Fragile Dreams: Farewell Ruins of the Moon Review

Game: Fragile Dreams: Farewell Ruins of the Moon

Platform: Wii

Played For: 12 hrs

Have you ever read the early 20th century science fiction classic the Purple Cloud by M. Shiel? The idea sounds great… the Earth passes through a huge interstellar poof of noxious gas, and every living thing on the planet dies… except for our protagonist, who happens to be at the one place the deleterious particulate matter did not reach, the North Pole. One of the very first offerings in what I like to call the “Quiet Earth” genre, M. Shiel’s novel describes the last man’s increasingly mad, lonely wanderings around a dead world in painfully overwritten detail (think paragraphs that go on for pages and pages, lots of self-similarity, and an unlikeable protagonist who’s favorite thing in the world seems to be pemmican.)

Without zombies or vampires or Will Smith to liven things up, the Purple Cloud stands as a great classic of the past that is pretty inaccessible to today’s readers (it was seriously revised to be made into a Harry Belafonte movie in the 60’s called the World, the Flesh and the Devil… and it isn’t exactly a memorable classic either.) Fragile Dreams: Memory of the Moon is very similar to the Purple Cloud. It is also about the last boy on Earth, but instead of being difficult for being old, Fragile is a challenge for being overly Japanese. But if you are willing to take the plunge into a possibly foreign frame of mind, there is a lot to Fragile Dreams worth recommending.

In Fragile Dreams: Farewell Ruins of the Moon you play Seto, a young boy brought up by an old man in an empty world. Seto’s benefactor just passed away, leaving him with the task of exploring the world (which turns out to be Tokyo, essentially) and trying to find any other survivors. Seto strikes gold almost immediately, encountering a scantily-clad silver-haired girl just the same age as him, and he spends much of the rest of the game chasing after her (she’s fond of running off into dark and dangerous looking places like collapsing underground malls or monolithic hydroelectrtic dams.) On his way Seto encounters a number of other mysterious personages, battles a ton of ghosts, and stops occasionally to play with cats.

Fragile Dreams is all about atmosphere. This is a game centered on loneliness and nostalgia, specifically focused through an adolescent lens. If you’ve ever indulged in that particular sense of ennui about the summers of your youth… memories of Coney Island and ice cream on the peer, the quiet magic of a pond in a light rainfall, or the joys of sidewalk chalk… then you’ll know what this game is trying to evoke (here we’ll take underground malls, cicadas and fireflies, and Tokyo Tower as the Japanese equivalents.) While Seto almost always has someone to talk to during the game, the experience is always somewhat hollow… his companions are ephemeral, inhuman and not entirely there. And that’s not even including the creepy chicken head merchant guy with the baby stroller who shows up regularly to sell you golf clubs and energy drinks! That one is a source of nightmares if I ever saw one.

The game is surprisingly spooky, a treat I wasn’t expecting from the cover. While not a horror title per se, Seto wanders through some very dark and tragic remnants of civilization during his quest. Ambiguous, sometimes sinister graffiti is scrawled all over the place… in fact, I’d say Fragile breaks new ground in the variety and frequency of wall art included in a game. Amidst the weird imagery and swirling lines are scrawled messages, sometimes only viewable with a special flashlight. Silent cries for help or screams of terror and despair surround you throughout the play experience, making for unsettling discoveries as you slowly reconstruct the nature of the doom that befell humankind. Seto also constantly discovers “Memory Items”, small pieces of memorabilia that give snippets of their previous owners’ lives in the form of brief dialogues or shadow plays. These objects add a panoply of subplot while advancing the storyline, and worked well as a narrative device (I’m pleased to say there is even a possible explanation as to why Seto can pick up psychic residues from these cast off items.)

So why isn’t Fragile a major game worth recommending to everyone who owns a Wii? Well, as mentioned previously it is steeped in Japanese sentimentality, which may be a bit impenetrable unless you’re used to it from watching too much anime (by the way, the whole game makes me recall the ending credit sequence for Please Save My Earth… how’s that for an obscure anime reference?) But in addition, the game is rough around the edges in several ways. From a control standpoint, I’m not sold on pointing the Wiimote at the edge of the screen to rotate your view… while it works on a basic level, it always felt less precise than the dual analog controls so often appearing in similar games on other consoles. I like the third person perspective, but in the tight corridors Seto is forced to explore, he himself often manages to block your view, making combat awkward rather than challenging.

Inventory management is also not my favorite thing in the world. Seto is given a relatively small amount of space with which to operate as he moves around the world… he has a larger container, but it can only be accessed at save points. Worse, Seto does a good impression of a topologist in this game, unable to distinguish a doughnut from a coffee cup, or a golf club from a piece of string. Almost every item you pick up on your journey is listed merely as a “mystery item” until you bring it to a fire (savepoint) and examine it carefully. Also, your weapons break with alarming frequency, making it necessary to carry backups that take up even more space in your limited carrying capacity and assure repeat visits to many locations to grab items you couldn’t previously pick up. Even though savepoints are very frequent, having to stop at every one of them to swap items in and out made for slow going, especially when the merchant makes constant, often unwanted visits.

Finally, I found it a bit unfortunate that so much of the game takes place in dark, underground corridors. One of the best sequences in the game finds Seto investigating an abandoned hotel, with daylight streaming through the windows and an evocative mix of light and shadow within. With all the interesting possibilities of depicting a world fallen into ruin and reclaimed by nature, it is a pity that Fragile features so few scenes such as this one. Be ready instead for entirely too much of Seto running endlessly in long straight dark underground steam tunnels, only to find some small mystery item for which you then have to turn around and backtrack the entire distance to a fire to identify. Be forewarned, Seto is also uncommonly fond of endlessly repeating, winding stairs.

I did like the variety of enemies that Seto encounters on his travels. From the little jellyfish ghosts that congregate in schools to the ever larger and larger wild dogs, Seto never lacks for things to smack with his cobbled together arsenal of broomsticks, umbrellas and the occasional katana (ah, Japan.) Just when you think you’ve seen it all, new types of menaces are introduced, and they all fit a consistent, creepy visual theme. The various monsters also sound scary, which goes a long way when it comes to game immersion. Seto is one brave kid to keep crawling into the darkest, dankest places he can find when he knows they are filled with such inconsolable spirits. Fragile is a game that features hit points and leveling up, so it isn’t always a bad thing for Seto to engage in a bit of grinding.

Fragile Dreams is a nice departure from your usual variety of video game adventure. It is a quiet, moody experience that is likely to resonate with your imagination long after you’ve played it through. It is nowhere near as polished as, say, a Super Mario Brothers game, but I hope that the greater Wii audience will find the time to adopt quirky little titles like it nonetheless. I’m very satisfied with the game… except that I’m still not sure of the connection to the moon that the title first implied. Weird.