Reviews from

in the past


Why on earth did I play this game. Why. WHY. It's filled to the brim with infuriating 2000s RPG design, unclear objectives, and outright insane random encounter rates.

But I love this game. I don't know why it stuck so much with me. Maybe it's the simple yet poignant story about how adults manipulate children. Maybe it's the half-apocalyptic setting, with stunning juxtaposition of the natural and the manmade. Maybe it's the worldbuilding - Landroll is occupied by a great many people you can befriend and talk to, a place where art installations have their own history with their creator. Maybe it's the DOWNRIGHT INCREDIBLE soundtrack that the wonderful composers at Basiscape managed to create for this game. (Listen to "The Village Without Memories" or "Tokione." Please.)

I'm 90% sure you'll hate this game. But if that 10% is true, I guarantee you're going to have a great time.

It's not particularly fun to play despite its unique world and OST.

A delightful experience even taking account the glaring issues it has.

If you dislike games with random encounters and confusing methods of progression, I really suggest not playing this. If you are, however, a complete fool like me and enjoy obscure yet charming RPGs, I do recommend giving this a chance.

What you can expect from this game is well-crafted environmental design, fun worldbuilding, charming characters, a phenomenal soundtrack composed by Basiscape, and overall just a feel-good time as you play as a round, orange boy striving to make the world a better place.

It's not a groundbreaking game by any means, but it's certainly one that was put together with a lot of love, and that makes it so hard to hate.

(BTW, if you do give this game a shot, I strongly suggest using the fan retranslation patch that conveniently came out this year. The original localization is really halfhearted and instances of syntax errors and grammatical issues are present in the FIRST area of the game.)


There are a lot of things to complain about this game. The weird difficulty spikes, the slow menus, the lack of diverse gameplay systems. But shallow? Opoona is anything but.

Opoona, at least in its first arc, is a game that explores what it means to be a citizen. Its society lies somewhere between utopian - due to how many systems are in place to ensure you have an intuitive time getting through your quotas - and dystopian, for arguably the same reason. All of your worth as a citizen of the domes is determined by the work you can do. Your primary job is chosen for you against your will, and there are certain careers that are forbidden to you due to you being a foreigner to the planet Landroll. There are numerous NPCs stuck in airports or outside of the city because they have lost their ID, or simply never allowed to have one. You are lucky to be from a "nicer planet", they tell you, while at the same time patronizing and excluding you if your existence is not deemed profitable enough at that place and time.

Yet, the world is not bleak. At least not to you. You are allowed an ID, multiple job opportunities, places to rest, a couple free meals and a variety of friends. The domes, while sometimes labyrinthine and cold, have a certain beauty to their architecture and how well things flow. The right symbol always leads to the right place. The counters are always in the same order. Every process has the same steps to completion. The fact that most gameplay mechanics are either menu, single button presses or reskins of the battle system might be a sign of the game's lack of "depth" to some, but to me it's simply an extension of the way the game represents the highly bureaucratic Landroll society.

I chose to acquire the license for (and progress through a good amount of) every side job. This game can be quite easy if you spend a couple of extra minutes grinding, so the extra money wasn't necessary. But it made me feel like I was contributing something to someone. Janitors in Landroll are held in high praise for their skills, and rightfully so. Art is a vital part of society, even though it's highly commodified and treated like a product of a job quota instead of an expression of the self. People are given jobs that are adequate for their specific needs, so everyone can contribute no matter what their physical or mental capacity is.

When you do go outside of the domed portion of society in the game's second arc, you really start to notice the faults of the system. Even without the influence of the Dark Force, it is a system that hates outsiders and people they can't exploit to their full capacity. The game becomes a sort of Dragon Quest-like narrative at this point (ArtePiazza worked on handful of those, so it makes sense that they nailed that feeling very well), but I care so much about the world by that point that I actively want to save it, because I care about the people in it. There is a beautiful world outside of the domes (really, the graphics in this game are actually really good), and I want to make sure the people living out there are also safe and cared for as much as they care for each other.

I can't really call this a utopia, but I wouldn't call it a dystopia either. It's a society that values convenience above humanity, and yet humanity still manages to shine through. You may be forced to work a dumb job you didn't ask for until society deems you have no more purpose, but at least you get free breakfast and an opportunity to bond with your friends over it.

By far the weirdest game I played on the Wii....maybe the weirdest game I've ever played. I can't really recommend it. It's not terrible.....It's just not good and very weird.

Cool game! Despite being a bit tedious and have some not so great mechanics I really had fun through the entire game and didn't even get tired of battling. I loved the world and the artstyle and the OST's great too!

Mechanically, this game probably deserves a 3 or 3.5. But I can't help but bump it up because of how inventive its world is, how utterly AMAZING its soundtrack is, and how much I keep thinking about this game, even years after having played it.

I came off of this game feeling a little frustrated, and with its shortcomings at the forefront of my mind. "It's mediocre". But I kept thinking about it. I kept thinking about its art direction; the mesh of sleek, hypermodern glass and iron structures and nature. That is really what stuck the most with me. The closest I think a game gets to this is Phantasy Star Online, but Opoona does it better, cleaner, classier. I want so badly for more games to look like this.

As an immigrant, the subtext of bureaucracy in this game is not something I expected, but wow does it add to the experience. All the requisites and red tape you have to go through for just Existing in a planet that you're not a citizen of - it hit close to home. It's definitely a subjective point, but I heavily resonated with it and made me connect with Opoona's journey that much more.

I was also impressed with the town design, and how much life every single location seemed to have. It felt lived-in, it made sense that these locations would develop the way that they did. I love that there's a town known for its museums and high-class shops. I love that there's a business center with two competing technology companies, all of it UNDERWATER, and named "Intelligent Sea". What an amazing name.

The soundtrack is impeccable, probably the best on the system. Hell, probably the best in JRPGs period. It perfectly accentuates the environments, though I will say that the battle theme is terrible. It gets replaced with a much better song later, but only while on a specific mission. I wish that better song played all the time instead.

I think my favorite aspect of this game is how much it respects art. Whoever was in charge of design for this specific aspect clearly had a lot of love for the art world and was fully immersed in it. The game has museums, art exhibits, installations, paintings; pretty much everything that you can expect from the world's finest museums. And these pieces are scattered across the different locales, in different town museums, out in the wild where a rogue artist has set up a small studio and left an art exhibit behind. My favorite of these is the many empty art frames you encounter in your journey. They are introduced with very little fanfare. You just see these random, intricate, gold-leaf frames around the world, with a small inscription telling you the numbering, and the artist responsible. The idea of the installation is that whatever you are seeing through the frame is the art. The game never gives you a special camera angle, never zooms in on an intended perspective; they're all just there, capturing whatever it is the game's camera has put inside it, and it always works. It feels so real.

Opoona, to me, is a game about being othered. It's about beureaucracy. It's about art. Opoona contains multitudes, and despite its very glaring flaws, I can't help but love it. It's the closest I'll get to taking an intergalactic vacation.