Builds upon the foundation of the first game, adding season changing mechanics on top of additional wind-based powers.

This leads to more interesting puzzle design, but also has the downside of making backtracking a lot more painful - repeating the same puzzle sequence for the fifth time just to navigate through a central room is not fun.

The aesthetics are a bit more varied this time round, with the changes induced by altering the season. The music remains the same, they even kept the irritating enemy jingle.

Just like the original, this was a cool side project from Frontier, however there are a lot of far better alternatives these days.

Short development times and rehashed assets aren’t always a guarantee of mediocrity- titles like Majora’s Mask and Assassin’s Creed: Brotherhood showed that a myriad of small changes combined with a good story could go a long way towards making a rushed sequel feel fresh and exciting.

Alas, LostWinds 2: Winter of the Melodias fails to join those ranks. Created in the span of six months and released less than 1.5 years from its predecessor, it throws a few new gimmicks in, but several setbacks, new problems, and a failure to address prior issues ultimately bring it down.

In my review of LostWinds 1, the haphazard cliffhanger ending made me wonder whether it was deliberately done to forcibly create a sequel. Having played 2, I can safely say that this wasn’t the case, though that wasn’t for the better as, in many ways, 2 feels completely divorced from its predecessor. Yes, it immediately takes place after the fight with Magmok, but none of the threads from before are continued- Balasar is completely abandoned, instead replaced with a new antagonist named Riveren; the Melodias and Toku’s mom, who were barely namedropped in the first (don’t remember if the latter was even mentioned) are now major plot points, and the whole thing about needing to restore Enril’s power is forgotten about.

You might be thinking this was done to make it easier for newcomers to get into the story, but that train of thought falters when you see just how much the game takes it for granted that you know everything. There’s no recap of what happened before, no explanation of who Toku and Enril are, no delving into the (potentially-interesting but wasted) mythology, nothing- it’s presented point blank as though you understand the basics of the world. In other words, that counter-argument falters, and what you’re left with is a standalone sequel in the same vein as Taken 3 that has no business being standalone when there were beats left unresolved.

This is made worse by the fact that the replacement narrative isn’t that good. In quick retrospect, it’s ironic I brought about Majora’s Mask earlier as the events that transpire in Winter of the Melodias are reminiscent of it, involving an innocent kid getting corrupted by dark magic, tormenting his village, and a young boy and his fairy companion trying to stop him. The snag here is that nothing is developed- we don’t get a sense of who the Melodia Boy was prior to his adulteration, who the Melodias even are beyond a species of magic singers, why Toku’s Mom Magdi wanted to find the Melodias instead of staying back and raising him (he has no dad), nothing. I’ve frequently used this expression in the past, and it applies just as much here: it’s as though the developers were more interested in moving from A to B than fleshing out anything, and that makes the game forgettable.

Of course, Majora’s Mask had similar issues (not bothering to explain where the Masks came from or who the Skull Kid was at all), and I criticize those aspects of it accordingly, but Zelda games have generally coasted on good gameplay over a powerful narrative, something Lostwinds 2 doesn’t have either. Like in the first game, the main mechanic is manipulating wind: you use it for movement, combat, and puzzle solving. One of the strangest decisions the developers make is to do a Metroid Prime-style removal of Toku/Enril’s powers without an explanation as to what happened. You start off the game and you’ve lost everything except basic airbending- storywise, it makes no sense; gameplay-wise, it was evidently done because the developers were either too lazy to incorporate a brief tutorial or craft brand new abilities.

Not like it matters because everything you do is very substandard- using slipstreams to move rocks onto switches, creating vortexes to propel a projectile into a breakable wall, utilizing strategic gusts to make it over long gaps between platforms. One of the more interesting abilities Toku gets allows him to summon tornadoes that can move water sources or drill into the earth, but the solutions to predicaments involving these are painfully obvious- the pool you need to refill is right next to the one you sapped from.

As the subtitle suggests, Lostwinds 2 throws in a new system involving abruptly changing the seasons from summer to winter. These lead to aesthetic reshufflings that I’ll talk about in the graphics section, but from a gameplay perspective there isn’t much imagination put into their differentiations (not surprising since you don’t even get the switching till halfway through the title). Frozen water is the only major thing, with icebound lakes and waterfalls presenting some facet for you to either overcome or employ for the sake of traversing a place or obtaining the game’s primary collectibles of mini gold statues.

