Zack & Wiki: Quest for Barbaros' Treasure ReviewFollow

Obviously this is my (and my honey's) opinion, yada, yada, yada:

The anime style sucks, and the keke and cutesy look/chat feels like it hasn't been localized and is overly weird. Obviously that's the feel they were going for, or they skipped the localizing budget. Either way - I'm obviously not the market they were going for here.

The intro is overly long, confusing, and so very anime that my husband didn't play the game for nearly 7 months after completing it. It turned him off completely. It interrupts you every 3 seconds and tells you what to do, and how to do it, and why you're doing it. Once it returns to game play if you don't immediately jump on what it tells you to do the second it says so - it ends up interrupting again. This was not a good way to introduce the game, as you never encounter that kind of game play again.

The puzzles are very Shadowgate-ish, which was exactly what I was looking for in a game. There are wrong ways to do things, right ways to do things, and then ways to do things that more right then others.

One has the ability to "rez" in the middle of a puzzle, restarting from a point you died or lost, by using in game currency that hasn't seemed to be hard to get. One annoying part here is that when collecting in game currency, sometimes it falls off the world instead of remaining collectible, a lazy shortcut that should not ever happen.

In the lobby area, in between puzzles there's a ton of extra's and goodies that don't really do anything or seem to have any meaning. It could be we've missed out on a huge portion of the game (in which case WTF), but I'm thinking that people just added a bunch of ways to track what you've gotten without any sort of meaning behind it.

Overall, I'd totally buy it again, would totally recommend it to anyone looking for a puzzle game. If you like the anime style, you'll really love the game. If you don't, it's worth it to put up with it to enjoy a puzzle game like no other I've come across in years. It utilizes the wii remote fairly well, and can be fun figuring out how to use it to solve the puzzles with the different items given.

I recommend this game to anyone looking for a puzzle game, who can see past the shell it's delivered in, or anyone (ugh!) that enjoys that kind of presentation.