Finished LostWinds today. It was shorter than I expected (~3 hours) and appears to be the first in an episodic series, even though no marketing or previews seemed to mention this. It's basically a small Metroidvania with one continuous map for the whole game and a few upgrades. The graphics are fairly pretty outdoors, but you do spend a decent amount of time in your basic caves and mines. With only three enemy types (Glorbs!) and a couple of different doodads used in puzzles, the world is also pretty sparse.
The wind powers are kind of cool, but aside from the final upgrade, they are really just complicated ways to do basic game moves (double-jump, throw stuff). Feels nifty for awhile, though, and the game goes into a cool bullet-time effect when you draw paths onscreen. Just moving the cursor around also creates directional wind effects on most everything, backgrounds included. Good sound, too. The greatest achievement of this whole game is probably how "windy" the cursor feels.
The normal music is peaceful and fitting, but whenever an enemy is in the screen it changes to annoying battle music. This is a bad idea in a 2D platformer.
There are these blue fairies that fly out of defeated enemies and rustled plants. You can collect them by pointing at them (like Star Bits) and they fill three squares next to your health heart. However, I read the entire manual and beat the game without discovering what the point was. At first I thought it was going to be mana for some power I didn't have yet, but that never happened. Near the end I started to suspect it would do something if I died, but I never went below 1/4 heart.
I also collected 19/24 little statue things, which also did completely nothing the entire game and were never mentioned by the manual or any NPC.
