"You are not alone."

If you're wondering who the cutie next to the blog title is, her name is Ren and she's a character from the Wii exclusive Fragile Dreams: Farewell Ruins of the Moon - a beautiful and sober game about a boy named Seto living in a desolate world where humans are an endangered species. The goal is to try to find the last few survivors in your area, just to avoid being entirely alone for the rest of your life.

I really feel like I should explore the games that the Wii offers more, because while the gems seem few and far between (I would hardly call random-Mario-title-2010 a gem), the ones you can find are usually elegant and slightly left-of-center - breaths of fresh air in a smoggy world of rehashed RPG and FPS games you can hardly keep straight.

I've had my eye on Fragile Dreams since rumors of its release first came out, but, being a Wii game and not getting a huge amount of hype, I kept putting off purchasing it in favor of other big titles, although every time I wandered into a game store, I would sigh dramatically and debate whether or not I should just cave and buy it.

And yesterday, after seeing it on a shelf at Gamestop for a very reasonable price of $20 for a new copy, I couldn't resist any longer.

Totally worth the purchase and the price.

Fragile Dreams is a mix of things: partly it's like playing through one of those quiet anime, like Kino no Tabi (Kino's Journey) or 5 Centimeters Per Second; partly it's an adventure game; and partly it's a survival horror game.

It's not as strange of a mix as it might seem. In fact, I'm a little curious why there aren't more games like this. (Maybe I just don't know about them?)

I'm only a couple hours into the game, but this is what I love so far:

• The visuals are really wonderful. Rich colors and high levels of detail. If you're going to have a game about the end of civilization, you've got to make the world interesting to explore, and Fragile Dreams does this well. Run down shopping malls, earthquake-shattered subways, abandoned artifacts from people's lives. What's really cool is that although all the text is in Japanese, hovering over the writing with your cursor will translate most of it for you, so you can see how normal this place must have been before disasters happened. Best part - the creepy drawings and graffiti all over the place left by past survivors. Adds to the atmosphere and kind of freaks you out when you wonder what inspired them.

• The spooks. Even though the people are mostly all gone, they left behind emotions of malice and despair which have manifested themselves as ghouls lurking around the world. At first you only see the jellyfish/metroid creatures floating around out to get you, but as you explore, the monsters get creepier and stronger. With only a small stick to defend yourself (until you find a stronger stick...), it gets pretty desperate at times.

• Personal Frame. And Seto. And that chicken guy. But really, Personal Frame is pretty great and I want to touch upon her separately. She's this little computer pack that you carry on your back and she offers you advice about your surroundings and your journey. She's got this adorable personality of wanting to impress you by having knowledge about everything to the point where when she accidentally helps you find a key, she stutters and says she knew where the key was all along and purposefully lead you to it. While this is endearing for the most part, it's starting to seriously creep me out. I'm growing cautious of PF possibly having a darker side, and I love her all the more for it. Also, her and Seto have some amusing exchanges, although I don't know if they were meant to be humorous.

• The Wii-mote. Finally, a game that uses the Wii-mote's features! The Wii-mote itself acts as Seto's flashlight and also controls the direction of the camera, so you actually have to aim your cursor around to move. At first, this was a little difficult to get used to, but it's not all that hard and once you do get used to it, it's second nature. The Wii-mote also acts as your ears. You hear various sounds around your environment through your controller and the closer you get or the better you aim your flashlight, the louder the sounds get, which result in this unique way of finding clues and creatures. It also adds to the creepy atmosphere since you can hear ghosts lurking before you can see them and you have to figure out if you're hearing them to the left of you or even on the other side of a wall. Best part - when you hold the Wii-mote vertically to your ear, Personal Frame communicates to you directly to give you clues and commentary about your current situation. The first time she warned me about earthquakes this way, I was absolutely delighted. This extra level of interaction with the sidekick character is just awesome and I want to see more games involve you like this.

