the composer to beat

Actually, that just ended up being me making fun of retarded people. But my main points are all there, once you wade through the Sea of Reckless Disparaging.

LostWinds is a game whose title is formed by taking two words (a transitive conjunction and a semiadverb) and putting them together while retaining the original capitalization. This accomplishes absolutely nothing besides raising a whole slew of questions from me.

• What is the part of speech of the new word?
• Why is the W in "winds" still capitalized?
• Is "Lost" pronounced very quickly, like the "Mc" in "McDonald's"?
• Speaking of McDonald's, did you know that there's now a difference between the classic "Double Cheeseburger" and the new "McDouble"?
• It's a piece of cheese.
• If the title were "Lost Winds," I'd assume that this game were about some winds that were lost. Oh, wait, that is what this game is about. What the fuck, then?

Obviously, I was furious at this game before I even played it. I thought that perhaps the game would answer all of these questions — even the one that's a statement about cheese — before I reached the end, but I was wrong. Though the game is persistently about "lost winds," the concept of "LostWinds" is mentioned only once, as the final word in the ending. As far as I can tell, it simply means "lost winds." Lame.

LostWinds, a Frontier Developments game, was one of the May 2008 launch titles for Nintendo's WiiWare, the service that forces developers to insert horribly unusable motion controls into their games in order to get paid. Before I get into the meat of the review, I proffer this surprise: the game is not shovelware.

The player is greeted by a title screen and musical number that basically says, "THIS GAME HAS A JAPANESE SETTING." A panflute over plucked strings sounds a poignant tonic to subdominant (or maybe tonic to a seventh built on the supertonic but look I'm not gonna load up the game just to listen for a fucking F-sharp and they function the same anyway okay?) while an adorable homeless child with a severe case of cranial elephantiasis sleeps under a cherry tree blowing gently in the wind.

It turns out that this diseased homeless child is unwitting protagonist Toku, and the game begins with him being awoken by the wind. Eager to get away from this sudden minor discomfort, Toku hops down a mine shaft or a bridge collapses under him or something and he ends up in a cavern below the Earth's surface, where he soon meets Enril, the game's other protagonist.

It's worth mentioning at this point that you've now seen (more or less) 100% of the environments in LostWinds, and you're about nine seconds into the game. The portions of the game that take place above ground are absolutely idyllic. Like, heart-wrenchingly idyllic. It reminds me of a cartoony version of the farmlands of Shing Jea Island in Guild Wars: Factions, a game location with which everyone is very familiar. Though the game plays completely in two dimensions, the background shows a fair amount of depth: above ground, you'll see everything from running waterfalls to a farm town populated by people that stand around and stare blankly at nothing all day (they're boring). Below ground, you'll see a shitload of dull-colored rocks and fluorescent mushrooms. Every now and then, the underground scenes surprise with something like an oasis, or enormous, abandoned mining equipment, but generally it's just rock, mushrooms, and crippling banality.

Returning to the story: Enril is a chef-and-television-personality-turned-wind-spirit. She explains to Toku that she once trapped fellow (but EVIL) spirit Balasar in some crystal (because his HATRED was flaring up), but Balasar (using the powers of MALICE) trapped Enril in with him. But then Balasar got bored inside the crystal (not enough FURY in there), so he just up and left (HOSTILITY, anyone?) without even saying "goodbye" to Enril (overflowing IMPOLITENESS). The game uses key words like "bored" and "goodbye" to communicate to you just how naughty Balasar is.

Ever-silent Toku agrees to help Enril free herself from the confines of the crystal, where "the confines of the crystal" apparently means "being a cursor," since that's her function. Technically, you control two characters at once in this game: with the Nunchuk, you move Toku left and right and interact with various objects; with the Wii Remote, you control Enril in all of her...gusty...glory.

And so the duo travels, out into one of the most confusing game worlds I've ever seen. As you enter the more populated part of the world, you'll see plenty of townspeople going about their daily business of staring blandly in your general direction. Everything seems to be vomit-inducingly bucolic (in a good way, I swear), but when you are given the opportunity to chat with some of the townspeople, they all seem shaken up despite their "get out of my face, kid" nonchalance. They worry about Balasar corrupting (CORRUPTING) the land, and they complain about tremors and other environmental frights. I say the game world confused me because it appeared that the NPCs were lying to me: there is one tremor (close to the very beginning, no less), no visible corruption of the land, no blood-smeared patches of grass with little organ chunks in them.

As you progress through the game, Balasar's corruption does visibly grow, however, by making the land appear just as heartwarming and friendly as ever. Trust me, you've never seen more menacingly gorgeous cherry blossoms.

The entire game consists of unlocking three new powers for Enril and unlocking four pieces of fellow wind spirit Deo's memory, which he hid in treasure chests in order to make the game longer than thirty seconds. Each of Enril's abilities can help Toku access new areas. The Gust ability allows you to push Toku in any direction by holding A and dragging Enril through Toku in the direction you'd like him to be pushed. You can Gust up to three times in one period of Toku's being airborne, and you'll need to, to reach higher and farther areas. The Slipstream ability allows you to write naughty words on the screen by holding B and moving Enril around. Calling Balasar a "fag" or pretty much any racial slur is the only way to hold back the corruption! Slipstream also has the side effect of making fire, water, and some objects follow along the path you've drawn, so that you can hurt Balasar's feelings in style. Finally, the Vortex power allows you to draw circles around stuff so that you can curse about how unpredictably inaccurate it seems to be. If it ends up working the way you wanted, you can use a Gust to throw the object at a very high speed.

