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* indicates a repeat
1~50
52. Bakushou Jinsei 64: Mezase! Resort-ou (N64)
53. Mother (Famicom)
54. Famista 64 (N64)
55. Weird and Unfortunate Things are Happening (PC)
56. Kirby and the Rainbow Curse (Wii U)
57. Mario Kart Wii (Wii)
58. Wario Land: Shake it! (Wii) *
59. Mario Party 8 (Wii) *
60. Zack & Wiki: Quest for Barbaros' Treasure (Wii)
Rounding out my recent endeavors to get through the shorter Wii games I’ve accumulated, there was this game that my friend Robin got for me a few months back. She had watched someone playing it, and she really wanted me to try it out too. This is a game I definitely have played before, granted, but I far from finished it. I only remembered getting stuck very early on when I was younger, and I was eager for an opportunity to prove that my puzzle game skills had improved since then X3. It took me around 10.5 hours to play through the Japanese version of the game on real hardware. I did not end up looking into any of the post-game content, but I did end up using a walkthrough online for a couple of late-game puzzle solutions (for reasons I’ll elaborate on later).
This game’s story is about the titular human boy Zack and his flying golden monkey friend Wiki. With dreams of becoming the greatest pirate ever, Zack has joined up with the fairly shabby Sea Rabbit pirates, and they frequently do battle with their bourgeois pirate nemesis, the Rose Rock pirates and their leader Captain Rose. After their dingy rental plane is shot down by the Rose Rock’s flying fortress, Zack and Wiki find themselves in a strange forest on an unknown island. Even more mysteriously, they find a cursed chest that Wiki’s magic can thankfully open without issue. Inside the chest is a magical talking golden skull calling itself Barbaros. Barbaros is very thankful for having been rescued, and says that he is, indeed, the legendary pirate captain Barbaros, but he was cursed to be a skeleton and his parts scattered like this! If Zack and Wiki can break the curse on him, he promises to give them his magical flying pirate ship. Their hearts bursting with dreams of becoming pirate legends, the pair set off at once to lift Barbaros’ curse and find that treasure!
The writing in the game is pretty lighthearted, but it’s good fun for what it is. There’s not a ton of talking, as most of the game is smartly centered around the puzzling rather than the yammering around it, but that writing which there is succeeds in always being silly and entertaining. Your Sea Rabbit pilot Jonny and Captain Rose in particular are very fun and silly, and the whole game reminds me a ton of how the dialogue is written in old Capcom games like Mega Man Legends. It’s hardly an all-time achievement of literature, of course, but I’d say Zack & Wiki still manages to go well beyond the call of duty and delivers a silly and memorable story that’s great fun to watch play out.
Exactly how the playing of that story works out, however, that’s something different all together. In a rather unique move for a console-exclusive game, Z&W isn’t just a puzzle game, but a point & click game too. Over the course of the games 20 or so stages, you guide Zack around using the cursor to have him inspect, pick up, and operate all manner of things. There are a lot of baddies and monsters lurking about the world’s treasures, however, so the two of them have to be on their toes. Thankfully for the two of them, Wiki has a special power to turn into a bell. Shaking the Wiimote will turn nearby enemies into useful items that can be used for puzzle solving too, and it’ll be an invaluable tool in your quest to life Barbaros’ curse.
Granted, with this being an early Wii game, the use of the Wiimote does not merely stop at pointing at the screen and shaking Wiki like a bell. Most activities you do have you waggling the Wiimote around in all sorts of ways to do everything from fishing up a giant treasure fish to dropping a pot on an angry skeleton. As is also the case with most early Wii games, this is where the game really starts to fall apart, in my opinion. While the game does its best to show you explicitly how to hold the Wiimote for each respective activity, that doesn’t mean it always actually works the way it thinks you have to. For every few activities you’ll get through with no issue, there will be at least one that ends up being totally inscrutable that you’ll need to just force your way through. The worst of them is the (mercifully optional) rhythm game, which I found to be one of the least functional Wiimote waggle activities I’ve ever played in any game (which is really saying something), but in terms of the stuff you’ll have to do to actually beat the game, the waggling isn’t a terrible problem in and of itself. Where it really starts becoming unforgivable is in how the game handles fail states.
In the dangerous world of pirating, there are a LOT of ways to die, and you’ll likely come across many of them in your quest for treasure. There are a good few approaches to each puzzle, and a lot of them can get you killed if you don’t do them quite right. The game thankfully has an in-game hint system for when you get stuck, but you’ll probably only realize you’re stuck enough to need a hint after dying once or twice, after all. On the one hand, I do find it very fun just how well animated and unique damn near every different way to die is. Not unlike some old Sierra games like King’s Quest VI are hailed for being “fun games to die in” with just how varied and silly they are, the same absolutely rings true for Zack & Wiki with all of the great faces Zack pulls as he gets flattened, scorched, etc. The real problem here is how the game itself handles failure.
