Opoona Review

12 Sep 2008 at 11:34:43 by Aisha Ragel
Systems used to review this title: (WII)

Opoona, a cute little alien character from the planet of Tizia, goes on a holiday with his parents and siblings.  They soon find themselves in a bit of a pickle when their spaceship is attacked.  Opoona and his siblings are separated in a very Kalel-being-saved-from-a-doomed-Krypton kind of way.  He crash-lands on the planet Landroll and is separated from his family.  On planet Landroll Opoona is more or less put to work by the State, where he is to earn money, gain social status, do as many missions as his little round head will allow him and find a little bit more about his ancestry along the way.   All this so that he, his brother and sister can be reunited with his parents again.  Opoona is the ultimate outcast on Landroll; he is reminded quite often of his crash-landing and how it has brought some of the planets technical systems to a halt since the little alien graced them with his presence.

This game is a very cute and colourful little wonder, it’s appealing and visually delightful at times.  It’s very well presented and I can see few seven year olds getting their teeth stuck into it and liking the little challenges and the easy battles that Opoona is faced with.  Sadly for me the game lacked depth, it was all a bit too robotic for my liking, I was slightly excited about the Serge character when my dreams were shattered, as I’m sure Opoona’s were, when I found out that his first little reliable companion on Landroll was in fact a robot.  And there were a few thousand of him scattered around the planet.

It is so easy to get lost in this game, the maps are useless and you can only look at the area you’re in.  The world of Landroll is too big and trying to get up and down the lifts to the different floors is painful when you realise that you’ve been on that floor already and you wanted to go down and not up.  However, there is lots to do which is great if you have all the time in the world to try and figure out where you’re supposed to be going.  You will spend an awful lot of time traipsing through the different floors, going through different doors, tediously going up to anyone standing idly around to see if they can give you any idea of where you need to be going.  It was all a bit too time wasting and frustrating.  And when you think you’ve managed to find yourself, hey presto you’re back where you started right before you got lost!

The outside battles which Opoona finds himself taking on aren’t hard at all, it’s quite easy to defeat the different quests he’s been assigned to.  Opoona’s magic ball, which floats on top of his head, is called a bonbon and is used as his weapon.  All you need to do is aim and toss the bonbon at the enemy and you’ve effectively taken them down.

I might be nitpicking with this one, but… there is no voice acting, the game is all a bit too silent, apart from the weird music that resonates throughout the game which I quite liked.   It gave the game a very relaxed and unrushed feel.  I have a bone to pick with KEOI, and it comes in the form of the text in the game, which is very poorly translated and flooded with typos.  And I'm not even going to talk about the camera angles, which were rather appalling and majorly frustrating.

I have to say that if I didn’t have to do this review I would have never played Opoona.  Despite its many faults which I have pointed out, it’s not a bad little game, if you’re looking for something to do on a rainy day, it’s got a few little nice quirks to it and its very pleasing to the eye.  I can see younger kids liking this game as they go through Opoona’s unfamiliar world they get a little taste of living in a world of adults and feeling like a complete and utter alien.  It’s a child’s way to experience what it’s like to be part of a social network, making friends, getting a taste of crappy future jobs and being treated like an outsider with no opinions (bleak but true).  It’s a nice warning of the future for them.  It’s not a bad RPG, in fact you probably couldn’t get an RPG like it out there with some of its original charm!  All in all not a bad game at all, I wouldn’t pick up the nunchuck to play it in a hurry but its comforting to know that it’s there for that rainy day!

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