Wrapping Up: What I'm Left With
Started: 26 October 2008 (10:15 PST)
Completed: 26 October 2008 (13:55 PST)
Posted: 27 October 2008 (21:00 PST)
So, let's sum this all up. What to make of Wii Music? Are the haters justified? Or is there something they've missed? From what I played, here are the key things I noticed:
1. The controls will behave quite well if you use them correctly, and quite poorly if you use them wrong.
2. I am not a musical prodigy to any degree, and I highly doubt that most people going into this game are, either.
3. It's very easy to make a good song sound bad if your timing is off, which it usually is for me.
4. It's also very easy to make a good song sound good if your timing is right, as seen in brief bursts in my own recordings.
5. Mastering even one song can take quite a while, and the prospect of mastering all 50 leaves me with the impression that this game is going to take a very long time indeed to completely dominate.
6. Even when I was doing poorly, the experience still felt fun to me; and whenever I got the rhythm down, it was especially satisfying.
In summary, the game is not for the learning-averse. You cannot simply sit down and pelt out Beethoven's 5th in a perfect concert-style rendition like you've known how to play it for the last 5 years if you have zero musical experience prior to playing the game. The term "learning curve" truly means something for Wii Music. The more time you spend practicing and perfecting your ability to play the instruments and the songs, the more enjoyable the game becomes.
Conversely, the more impatient you are and more irritated that you aren't an instant rock-god or concert superstar just by touching the controls, the more you'll hate the game. I understand now why there are people who came to hate the game as they reviewed it, as it is one of those rare titles that manages to perfectly capture the joys of learning and the rewards they give. For those who just want instant gratification, the realization that they are not in fact automatically awesome will be a horrible blow to their egos.
Wii Fit did this as well, as did Wii Sports, and I suspect Wii Play does it too. It's an underlying theme with all of the Wii series: that of gradual, definite progress through practice and putting in an effort to improve. You literally get out of Wii Music (and Wii Sports, and Wii Fit, and probably Wii Play too) what you put into it. I didn't really appreciate, going into it, just how true this would prove to be. In retrospect, I should have, having thoroughly played and enjoyed both Wii Sports and Wii Fit.
What reviews I read (both good and bad) seemed to suggest that you would either automatically suck or rock at the game and would stay that way perpetually, yet I was skeptical of this, and with good cause it seems. How well you do is directly proportional to how well you grasp the concepts behind music itself, and how well you can apply said concepts in real-time. As you play the game, if you don't have the natural sense of rhythm or balance that is inherent in music, you can and probably will pick these traits up as you go. As I said, it all has to do with how much you put into it, and how determined you are to get something out of it.
So what does Wii Music mean for the industry, then? The same thing, actually, that Wii Sports and Wii Fit mean for the industry: that games where you actually learn something instead of just memorizing something are making serious headway into mainstream awareness. What this means for more traditional gamers is up to traditional gamers themselves, of course; it's down to the individual to decide whether they accept or reject the Wii series "revolution", if you will. As for the industry itself, however, it's getting increasingly hard for developers to igore the sales numbers for Wii series games...
And now, of course, is the part I'm sure you've been waiting for, the "how does it stack up" part: the score. Like Wii Music doesn't score the player, but instead lets the player score themselves, I'm letting Wii Music score itself, in a way. There is no "good" or "bad" scale going on here, it's... well, take a look and see.
Presentation: Subtle, yet very functional. It follows the same presentation themes as the rest of the Wii series. If you like the Wii series presentation style, you'll like how Wii Music does things.
Visuals: Like all of the Wii games, the art style is unique and colorful, and very much not meant to look realistic.
Audio: Depending on how well and how long you play, this is either really good or really, painfully bad. It quite literally depends on you.
Learning Curve: Very long, but very even. I didn't ever feel like I'd hit a brick wall in my progress, either.
Challenge: Like all Wii series games, the challenge is largely up to you. If you don't put in the effort and time to get better, it will be hard, and if you do take that time, it will be a lot easier.
Replay Value: It has the potential to be pretty much infinite, or at least until you get sick of the 50 songs included (which, in my experience, should take a long time).
Fun Factor: I'd say it's really high, as long as you take the time to really appreciate it. If you approach it with a mindset of hating it, you'll hate it, and if you approach it looking for fun, you'll find a lot of fun.
Overall: I recommend Wii Music to the gamer who appreciates the underlying theme to the Wii series: that of gradual yet definite improvement over time that reflects one's own ability to control one's body movements more than one's reflexes and memorization abilities. I also recommend it to anybody who enjoys the idea of playing and customizing well-known music, but lacks the time or drive to learn an instrument. That's not to say that you won't have to learn anything, of course; it's just a lot easier to learn timing and rhythm than it is to learn how to play specific notes.
Sky Render - Sanity is for the weak.
