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Koei's Opoona has become part of a distressingly broad category of Wii titles, games that sounded revolutionary on paper, looked promising in previews, and then somehow managed not to be very much fun to play. While gamers tend to equate "innovation" with "good gameplay", the fact of the matter is that implementing new ideas is very difficult, and something even the most conscientious of studios can foul up. There's a reason why many of gaming's most universally praised companies, like Blizzard, stake their reputation more on polish and implementation than new ideas.

Polish is about the furthest thing from my mind when I think of Koei, who instead seem to thrive by finding genres no one else is making console games for, and then making a new one every year. Opoona fits this profile quite well in many ways, and to explore how we'll take a look at some of the reviews that have shown up for it in the past month. Opoona's current Metacritic average is sitting at 64% as of this writing, so don't go into this expecting any super-high scores. In fact, there are no super-low scores either, but a lot of 6 and 7 equivalents.

The high score comes from GameZone, an online outlet that awarded Opoona an 8 out of 10. These are both bad signs in their own ways, and not because there's anything wrong with GameZone. Online outlets frequently use green n00bs or iconoclast hobbyists as writers, and have a tendency to generate scores that are weird outliers.

Usually these scores sit well below whatever rating the print scores lump around, and that often makes them interesting just as a dissenting opinion. What's happened with Opoona is that a weird outlier has become the high score, suggesting the game just happened to be exceptionally pleasing to reviewer Dylan Platt... and for most pre-release players, didn't work. The text also suggests someone who's well aware the game is problematic, but desperately wants to like it anyway.

Opoonas far from perfect. Its story is full of typos, errors, and confusing bits. Its far too easy to get lost in the city, and random battles occur too frequently. Still, despite all these problems, the game manages to have a fun, cute, engaging style thats refreshing in the modern gaming scene, where most games are trying to be the darkest and most serious. Sure, not everybody will like the game. But if youre an RPG fan with a Wii, and youre looking for something a little different, you could sure do a whole lot worse than to accompany little Opoona on his quest to find his family.

So, Opoona has a high score that smacks of an "A for Effort" type review. What are the middling scores like? Cheat Code Central awarded Opoona a 3.6 out of 5, a score that would indicate a title slightly above average. Reviewer Nathan Meunier seems to have homed in on a key problem with Opoona as an RPG: despite supposedly being about taking a variety of jobs and fitting in on a new planet, most of the jobs you can take don't actually matter.

When you're not battling Rogues, much of your time will be devote to social pursuits and building relationships with NPC characters. Making nice with characters scattered throughout the game will eventually open up new activities and jobs. Employment serves as the main driver of progression in the game, since it lets you move on to new domes to complete specific assignments. The job system primarily serves as an optional distraction from the main quest. In a few instances they're crucial for moving forward in the story or for exploring new areas, but on the whole they can be easily avoided unless you feel like changing things up for a bit. In general, completing ranger jobs will help progress the story while most of the other professions are there just for the hell of it. The job variety is decent; you can find careers in fast-food service, fortune telling, mining, art, and many more.

GamePro awarded Opoona a 3 out of 5 review, and damned it with very faint praise in a brief online reviewer. Todd Melick had little truly positive to say about the game other than some praise for Opoona's controls, which for the most part only required use of the Nunchuk. Even that was tempered by vitriol targeted at the in-game map system, an inadequacy that most other reviewers spotlighted, too.

The good news is that Opoona's control scheme is one of the best I've ever seen in a Wii game. You can play using just the Nunchuk and it's all intuitively done. Whether it's navigating menus, exploring the world, or fighting battles, using the Nunchuk feels right. The game world is also well realized; Landroll features a fusion of fantasy and modern architecture and it is a joy to explore every nook and cranny. I just wish the developers did a better job with the map, which is vague and lacks labels or markers to help you're your way.

Likewise, Opoona merited only a C from 1up.com, and review text infused with a profound sense of ambivalence. Reviewer Ray Barnholt lays much of the failure at the feet of the game's localization, which even saw criticism in one of the game's most positive reviews.

Despite its good looks, Opoona really stumbles in its localization. The game's English translation is rough and lifeless, with multiple typos and characters that barely sound different from one another, not to mention out-and-out confusion when NPCs say things like "head to that door" when there are multiple doors in a room -- confusion like that unnecessarily slows down progress.

Blech. Initially I promised myself I wouldn't go all metareview on games that received uniformly mediocre scores, because in my mind, the only way a game can really fail is by not being good at anything. Even tremendously flawed Wii titles like Octomania and Baroque are games I can have fun playing, because for all of their shortcomings the titles are also really good at satisfying a particular type of gameplay itch, too. It's hard to see Opoona inspiring anything but frustration at how much of the game just didn't work, and how small its victories were.

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