Wii Music

"An outstanding music game with great replayability."

Wii Music is a strange kind of game in many ways. It can be divided into four main parts: lessons, mini-games, jam sessions, and video library. (There is also an optional drum mode which requires the Wii Fit balance board.) The mini-games are short, simple, and easily completed; the jam sessions are the real focus of Wii Music. In the jam sessions, there's no scoring, no feedback on how well you perform, and no failure for missing too many notes. Instead, you're encouraged to play the music in your own style and save videos, which you can watch later in the video library. Without any way to rate your performance skills, traditional gamers may find themselves at a loss to understand this game. But anyone with an interest in music and a willingness to experiment will find many fun things to try in the Custom Jam sessions.

Wii Music has three mini-games: Mii Maestro, Pitch Perfect, and Handbell Harmony. The Mii Maestro game features five songs in which you use your Wii Remote to conduct an orchestra. The orchestra follows your direction, but the response can be unpredictable. You do get scored on your performance, but it's not entirely clear how the points are scored. None of the songs you conduct have any complexity; you just need a steady beat. Pitch Perfect is more interesting as a brain training game, but it may be too easy for anyone who plays music. You are graded on how quickly you can accomplish simple tasks such as lining up instruments from low to high pitch, or matching the pitches in a chord. Handbell Harmony is the most traditional of the mini-games; a set of notes scrolls across the screen and you play notes at the right time by tilting your Wii Remote or Nunchuk to play one of two handbells. This does have a higher difficulty setting, but the difficulty level is still fairly easy even with the options.

The jam modes are where the real action is in Wii Music, and this is the part that seems least like a traditional game. There are three jam modes: Instrument Improv, Quick Jam, and Custom Jam. Instrument Improv basically allows you to try out each of the instruments, to get a feel for how they work. Quick Jam picks a random song, style, and instrument for you to perform. The Custom Jam sessions are where you'll spend the most time in Wii Music, and this is the most fun part of the game.

There are 66 instruments, which fall into a small number of basic control schemes. Some of the instruments are controlled by swinging the Wii Remote and Nunchuk as if you're playing a percussion instrument with mallets. Others use the Wii Remote as if you're strumming the strings of a guitar, with the Nunchuk to control pitch bend and other effects. For other instruments, you need to hold the Wii Remote out like a trumpet and press buttons to play notes. The instruments range from commonplace (piano, guitar) to more exotic (sitar, shamisen) and really strange (dog suit, cheerleader), representing a wide variety of musical styles (classical, jazz, rock, tango, and many others).

For each of the 50 songs in Custom Jam, you can change the style of the music in many ways. There are twelve preset styles with different combinations of instruments, and a choice of five tempos from slow to fast. You can select an instrument, and choose a Mii to play one of six parts (melody, harmony, chord, bass, and two percussion parts). You have the option to bring up a note guide which shows you when to play notes, but if you like you can ignore the note guides entirely and play notes whenever you want. Once you've finished a song, you can rate your own performance and save a video.

The lack of any kind of automatic rating is one of the more unusual features of Wii Music, but when you start to consider the kinds of things you can do in Custom Jam, it begins to make sense. You can certainly play the notes as written, but that's only the most obvious way to play a song. You're encouraged to experiment with the music, playing extra notes, or leaving out notes, making your own performance unique. And once you've performed one part, you can swap out your Mii for a different character and play a different part of the same song, until you've got your own complete performance with up to six tracks. This is where the real fun and challenge of Wii Music comes in. How much expression and style can you put into the performance? How much can you change a song and still end up with good-sounding music? This is something only you as the player can judge.

This may sound like an easy game with no challenge to it. But if you miss a note, or play a note at the wrong time, you can hear the result, and you won't want to keep it as a video. Some of the songs include rapid runs of notes, which only get more challenging at faster tempos. You may find yourself practicing for hours trying to get a part just right at the higher difficulty levels. Another thing you can do is to try creative ways of making new music that doesn't sound anything like the original song. There are certainly harder games out there, but Wii Music can be a pretty interesting challenge if you look at in the right way.

As for the selection of available songs, many of them are from the public domain (classical or traditional music), with a few songs from Nintendo games and a few older popular songs. Some of the songs are ones you won't want to play more than once. The beauty of Wii Music, though, is that you can take a song you don't like and make it into something radically different. And there are a few really great songs in the list. On the whole, the song list makes sense for what Wii Music is. It's not a rhythm-matching game, where you have to press the right button at the right time for a high score, but a music-creating game, where you design your own arrangement of a song and save a video to watch later. Many of the songs are more fun to jam with than you might think just looking at a list of song titles.

Rating summary:

Controls: 8/10. The response of the instrument controls is sensitive and precise, but a bit awkward for some instruments. The conducting mini-game responds in unpredictable ways.

Graphics: 7/10. Unimpressive from a purely visual point of view, but the focus in this game is on the music, and the graphics are reasonable for this purpose.

Sound: 8/10. Most instruments have reasonably good sounds for an inexpensive sampler (you can't expect studio quality sounds from a $50 game).

Replayability: 10/10. There are just so many different ways to play any song that you can go on for variation after variation and still not run out of ideas.

Reviewer's Score: 8/10, Originally Posted: 01/12/09

Game Release: Wii Music (US, 10/20/08)