IT IS TIME TO TWEET ABOUT FRAGILE DREAMS

Fragile Dreams: Farewell Ruins of the Moon is a very weird action-rpg-ish horror-ish game for the Wii. It came out in 2009. It is "bad" by game reviewer standards. By any other standards it is incredible

Combat sucks, and there's too much of it. Wii controls are as bad as ever (although it gracefully relies almost entirely on the IR pointer instead of waggle)

Art direction's brilliant and the combination of writing and environment design creates some of the most powerful feelings of atmosphere I've ever played in... anything

I have no idea how this game got made; the budget and polish level is WAY too big for such a weird undertaking

Premise:
Protagonist is 15. Literally every human except himself has been dead since he was a baby, and you don't know why. He sees a Waifish Anime Girl but she's startled and runs away. He goes looking for her

It was marketed as survival horror, bc there's horrible deformed ghost monsters (which you fight with a wiimote flashlight and a stick), but the monsters aren't the point

the game is about *loneliness*

It's set in the ruins of Tokyo, but they're ruins of neglect, not war. Everything's just overgrown and rusted and empty. There's never an exposition dump, but you can find memories of the ghosts along the way, and by listening to them slowly piece together what happened

Minor spoilers: "something" happened, after which everyone who went to sleep simply never woke up. No war or disease or cataclysm; the whole world just slowly ground to a halt over a period of weeks as everyone just... went out, peacefully but inevitably

The memories you find are all of people just sort of setting their lives in order and coming to terms with the fact that they have a matter of days before they can't stay awake any longer

it's incredibly melancholy and strange and poignant

The protagonist is alive because he's such an acute insomniac that he literally cannot sleep

It's possible there are a handful of others left alive with a similar disorder

So like, you explore crumbling tokyo and fight scary ghosts, but the whole thing's framed through a protagonist who's so soul-crushingly lonely that he'll search the whole world to find anyone to talk to

He befriends ghosts, but ghosts are sad and mournful and can't fill the need for human interactions.

He befriends robots and AIs, but the robots are lost and dying; trying to understand what it means to be made in the image of absent humans while their batteries inevitably deplete

The environment art plays into this premise perfectly; it's a horror game that can set levels in broad daylight surrounded by grass and trees, because the horror comes from the world's crushing emptiness and the protagonist's desperation for companionship

In later areas the spaces become distorted and obtuse; still grounded in reality but... uncomfortable. Featureless hallways stretch for so long you begin to wonder if the game is bugged

The experience of just playing it and feeling your way through its world is so completely unlike any other game it's almost a masterpiece, despite being littered with "design flaws"

It's wildly ambitious and experimental with everything that isn't the moment-to-moment gameplay

SPOILERS:
There's an absolutely wonderful bit of writing where it deliberately calls out the protagonist's obsession with the girl he's following. We're conditioned to expect a star-crossed-lovers scenario but one of the ghosts is literally like

SPOILERS CONT.
"Hey there's like a 5% chance she even wants to see to you, let alone whether she'd *like* you. She ran away as soon as she saw you"

SPOILERS FIN
Turns out protagonist *genuinely* understands and accepts this. He's not chasing an imaginary girlfriend; he just desperately wants to speak to the only other human alive

This isn't an offhand thing either; it's p central to how the plot plays out

Not sure how to conclude this thread

It's not *fun* to play but it's utterly fascinating to play. It does incredible things with worldbuilding and writing and level design. It left enough of an impression I still regularly think about it 9 years later

It's good