I picked this game up from a bargain bin back when I was something like 11-12 years old. The gloomy cover art stuck out to me amongst the sea of other Wii shovelware titles (and the occasional Just Dance), so I begged my mom to pay the 10-15 bucks I needed to buy it.

That afternoon, I popped the disk in and was immediately drawn in by the atmosphere. The quiet strings of the title theme started up and I remember just sitting there in front of the TV, listening to it for a while.

"At the very end of a summer that was all too short, the old man I was living with passed away. Even after all the years I spent together, I never knew his name. Later that evening, I dug a shallow grave in the front yard of our home and buried him there." This intro has a permanent spot in my brain. I can pretty much still quote it word for word. Seto's emotionally distant voice accompanied by the screeching cicadas and the sound of a shovel striking dirt establishes an incredible vibe. It has all you could ever want for an excellent intro.

And Fragile Dreams carries this atmosphere throughout the entire game. Little middle school me was absolutely enraptured. I spent my summer with Seto and his post-apocalyptic world, learning about the people who had vanished from it alongside him. Discovering the beauty (and sometimes the horror) of quiet, abandoned places. This game is so carefully crafted to elicit stirrings of melancholy and some undefined sadness from your soul. The story isn't perfect, in fact I'd argue that act three's pacing was pretty bad and there were some loose threads that really should've been picked up by the end, but the overall themes and excellent character driven storytelling really pulled me in. The set design and beautiful visuals accompanied by a sparsely used but incredibly moving OST really cements the experience in your brain. Godawful combat and some baffling gameplay design choices bogged down that experience plenty, but as a kid I was happy to slog through the next pack of random enemies (that would despawn and respawn if you backed out of their detection range) if it meant I could get another mystery item with more story.

That said, this is a game, not a movie. And revisiting it, the fact that my wonderful exploration experience going through this world was marred by having to suffer through terrible combat encounters (horrible movement, no dodging, physically attacking anything feels like moving through molasses) and bad gameplay design (punishingly small inventory that obviously took inspiration from Resident Evil's Tetris style storage, constant backtracking, straight line level design with load screens for every new room or hallway, etc.) brings this game's rating straight down. I wouldn't be surprised if the dev team was sorely strapped for time towards the tail end of development, or just didn't really know what to design to fill gameplay time, and thus defaulted to combat (that they obviously could not get right). It's not like this game is survival horror - it's got horror elements, but it's no Resident Evil, and it didn't need to be shoehorned into something similar to it. It's already a sub 10 hour game, the padding just made it worse.

2.5 is all I can give it, and that's with all the heavy lifting being done by the fantastic atmosphere and storytelling. Did I mention Fragile Dreams also has some of the most beautiful prose I've ever read in a game? God I wish this game could get a modern remake somehow, with the all the design flaws ironed out. Then I would actually be recommending people play it instead of just watching it on YouTube to skip the agony of combat.