Fragile Dreams: Farewell Ruins of the Moon
August 3rd, 2010
Fragile Dreams: Farewell Ruins of the Moon is a recent, fairly obscure, unusual and very Japanese Wii game, developed by Tri-crescendo, who most famously made Eternal Sonata for Xbox 360 a few years ago, but first caught my attention with their Gamecube card-RPG Baten Kaitos: Eternal Wings and the Lost Ocean. Eternal Sonata, despite the interesting premise of being set entirely inside the death-bed dreams of the 19th-Century composer Frederic Chopin, was too JRPG cliché for me, so I gave it a miss. Baten Kaitos had some beautiful pre-rendered scenery, a compelling story and characters and an unusual battle-system involving the real-time chaining of randomly presented cards to multiply attack-damage. It remains the only JRPG I’ve actually enjoyed playing, even after slogging my way through Final Fantasy VII and Chrono Trigger.
