Pirates: The Key of Dreams (Wii)
Sailing the high seas, finding chests filled with treasure… it’s not hard to see the appeal of a pirate’s life, at least the life depicted in popular fiction. It’s a simple spark for dangerous adventure, with simple motivations that can lead to exciting conflicts. Of course, the reality of pirates is not much of a secret, they were grimy thieves on the high seas, and Pirates: The Key of Dreams introduces itself as a game about pirates before hurriedly trying to dodge any association with the more unsavory reality of the pirate trade.
In this game, you are but a navy captain who has disguised his vessel as a pirate ship to better aid him in his noble search for the legendary Key of Dreams. This key has the mysterious power to make whoever has it incredibly powerful and successful, so naturally the go-to pirate Blackbeard has his hands on it and your team of undercover navy officers must track him down and take it to be stored in complete safety with a navy that gives you no reason to trust them. It is a shame the game went with such a milquetoast approach of putting us in the pirate role, and since the navy immediately begins opening fire on you the moment you have the skull and crossbones on your sail, it’s not like your ruse has any real payoff during gameplay. Quite quickly after you begin playing the game though, you’ll notice the expected thrill of being a pirate isn’t really present here either, so perhaps the deception is an apt angle after all.
Pirates: The Key of Dreams is a simple WiiWare game that takes its ship-focused combat and throws in a bunch of pirate paraphernalia to make it seem more appealing. On your quest through the Caribbean, you remain locked to your boat, meaning all treasure you claim must be sailed over. While the gold is good, the treasure your pilfer from sinking ships is always the game trying to squeak in more superficial pirate accoutrements. It’s a little charming the first time you find something like a “crate full of beards (black)” but the cargo is mostly just for filling a checklist and what’s inside it is both random and meaningless. The truly annoying attempt at pandering to pirate fans though is the way the game does text boxes. Whenever a notification appears on screen, the game mumbles “Arr” at you, and since the game is mostly silent due to having no music during most gameplay, the “Arr” might as well be this game’s soundtrack. Many of these notifications are pretty pointless as well, which is good in one way because the way to close them is the same button as the cannon fire button you’ll be hammering all the time so you’ll inevitably miss a bunch of them. The ones that do hold some significance either inform you that you are about to be ambushed or you have cleared all the enemy vessels you need to proceed, so even then it’s no big loss if you accidentally close them immediately.
In this mostly silent world, your ship mostly finds itself sailing through narrow channels, the game never really putting you out in an open sea or making sailing choppy in the slightest. You hold one button to go forward, can hold another to reverse, and you can turn your boat left and right. As you easily sail through cramped water corridors, other ships may appear and try to start up a scrap, but you’ll probably eventually realize that very few ships ever need to be dealt with and you can just sail on past them. Save for gates that won’t open until you defeat nearby boats or break down their boathouses, battles are optional and not really worth the time to indulge in. Battles involve spinning your ship to fire from your broadsides, the AI ships often too simple-minded to outmaneuver you and too weak to put up a fight even when they have a numbers advantage. If you have gold (which you’ll get ample amounts of) you’ll even slowly recover health as it’s automatically spent on repairs, the only other use for the treasure being to pay overboard sailors you pick up who have a negligible effect on your ship stats. There’s not much threatening up against you, even when you face Blackbeard himself, and the ships you face mostly just come in small or big varieties with the occasional bomb ship and turret that can be easily avoided. When you are forced into a battle it’s a boring chore and when you aren’t forced to fight the ships ahead you can pass them by without worrying at all that you might be sunk.
One thing the game gives you to give the slightest bit of depth to its battle system are limited use weapons you find in crates. These make the easy battles easier since they’re much stronger than regular cannon fire, but you might have to think if you want to use them to clear out the bigger ships with more health, a boathouse, or just breeze though weak enemies. You’ll never need them nor will it feel like a big waste if you use them poorly, so they mostly just add something to consider besides positioning in a skirmish. You are also able to cycle through four icons that seem to represent your cannons, sails, repairs, and navigation, but whatever these are meant to do, just like the crew members you pick up, doesn’t seem to have an apparent effect.
The game never really does change level objectives meaningfully as you progress, the goal almost always ending up reaching the end of the narrow canals, and even some things like chasing Blackbeard or clearing an entire area of military vessels just turn out to be goals that are stated but barely enforced. Blackbeard waited patiently at a gate for me to catch up and of course the military vessel objective didn’t bar me from finishing the level even after I skipped the meaningless fights. The game ends very quickly as well, with your ship only having sailed through pretty identical waters save a short trip to Persia. It’s actually not too big of a surprise to learn that this game was developed as a prequel to a DS game called Pirates: Duel on the High Seas, which makes me think this game was more a teaser experience than a true title with a lot of effort put into it. Sadly, looking quickly at Pirates: Duel on the High Seas, it looks like a lot more of the same, so while this is an accurate teaser to the other game, it almost feels more like a warning not to play the DS title.
Perhaps the most disappointing thing about this game is that the multiplayer shows that the single player could have been a bit more fun. If you play with another human player, Pirates: The Key of Dreams gives you a decent stage for a battle with a bit of tactics to it. In single-player you’re always in the position of power, but against another person, they might actually position themselves intelligently, run away if they’re being fired upon, and they can use the same special weapons you can. There are even more areas available in multiplayer, with an Arctic ocean and lava sea that could have been interesting to see in the main story but would have likely been squandered just like everything else. The multiplayer is still not deep enough to keep you around for long, but it’s a little better than the rest of the package and almost looks like the game’s true focus. Still, if multiplayer is the game’s actual intended mode to be played in, it’s still not all that interesting.
THE VERDICT: I can’t really say that pirates appeal to me more than any other fantasy genre, but I have enjoyed a few good pirate games and Pirates: The Key of Dreams is not one of them. You can’t hide the game’s bland ship battles behind a layer of “Arr”s and Jolly Rogers, and while the multiplayer is interesting for a few minutes, there’s not enough there to make it something worth coming back to after the first visit.
And so, I give Pirates: The Key of Dreams for Wii…
A TERRIBLE rating. Half meaningless ship battles and half a portent of the sequel’s potential failings, Pirates: The Key of Dreams has little identity outside of being a glorified demo for Pirates: Duels on the High Seas. Being a pirate has never seemed so dull, but that’s partly because any potential hardship a crew might face has been stripped away to make the simplest setup for ship battles that they could pull off. Other than the unusual items like rockets and saws you fire, you’re just sailing around with ease and blasting your cannons, something that grows old before the short game is even close to over. If the enemies put up more of a fight and if you had more interesting types of enemies and obstacles to deal with, The Key of Dreams would have been a more interesting quest to go on. The multiplayer is weak but it shows the potential of the game, and if your enemies were even close to being as smart as another player than maybe the story could have put up a good fight. There would still need to be some work done to add more variety to the battles after that, but this game could have saved itself from sinking if you weren’t just able to sail past almost every threat in your path.
The average multiplayer ship battles aren’t enough to put this close to a recommendation. Pirates: The Key of Dreams is no good for people looking for either a pirate game or a ship battle game, the game growing too boring too quickly and never trying to add anything to mix things up. This forgettable game won’t be satisfying anyone’s dreams of sailing the high seas in the slightest.