While the earlier levels don’t take too long, later levels can get incredibly long with dozens of tiny steps and puzzles between the start and end. Upon dying, you have two choices: Restart the level from the beginning or resurrect from just before you died. Resurrecting from just before you died is the obviously more convenient choice, but that convenience comes with a great price. Angel tickets are a finite resource, and if you run out, you’ll be forced to retry from the beginning of the stage. Much like the goddess dolls that provide your in-game hint system, you can buy angel tickets at the hub between stages using the money you collect in the levels, but even that comes with a big caveat. Dolls and tickets both start less than cheap and only get more and more expensive with each one you buy, and, so far as I could find, there’s no way to reset that number (though I must assume it has some kind of maximum).
While this *is* a puzzle game, it’s also got those action elements to the puzzles, and that means consistent success at those waggle activities. Even if you know the solution to a puzzle, you still need to actually do it, and for things like the atrocious sword-fighting activity near the end of the game, that can get pretty darn miserable. All of this means that failure not only gets more and more expensive as you continue to mess up, but with how poorly some of those waggle games control, it will often hardly feel like your fault when it happens. Nothing feels worse than managing to just barely scrape past some earlier barely functional activities just to get caught by a later one’s poor control and need to restart because you’re fresh out of angel tickets (so you’ll need to barely manage to stumble past those earlier activities alllll over again too, of course). Your only recourse for more angel tickets is to go back to earlier levels and grind them for money, but that’s hardly much fun when you’re trying to get past the thing you’re currently stuck on (not to mention that you’ll need to grind more and more every time because these things just keep getting more expensive with every purchase).
The price of failure is so high in resources (both in-game and that of the precious time your life only has so much of) that it ends up making Zack & Wiki fall into what I consider a death-spiral of puzzle games. After a certain point, failure is SO undesirable that you end up looking up the solution in the first place because risking death just isn’t worth it. That continues from one puzzle, to the next, to the next, until you’re just looking up everything. At that point, you’re no longer even playing a puzzle game. You’re just doing your best to try and manage through these crappy motion-control activities so you can actually complete each stage, and that makes for an exceptionally frustrating and boring gameplay loop (and you can sure bet it was for me in the incredibly long final stage and overly long final boss fight, the latter of which actually can’t even have angel tickets used during).
I really hate that Zack & Wiki reached this point, because it otherwise has really solid and clever puzzle design that I really enjoyed working my way through. Additionally, the angel ticket and hint systems being as punishing as they are feels *so* extra unnecessary in light of the game already having perfectly serviceable penalty mechanics for dying and taking hints. You get a certain number of points per level for solving puzzles correctly and succeeding waggle activities on your first attempt. Accordingly, using angel tickets and hint dolls detracts from this score at the end of a stage. While I don’t think it’d be much fun to actually try and retry stages for those high scores, this is a perfectly acceptable way to penalize a player for being less than literally perfect, so I cannot see why they felt the need to not only have a system of limited retries but also to make it punish you for failure so harshly. It feels very outside the spirit of a puzzle game for me.
The only reason I can think of for why they’d do it like this is that it’s here for the same reason the points system, awful rhythm game system, and bizarre collectible system (where it’s simply there on some attempts and not there on other attempts randomly) are: Replayability. Reviewers and video games were downright obsessed with games giving you reasons to replay games outside of the game simply being fun to play, because otherwise they wouldn’t be long enough to justify the large money price of entry for a new video game. While it’s far from unreasonable to expect a good bang from your buck, the efforts to push replayability in Z&W are only aspects that detract from the player’s fun. Having such a punishing death system is certainly a good way to make the game longer, but it’s hardly a way to make the game a more fun and satisfying puzzle game, and it honestly totally neuters my ability to seriously recommend even this game even to big puzzle game fans.
In another great irony, much like the writing, the game’s aesthetics are very good and fun too. Character designs are novel and fun, animations are cartoony and memorable, and each level feels very different from the last with just how different their major gimmicks respectively are. The music is great, and it’s a real shame that every other aspect of the game is put together so well when the actual fun of the game is compromised so greatly.
Verdict: Hesitantly Recommended. I had enough fun with the earlier parts of this game that I can’t completely not recommend it, but it’s still a pretty damn tough sell for me. Just how overly harsh the punishment system for failure is kills SO much of this game’s ability to be a fun puzzle game that it really bums me out. The writing is funny, the graphics and music are awesome and perfect for the setting, and even the puzzle design is largely really well constructed and fun to figure out. Even as much as I hate motion controls in games (since they lead mostly to frustrating control schemes with poor accessibility features rather than anything else), even that isn’t the big killer for me in enjoying and recommending this game. This is a game I really wanted to love and highly recommend to everyone, and it bums me out so badly that I need to be so harsh on it for what are ultimately such minor and unnecessary gameplay design choices. You just might find the good aspects outweigh the bad for you if you try this out, but just be ready for a lot of grinding for money, frustration, and/or looking up puzzles piece by piece if you do end up taking the plunge.
