Opoona

Balls of Fire

Yeah, if you read all that last page then the last sentence or two probably left you more than a little confused. Balls over their heads – wah?

You see, this is how Opoona and the rest of his crazy lazy-juggling race are; they have these huge balls of energy that float over their heads which they can throw around as a weapon. Well, most of them are like that anyway. The Sages choose to roll around on theirs instead, like old people at the sea side.

It’s the energy ball which also makes the combat so accessible too – and accessibility is obviously the driving force here, what with all the smiley faces and nice, short sentences. Whenever Opoona gets into battle, all he has to do is flick the C-stick to defend himself.

In fact, the entire game is built so that it can be played with just the Nunchuck, which is one of the things we love about it. There are far, far too many games out there which try to ham-handedly and mug-fistedly force in some complex motion-based controls and it’s good to see that Opoona doesn’t fall into that trap. All you need is the nunchuck to move and act with – no Wiimote waving required.


Unfortunately, the accessibility of Opoona ends up getting pushed far to far in some areas and not enough in others. The combat for example starts off as a simple and somewhat engaging affair where you flick your energy ball back and forth like a turn-based game of Pong!, but it quickly degenerates into a boring and samey minigame.

The game tries to compensate for this somewhat by giving players dozens and dozens of nonsensical items they can use as power-ups and attacks, but nearly all of them sound like an awful mish-mash of the medical and confection industry – needle chewing gum and so on.

Which isn’t to fault the game too much, of course as the basic gameplay here is essentially an enjoyably streamlined version of the classic JRPG formula, harking back to the early Final Fantasy games especially. There are gun blades and healing potions and hundreds of random encounters and fetch quests for you to scurry around on, and impressively not all of these things are as bad as they sound.


The level design however is an altogether more serious problem and the first few levels of the game are very much impinged by the fact that the action is set in a number of identical towers, with spiralling, messy and wonky room layouts. It’s often hard to know where you are, where you’re going, where you’ve been or how to get out. Getting bored and abandoning completed quests, if not the game, is a constant threat thanks to impossible to navigate maps.

Conclusions

Opoona isn’t a revolutionary game at all and everything it does, from the basic layout and plotline right through to the job-based levelling system and so on has been done before in more complex and exciting ways. Instead, Opoona’s strength lies in the fact that it makes all of it very accessible and easy to pick up. This is essentially an RPG by numbers after all.

Unfortunately there are a few places where the lack of imagination shines through as being somewhat obvious and even though Opoona isn’t trying to be anything hugely original, it might have been nice had it not been so blatant in sourcing its inspirations.

The game also makes some rather fundamental errors in more than a few places – you’d have thought that in this day and age we wouldn’t still have to wait for the text of each line of dialogue, all of which is unvoiced, to spill out and be skipped through individually. It really is a shame that Opoona has reproduced many of the flaws of the JRPG format, as well as many of the strengths.

Still, provided that you can get past these issues OK, Opoona does actually achieve what it tries to do; be a decent and very playable RPG suitable for any and all in the Wii’s massively varied audience. It may not be the most creative game we’ve ever seen, but Opoona is pleasant and playable at least and that’s more than we can say for some games.

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