Overall, my first impression of Fragile Dreams has been absolutely fantastic. I'm nervous that the game might lag story-wise in some spots, but PF has been pretty good so far at giving me objectives (get out of the subway station, find a stronger weapon, find the key) and it hasn't been a problem yet. (Which is good, because I've got a terrible attention span.) The camera could also be a little better - when the cursor hits the edge of the screen, the camera sticks, which is frustrating during a fight.

But despite the minor complaints, the game has a lot of potential and has already impressed me greatly. It's a nice change from getting bored of a game after the first hour - I'm actually excited to keep playing and see what happens next.

Searching for a Home Away from Home

There are times when I'll be sitting at home or driving through town or doing some random task at work when it'll hit me. This wave of nostalgia and homesickness. This desire to go back, to be somewhere familiar.

This homesickness isn't for a childhood house or even mom's home cooking (I eat that most nights since my parents live right down the street from me).

No, this sudden urge is to go back to some other reality, a place that can't be physically occupied but feels more like home than anywhere I've ever slept.

For me, there are a few: Balamb Garden. Shadow Moses. Hyrule (back in 1992). Amongst others.

Video games give us this opportunity to be other places, to be with other people, to BE other people, in ways movies and books can't. We can walk across the country and spend some time in our favorite villages. We can scope out our high tech apartment and feed our dog while taking a break from hunting Replicants. We can decorate our houses in ways we never would or could in real life, learn the back alleys of the neighborhood slums, stay at mysterious hotels, take a breather in secure diners while searching for our daughter in some hellhole town.

These locations become bases to us, safe places where the conflict of the game can't actively hunt you down. Your heart gets to take a break from trying to pound free of your ribcage. Your thumbs get to take a break from rapid-firing those controller buttons.

So when a game denies me this little space, I get very disappointed.

RPGs, adventure games, horror games, action games - most of these understand the need for a home base and deliver rather nicely.

But where I'd really love to have a "home space," a place to retreat when not questing or fighting, is in MMOs.

Why oh why oh why, do I not get a house in WoW or Guild Wars or FFXIV? I mean, I know the real reason is because it'd be damn expensive to have a house per a player, but come on, can't we get some sort of apartment complex where everyone gets at least one room? I know Guild Wars has guild halls, and those are cool, but let's give it a little more detail and individuality, hm? Allow us to throw our treasures in there and decorate.

Hell, Gaia Online gives members their own little houses to decorate. I think WoW should be able to afford some sort of dormitory. Limit the server sizes and give us a place to live, damn it. If people are going to be getting married in this World of Warcraft, you can't go denying them a threshold to carry/be carried over! I mean, obviously people aren't devoting enough of their lives to MMOs.

Seriously, though, while having a house in WoW may invite people to abuse and neglect their real-lives even more, I think many gamers would thoroughly and safely enjoy the feature.

I, for one - a novice WoW player and perhaps one of the least dedicated gamers on any WoW server - would love the feature. My main problem with MMOs in the first place is that the rewards for heavy battling aren't enough to keep me going. I got new armor? Awesome. I can make an amazing potion? Sweet, go me. Still nothing to really entice me to keep battling over and over.

Give me a house and make battling a way to get stuff to decorate it, though - I be on that all night, I be on that all day, baby.

It would be like an episode of MTV's Cribs - the WoW version. "And in this corner, I stable my own dragon mounts. They have 42-inch satellite televisions in here - got those from some Alliance member whose ass I kicked last week."

No, I'm just kidding, I totally play Alliance. Those Draenei are just too cute to say no to.

Anyway, home space is something MMOs really need to learn to utilize. In single-player games, homes provide small details that really build on the characters and give them a depth that wouldn't be possible without those spaces. We can see how they keep their personal space and that says a lot about a person a game developer is expecting us to spend 50+ hours with.

In an MMO, a game genre that functions largely on the ability for the player to feel like an individual that they've created and developed, having a home space would provide a whole new level of interest, and I'm sure the number of people who would play just to enjoy that "Sims" and "Farmville" aspect of it would more than cover the costs.