Nights: Journey of Dreams -- Initial Impression.

Next up for me is Nights: Journey of Dreams on the Wii, the very long-awaited sequel to the Saturn game Nights into Dreams. It's been eleven years since the original game and in the mean time Nights fans have had to endure lots of interviews with various Sonic Team members saying how a Nights sequel was always on their minds and how much the fans are clamoring for another game and how they never really did anything about it until now. Until the Wii with its motion sensing controls would be a perfect fit for the concept of flight that makes up the original Nights into Dreams. And of course, the rather timely departure of Nights into Dreams producer Yuji Naka. Naka gave up Sonic and Nights and his other creations and left SEGA to form Prope, a new studio with as of yet no announced titles. This strikes me as the real reason we're finally seeing a Nights sequel, the Naka roadblock is out of the way. The original Nights into Dreams was unfortunately advertised as the Saturn's answer to Super Mario 64. That caused a lot of people to purchase the game expecting some platforming action and Nights of course isn't a platform game. In fact it's closest to an arcade racing game where beating your best time and score is the goal. Only instead of racing around the track you're flying around a dream world. The original Nights was a critical darling and extremely hit or miss with gamers. It's one of those you either get it or you don't kind of titles. The original game also was designed for and launched with the Saturn's 3D controller and it made a rather large impact on the game. Controlling like a dream with it, and not so well without it. Most people would play the game without it. Nights: Journey of Dreams offers just about every Wii control scenario in existence so hopefully one of them will feel just right. And hopefully the music will live up to the original game's music which is easily one of the greatest video game soundtracks ever composed. Of course there is only one way to find out if dreams come true... and I'd like them to in this case.