It's a fairly rare thing these days to finish a game and immediately be dismayed to have no more. Whether long or short, by the time the credits roll, I'm generally either satisfied or glad to be done—if I bother getting to the credits at all. With a play time of only five hours (it's a free indie game after all), Wind Ryder didn't have long to get stale, but it outperformed every expectation by miles, and has the tone and charm so, [i]so[/i] many old Idea Factory and Compile Heart games struggled for and never reached. If you want a cute, flirty JRPG that delivers on humor and charm, you want Wind Ryder.
The writing is the star of the show, from start to finish. I was laughing out loud in the first thirty seconds as love interest #1 forbids Ryder from starting on "another of his flashbacks." While fourth wall breaks like this are rare (I honestly can't think of another), the game is very self-aware, and I want nothing more than to send the creator some money, just for having Sylvie (the game's adorable, rotten pixie) call out amnesia as the "lamest excuse in the book." Wind Ryder marks only the second time in JRPG history I've not been bothered by the obligatory use of amnesia: virtually all uses trot it out as an excuse to hide plot elements the writers are too lazy to properly develop. Ryder doesn't start with his memory lost, and the player observes every event that occurs. There are no cheap, deus ex machina surprises hidden away under the laziness of an amnesiac main character. The game doesn't just avoid terrible writing, though. That would leave it mediocre at best. Instead, it's full of warm, friendly banter between Ryder and whichever girl is accompanying him at the moment. (In what's released so far, only the very end sees Ryder grouped with two love interests at once.) Arwen's barbs are friendly and good natured, and Prim properly comes off as the spoiled step-sister you can't help but smile at. The characters seem to enjoy each others' company, and that makes all the difference in the world for keeping the player from hating on any of them.
The plot itself is barely begun so far: there are mentions of an astral goddess and a war in which she was defeated, but not until the very end do those events more than tangentially relate to what's going on, which is simply this: Ryder doesn't remember anything, and to find someone who knows him, he and Arwen have to undertake an adventure just to get him back into his academy. There are a pair of significant sidequests to be had, and the gameplay driven by this simple plot is similarly uncomplicated: This is a traditional JRPG in almost every sense, with only the slightest of frills from the old classics. Coming from me, this is high praise: the more JRPGs have sought to redefine the genre, the worse they've become, until at last we have one of the greatest names in the genre suffering an identity crisis to become a stylish action game instead. When I want a JRPG, tradition is what I want. Difficulty is low throughout, but it IS the first part of a (hopefully) long series.
Beyond the excellent, playful writing and traditional gameplay, the rest of the game has polish of only about what one would expect for an indie. The art is good, with appealing designs executed competently, but nothing particularly standing out. The voicework is also more than adequate, but without any real "wow" moments. I do wish a bit that the voice actors had access to better hardware—here and there, the voices actually seemed to clip a bit, most noticeably early in the game. Finally, I ran into one design decision that I feel invites player error: at some point, I had in my inventory a gem I didn't remember picking up and sold it off. Not until very late in the game, when smithing is unlocked, did I realize that that was the key to upgrading the main character's weapon. Were I the developer, I would either have given it when smithing is unlocked, or made smithing materials key items.
For the low, low price of zero, I want to reiterate that Wind Ryder is a great time, focused wisely on being fun rather than dragging anything out. It knows what it is, it knows what it needs to accomplish to succeed there, and it does everything it needs to well or better. Coming off a deeply regretted purchase of a triple A Japanese tactical RPG and all of its self-importance and lack of attention to narrative, Wind Ryder was a gust of fresh air.
