This game was just incredible when I first started playing it. A fun game for the Nintendo WII that played like something I have always dreamed about playing. Unfortunately, near the end it tails off drastically and becomes almost a "Silent Hill" or "Resident Evil" clone and it loses a lot of its luster that it attained during the first portion of the game. The story has a boy who lives in an observatory with an old man who basically raised the boy. Most of the people on Earth are dead and so is the old man. He writes the boy a letter though and tells the boy to search out the "Red Tower" and try to find survivors. Well the boy encounters some strange mask that seems hostile and soon sets out for said tower. It is not to long after that, that the boy sees a girl, touches her even. She runs away and he immediately goes in pursuit of this girl. His adventure will lead him to an underground mall, an amusement park, an old hotel, and finally a drab and boring underground facility in a dam. He also meets a couple of interesting characters along the way including a mischievous young boy with a secret Crow, a artificial intelligence known as personal frame, and a ghost girl named Sai. There is also a merchant dude that seems like comic relief, but when you find out why he is doing what he is doing it is actually rather sad. So as for the game it consists of exploration and battling strange ghost like apparitions. The combat is at times clumsy, but not as bad as other WII games out there. The graphics are great for the WII right at the start. Lots of nice locales. I especially like the storage shed area when you emerge from the mall the first time as it is just wondrous to look at. To bad instead of adding more locales like this the creators of the game instead just have the main character go through the same stages again until he does get to the final location a really boring underground facility. At this point the game became far to less exploration and way to much fighting. Hell, I could have done without the fighting all together and just would have liked to explore the world as a whole. More areas of open road. The ending is okay, but it tries to hard to explain why everyone is dead and adds to much science in the end. Also, the weapons in this game degrade and for the most part degrade quickly. However, some of this makes no sense as a crow bar type weapon does not last nearly as long as a butterfly net. In fact, the butterfly net was by far the longest lasting weapon I had. The range weapons were annoying to use and other cooler weapons just broke down to quickly. This game could have been something really special, but in the end I just think the makers got lazy and ditched what could have been the best exploration game ever in favor of just another "Resident Evil", "Silent Hill" survival horror game.