Aside from Vortexes being a bit unpredictable and a late-game item that allows you to move Toku with Slipstreams getting you caught on the environment, the motion controls are superbly implemented. It's important to note that when Enril is "active" — so when you're holding A or B to use a wind ability — time slows to a crawl in order to allow you to make accurate movements. This was weird for me for the first few minutes of play, but I got used to it almost immediately and now can't imagine being able to maximize height and distance without that mechanic.

LostWinds is meant to be a platformer-puzzler hybrid, and it succeeds at that if you take "puzzler" to mean "rock-mover." The puzzles in this game are not challenging whatsoever — if the solution to something isn't immediately obvious to you, you're probably retarded and should toss your Wii in the garbage and start lamenting the fact that you paid money for it and this game. The most challenging part of this game is trying to position rocks onto platforms. I probably spent 85% of my playtime watching my tiny gusts throw a boulder halfway across the screen, then watching my huge gusts make the boulder move in a completely unintended direction, causing my Wii to overheat and catch on fire. Positioning rocks works a little better after you get the Slipstream ability, but you'll still sometimes want to use them to smash Toku's disproportionately large skull to a less "kawaii" (^__________^) size.

Scattered about the world are 24 collectible statues that I guess are supposed to be challenging to locate and obtain. I used them as a means of determining how far along into the game I was. LostWinds is short. Like, really short. I collected 23 of the statues and beat the last boss (oh, yes, there's combat) in just under three hours. I did not rush through the game, but I did not spend a lot of time searching for the statues — the ones that I found were very obvious and required little backtracking. After I finished the game, I went back to search an area that I suspected contained the final statue. I was correct, and had obtained 100% completion in three hours, eighteen minutes. Unfortunately, completing the game with all of the statues does not offer a different ending, rendering them about as useful as every single power Enril possesses when faced with the monumental task of positioning a rock on a platform. This also means that all of your hard work earns you the same HAY-GUISE-PLZ-BUY-TEH-SEEKWEL ending. (It's worth mentioning here that I played the game a second and third time, and was able to finish with all 24 statues in as low as 45 minutes.)

All right, let's talk combat. Combat is the God damn worst part of this game. All of your foes are Dots candies onto which a blue ink pen accidentally burst. They're called "Glorbs" (exasperated sigh) and they're apparently manifestations of Balasar's EVIL, or something. Actually, I can't remember the game's explanation, but mine's probably better anyway. Glorbs (hearty grumble) come in roughly three flavors: annoying, boring, and fuck this. There's a lot of overlapping there. Combat seems to be tacked on in an effort to give you something to do when you're not getting pissed off at moving rocks. There's no real purpose to it, and there's only one boss battle, at the very end of the game. And once you figure out how to defeat the boss, you can do the entire fight in considerably less time than it takes the monster to make his entrance.

You kill Glorbs (fuck) by — you guessed it — strangling them to death. Or throwing them into walls using wind. It brings me no (and by "no" I mean "a positively tremendous amount of") joy to say this, but the death throes of the Glorbs (...) sound a lot like how I imagine strangling a retarded child to death might sound. To increase the amount of unbearable aural bombardment, the background music is harshly interrupted by an annoying kid wailing on some Japanese drums every time you're within forty-one screens of a foe, including the "final" boss, who doesn't even get his own music.

Speaking of background music, this game's enjoyable title theme turned out to be very misleading: once you're actually in the game, the music degrades into this tuneless ambient crap that's a mix between silence and little phrases played on the same gentle Japanese instruments. It's nice while it's there, but it's unmemorable, way too thin, and too quiet (compared to the blaring combat music).

If Toku loses all of his health, which can happen in a surprising number of inconsistencies, you can rouse him by having Enril give him a gustjob. GET IT? IT'S A WIND JOKE WITH SEXUAL CONNOTATIONS. Reviving Toku costs one icon on your spirit meter. You can easily refill these icons by moving Enril over these little blue floaty things that appear out of wind-disturbed plants, dead enemies, and Toku's bodily waste. This allows you to enjoy the game without really having to worry about death at any point, although it makes me question even further the need for combat. Toku can still get his huge head clobbered in a number of other ways. For example, sometimes you'll fall six feet, slowing your descent with wind, and you'll take some damage. Sometimes you'll jump down a huge ravine, not bothering to slow your descent at all, and you'll be fine. Sometimes you'll accidentally throw a rock straight at Toku's head (this will actually happen a lot) and he'll shrug it off; other times he'll turn around and shocked by an unmoving boulder and crumple to the ground in a heap of giant skull and stupid outfit.

I've done a lot of LostWinds-bashing here, but, frankly, there's a lot fundamentally wrong with the game. I'd like to see non-boss combat completely removed; puzzles become more difficult; a few motion controls tightened up; and more content, more environments, and a true musical score added.

As I wrote at the start of the article, LostWinds is exploding with potential. I will say that, flaws aside, I genuinely enjoyed the experience. I played the game in three sittings of about an hour each, and I looked forward to each one. It's relaxing, innovative, and not entirely linear. With a ten-dollar price tag, you can't really regret making the purchase. In October 2009, sequelLostWinds: Winter of the Melodias was released, and I definitely enjoyed the first game enough to make a second purchase.