Honestly though, the truth of the matter is Frontier Developments didn’t successfully make both sides equivalent in terms of pros/cons. Because most of LostWinds 2 takes place during the cold spell, winter in general presents more advantages than summer: verglas barriers can be demolished, snowballs conjured to hit switches, and monsters are far-less abundant. When you initially arrive in the frost-ridden mountains, you are made to deal with survival aspects of keeping Toku warm and strategically lighting fire sources, but this is quickly made useless by the obtaining of an Eskimo outfit that makes you immune to the frigid temperatures (making me wonder why they bothered putting it in, in the first place- such permanent solutions are usually saved closer to the endgame, like water filtration in Subnautica or the light suit in Metroid Prime 2). Overall, it’s clear more could have been done with this Oracle of Seasons mechanic.

I also felt it would’ve been better to have a smaller number of larger-sized areas over the abundance of medium-sized ones you see throughout your odyssey. Not only could this have led to the crafting of more intricate puzzles, but it would’ve also reduced the amount of backtracking you’re required to do, which is aplenty and strongly suggests a poor man’s attempt at implementing a Metroidvania design. The incorporation of a fast travel system would have also done wonders to alleviate this, though I’m 90% sure the reason such a scheme wasn’t implemented was because it would’ve cut down on the length of the game.

I ranted about combat in the first Lostwinds, and my criticisms remain just as potent here. New enemy types are thrown your way that you can’t just toss into walls (no pun intended) the way you could the first time around. Unfortunately, there is still no incentive to even engage in fights minus mandatory sections or minibosses- you don’t get any rewards for beating blobs, they’re easy to avoid, and, above all, it’s not just fun. You’d think a game with aerokinetic forces would be the breeding ground for something entertaining here, but you’d be wrong to do so.
If I can end on a positive note, it’s that the one-to-one motion of the mouse is a lot more fluid this time around compared to the first game, where I felt the initial Wiiware intentions had limited the capabilities of the port.

Graphically, Lostwinds 2 bears the hallmarks of its predecessor, which were already quite good and consequently hold up well here. I won’t go into too much detail since I explained it enough in my review of the first (https://www.backloggd.com/games/lostwinds/), but you got blocky, colorfully-adorned 3D characters that match up well against more 2D backdrops.

One of the things I really appreciated was the amount of small animations the developers programmed with regards to wind impact- you swipe the cursor in four different directions, and each cardinal yields a unique reaction on the NPC or object it’s hitting; you hit Toku while he’s hanging off a cliff edge and he’ll roll over as though beckoned by a squall; smack some trees and snow falls off it (but only once!); stand on a glacial sheet and Toku slides as though he’s wearing ice skates.

Ice, as a whole, yielded its own visual delights- giant crystal stalagmites act like funhouse mirrors that project Toku’s persona, while manipulating flames through rimy enclaves generate orangey, blurry glares. It’s not surprising to see the extravagances put up in later Frontier Development’s games considering what they were able to accomplish with a limited budget for LostWinds.

The sound is honestly another downside to the title. I didn’t like the music at all- most of it doesn’t stand out, and the tracks that do are more irate than pleasant. The title screen (which simultaneously operates for emotional leitmotifs) is like a modernized version of the old Lavender Town theme, while battle music is the same Asiany stringed instrument piece repeated ad nauseam.

Sound effects range from adequate to outright bad. The soothing sound of a blaze is always nice (despite the streams only being damaging at the tip, not the body) and splashing water syncs well with the fall of the droplets on the ground. However, this is contrasted with most of your wind moves surprisingly not having any associated din, the ones that do coming off as pretty stocky sounding. Getting rid of ice blocks or icicles via collision literally sounds like a baseball shattering a glass window, and the less said about the squawking of the glob toons the better. Taking everything into consideration, it’s not surprising that the mixers deliberately dampened the SFX. And as there is no voice acting, there is nothing to say on that front.

So in the end, Lostwinds 2, like the first one, isn’t recommendable by my book. The motion is more synchronous, but story and gameplay that don’t live up to their potential knock it down several pegs. Combined with backtracking galore and you got a platformer that just barely made the cut over shovelware.