Zack & Wiki: what happened to them?

Zack & Wiki is perhaps one of the emblems of a column like ours, which aims to remember old franchises or single well-made titles that lasted the space of nothing, which have not found a following after one or a few appearances.

Exclusive for</a> Nintendo Wii, the game made by Capcom was released at the end of 2007, perhaps in the period of greatest success of the old console of the house of Mario, achieving excellent critical success and good feedback on the market, with nearly half a million units sold. Not bad for a niche production in some ways. Yet, Capcom ignored these results and never mentioned this game again.

Pirates of the Wiimote

For years, at least close to the time when the product was on the lips of many, rumors of a possible sequel or in any case of a new chapter chased each other, fueled in spite of themselves by the declarations of the authors of the game, who dreamed of being able to make it happen. In a 2012 interview, the producer of the original project, Hironobu Takeshita, said he was very interested in working on a Zack & Wiki 2. He even hinted at some ideas that he would have liked to implement in the work if only he had the chance to make it happen. .

Among them there was one, for example, linked to the possibility of having two players interact with each other at the same time, through a co-op mode that would allow gamers to help each other in solving puzzles and in some particular phases of the adventure, perhaps sometimes dividing the tasks in controlling an aircraft or some other strange gadget in real time. In the game, a point and click adventure completely created around the Wiimote, on the other hand the interaction between the two companions was fundamental.

Zack was in fact the member of a group of pirates called Sea Rabbids, and with his strange friend Wiki, a flying animal similar to a small monkey, which could be transformed into a bell, he decided to leave to succeed to find the pieces that made up the body of the pirate Barbaros, an old captain incurred a terrible curse. Each level was fully visible on a map manageable through a special icon that adjusted the camera and the characters were controlled with the pointer.

Transform and use

Often the objective of the missions, generally a honey, he was maybe a stone's throw from the protagonists, even if apparently unreachable. At the time, it was necessary to solve various puzzles by interacting with the environment and with the animals that populated the strange world of Zack & Wiki to get closer to the finish line and then unlock the way to grab the coveted prize. And here, the motion sensors integrated into the remote control of the console had a great weight. Wiki could turn any creature in the game into an object.

It was enough to grab the monkey, shake it by shaking the Wiimote until it transforms, as written before, into a bell, and then through its sound, the snakes change into pliers, the wild boars into drills and so on. At that point, the objects could be collected and used according to the needs of the moment simply by mimicking their functions with the controller. The system worked very well and interacting with the environment was a source of absolute fun, as each object practically activates a different minigame that forced the user to move, mimicking the various situations, as written before.

If we then add a well-chosen character design, with funny and well-chosen characters not only from an aesthetic point of view, animations and often hilarious situations, it is even more inexplicable that Capcom's choice to never think about a new episode of the game. But who knows that sooner or later, in one way or another, perhaps cross-platform, a project does not come up that, as mentioned at the beginning, resumes a production that we believe would have deserved greater consideration by the publisher.