Coraline for Wii Reviews by Gamers

I quite enjoyed the eerie aspect of the game’s storyline, and thought it was going to be an awesome game, based on the opening title sequence with its “Nightmare Before Christmas” look and feel. The game started out easy enough, with Coraline exploring the house and performing menial tasks, but I was hoping the game would get more progressively difficult. It didn’t, but it certainly had difficult parts, especially when you had to push button sequences on both the remote and nunchuck in a very short amount of time. I had to buy a pass on a mini game that had me supposedly playing a piano, but wasn’t ambidextrous enough to coordinate the buttons. It also didn’t help that the button sequences weren’t matched to the music in any way. What made these mini-games even more difficult was that the buttons would just stop working altogether and I’d have to re-set the game. The ultimate blow came when I got to the end of the game and couldn’t finish it, apparently due to a crash bug that was reported in the review by IGN. I don’t see how a kid could do any better than I did, so parents beware: these frustrations made me want to throw a big tantrum.

In case nobody else knows, Coraline was a book years before the movie came out. It was written by author Neil Gaiman and was published in 2002. The movie was based on the story, so some of the missions in the game were a little lacking because they came directly from the story's original version. I'm sure when Gaiman wrote the book, he had never planned for it to become an adventure game, so he hadn't planned major action scenes for gamers to survive.

Being a fan of the actual book, (I enjoyed the movie as well) I compared the game to the book, not to other games. In which case, the game was well designed. It followed the story fairly well, captured the relationships between the characters perfectly, and added a few fun games to lighten up the depressing atmosphere Gaiman had provided for this story.

I think the game gave a decent amount of challenge. Truth be told, it's not a game for all you hard core gamers out there. I see it to be more family oriented, (as was the movie) so it shouldn't be judged on a hardcore basis.

So I think it was a good game. The voice acting was superb. The animation was very similar to the movie. Also, the controls were simple and easy to learn. So I say it's worth a rent. But if you do, know that Coraline wasn't planned to be a game when it started.