Opoona Member Review for the Wii

You play as the eponymous Opoona, the oldest sibling in a family of ball-shaped people. It’s an entire family tree full of balls. They all wear balls, and they all fight with their balls. Balls. Balls. Balls. One day, while Opoona’s family is all in a spaceship headed for a balls-filled vacation, the ship comes under attack, and you all jump into ball-shaped escape pods and land on a planet made up of human-looking folks (you know, the kind of creatures who don’t have balls coming out of their ears). The remainder of the game is spent trying to get the whole family and all their balls back together again. The developers could have just called the game “Testicular Reconstruction Quest”, but then we’d miss out on such a wonderfully suggestive title like “Opoona”.

The title of the game is just asking to be mocked. For a character who shows so much cajones, the name “Opoona” sounds more like a strange euphemism for female genitalia. Maybe I’m being unfair, but then again maybe I’m not, considering the game’s made for a console called the “Wii”. I can’t imagine why the Japanese might have a thing for naming games and characters after genitalia, but I’ve already sworn off Pokémon and its “gotta catch ‘em all” motto. There are very few things I’m interested in “catching”, especially if I have to use my balls to do so.

But now that I’ve (mostly) gotten the requisite “balls” jokes out of the way, that leaves the game itself. Unfortunately, my childish puns about testicles are a hell of a lot more fun than this game. As far as I can tell, this is meant to be an RPG for little tykes. The look of the game, the simplified combat mechanics, and the storyline are all molded to hook the little ones into the crazy world of Japanese turn-based RPGs. I’d be all for this if it weren’t one of the most non-intuitive, poorly designed RPGs I’ve played in a long time.