Thursday, November 30, 2006

We adjourned yesterday on what you may suspect was a teaser, but such an allegation would be, once again, erroneous. The problem is a teaser presupposes a) that a follow-up post will materialize and b) readers so recently abused with silence will return, jaded hats in hand, for a second evening in a row. But the question needs to be addressed, and the short answer is the Wii promises to be a reliable portal to compelling new media.

My attention span doesn’t easily accommodate 3-hour movie epics anymore, so you can only imagine how a 70-hour video game would fare. Oh, I tried, believe me, popped that legacy Gamecube JRPG right into the Wii, whereupon the disc spun heartily and heroic music underscored the prologue to another trite narrative. Within a minute, I was all like, “You know, I don’t think your due diligence is due anymore and, in fact, please for the love of Gondor stop the blue hair.”

For the uninitiated, JRPG stands for a game genre that usually begins in a village, which may or may not be on fire, where a young hero, who may or may not resemble a girl with green hair, begins his quest to save the world by killing hundreds of rats with a stick so he can amass enough gold pieces to purchase a bigger stick from the blacksmith. Why not just melt the gold into a 24kt gun? Because the blacksmith doesn’t forge common sense.

Now that we’re on the same page, let me suggest the Wii certainly could go hardcore, but if it does, let the current aesthetic remain a viable choice. This would be the pick-up-and-play philosophy, where fun is distilled into glorious, intuitive 15- to 20-minute chunks. Don’t get me wrong, I enjoy Zelda and Call of Duty 3–heck, I pretty much bought all the Wii games–and other titles like Final Fantasy XVIQXII and Gears of War continue to entice, but there’s nothing quite like swinging the Wiimote and knocking one out of the park. Well, y’know, other than doing so with a real bat.