// Write something witty here

The second LostWinds game is very much like the first one. In a sense this is a bit sad since LostWinds felt rather refreshing but this one mostly feels derivative, but there are some interesting additions. The touted weather mechanic is in itself nothing spectacular, a standard binary world system (with a theme that was used in Oracle of Seasons, no less), but it has some interesting puzzles based around it. Also, it still looks and sounds fairly nice.

The problem with gesture-based commands is that it is hard to parse them correctly, especially when the input device is something as fickle as a wiimote. In order to get around this you’ll need to have either a smart and forgiving input system that is very good at figuring out what the player wants, or make the difficulty in controlling part of the game itself. LostWinds seems to have done neither and is often quite frustrating to control as it is imprecise and often very hard to tell if you can actually reach a platform or not. Like its predecessor it is not a difficult game, but the occasional series of tricky jumps will take some time to clear. There are also a few cases of illogical puzzles to add to the frustration, but thankfully they are rather few.

LostWinds was short, just long enough that you wouldn’t get bored of the new control methods and soothing atmosphere, so while Winter of the Melodias might technically be the better game it is no surprise that I did not find it as enjoyable. I heard that the idea for LostWinds was conceived after many brainstorming sessions where other ideas were discarded, maybe a similar process should have been used to take the idea further.