Fragile Expectations

I have just watched the latest (first?) Fragile trailer, courtesy of the Kotaku newsfeed and YouTube:



Fragile is a game I've been looking forward to since I saw my first batch of screenshots. It's for the Wii and it's very pretty. In aesthetic, it resembles the sort of beautiful desolation I enjoy in everything from the anime Kino's Journey to the manga Yokohama Kadeshi Kiko to Steven King's The Dark Tower, coupled with shojou character designs straight out of CLAMP. There's really nothing there I don't like. I don't understand a word of the dialogue spoken but I'm looking forward to listening to more of it, with English subtitles. Using the Wii remote to direct a flashlight while exploring environments worthy of Misty Silent Hill but without Silent Hill's oppressive atmosphere it something I can buy into.

Or could.

Pay attention to the, oh, four seconds of video starting at the 1:31 mark.

I think I see a protagonist standing mostly in place and flailing rather limply against huge numbers of slow-moving and unresponsive identical low-poly enemies -- low poly enough that they look out of place in those beautiful environments. Given that he's using his flashlight, directed in the rest of the gameplay by the Wii remote, I'm guessing it's waggle-controlled, too.

I've played enough mediocre 3D platforming games with combat mechanics like that to know I don't want to play another.

I could, of course, be wrong, though since we're only a month away from the game's Japanese release date I doubt that's an alpha version of the combat. The game looks promising in other ways; God knows Ico didn't have very in-depth combat mechanics and it was great.

Still. Four seconds of video, and if most of my enthusiasm is, if not shattered, at least cracked.

I'm getting pretty jaded, to have expectations that fragile.