I'm thinking of buying this maybe as soon as tomorrow. (I wanted it for my birthday but nobody got it for me. In fact, the reason my girlfriend didn't get it for me was because of "bad reviews." Grr...)

But, hey, with few exceptions, a lot of people sure make Wii Music sound like a complete waste of money.

So to those out there who liked the game...psyche me up. Give me a reason to buy it. Explain to me why it's worth $50 of my hard-earned money. Get me off my butt and into the store.

Please.

Hey, maybe you would like my review (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5xcc3rfLhV8)
Hope you like it.

And i gave it a 7.5 out of 10 but you should probally rent this game first or wait for a price-drop just in case

Trying to watch now, Link, but my computer is downloading updates and the stream is all jerky. I'll check it out later though; thanks for the link. (Link, link.)

Watched it, and I've subscribed to you. Thanks man. That was a good review...how on earth do you get gameplay footage off your Wii, though?

Also: no others want to speak up for Wii Music?

Never even played it,what is it? Oh,and I would LOVE to make Youtube videos very soon,so spill the beans Link6694!

Well I'm sure there is others, but I can't reveal my secrets ( ok yes i can but i dont feel like it sry )
Maybe in the future

but if you have any other game questiosn just send me a message my way

Link6694 ( Head Reviewer of Wiilike2review Productions

I could go on about Wii Music for pages, but I don't want to start this off with an essay, so let me try to quickly explain what it is that is so enjoyable about the game.

As you know, it isn't anything like the other music games out there; you are not given falling button prompts to follow, and nothing you do will cause you to 'lose.' I used to play a good bit of Rock Band with a couple of friends who were into the game, and while it can be fairly enjoyable as a party game, I'm someone who is obsessed with the details of music and music theory, and I always felt annoyed by the utter lack of freedom you have in RB. When I was on the rhythm guitar, I might want, for instance, to start syncopating my repeated part, or invert it a bit in time; on lead, I might want to go ahead and hold out a particular note in the solo, letting it continue over the next bar where it should sound completely different over the chord change; if you try anything like this, however, you just get an error sound and you lose points. On drums, RB gives you the ability to throw in really dull fills at predetermined times when your meter is filled up, but you can't decide you want to suddenly go into double-time, or play around with the basic beat. The fact is that Rock Band, and Guitar Hero, are not really games about musical skill at all; they're just about following directions, and are nothing but Dance Dance Revolution with plastic instruments.

Wii Music is basically the first music game that actually engages your musical ear and musical creativity. At first, when you start playing through a song in Wii Music for the first time, or as you go through the mandatory tutorial, you will feel like you don't have a whole lot of control. Most reviewers seem to have stopped here, with the impression that all you do is shake the remote and let the notes come faster or slower. That's utterly wrong, though, and all you have to do is play with the game long enough in order to slowly begin to understand how to completely change, reconfigure, bend, and remix the songs in the game into entirely new creations. It isn't easy; in fact it's harder than the entire RB/GH opus, and it still takes me over an hour of playing and experimenting to ever produce one musically creative remix that I'm satisfied with, but if you're truly into music, you will enjoy it more than any music game ever released.

If you're the kind of person who cares about the little details of music, get this game. Rock Band / Guitar Hero appeal only to one rather simplistic notion of musical skill: the "virtuoso," which they then further reduce to the ability to hit notes quickly and accurately. That is such a devolved idea of musical skill, and even technical virtuosity has a lot more to do with careful control of dynamics and little rhythmic touches than it does with mere mechanical accuracy. Wii Music cares more about these kinds of things: how to balance out the instruments in your ensemble to produce a complex but unified sound, how to elevate the bridge section of the song, how to toy with the harmony by using subtle variations in the bass or carefully applying suspensions and anticipations, how to produce a sense of movement and build-up of tension across the song, etc.

Now, I can go on for ages about any particular feature, such as how the controls actually work ( hint: the idea that it's just shaking the remotes to get the next note is absolute nonsense ). But you must ask

I will leave you, for now, with Nintendo's staff videos, if you haven't seen them. These are videos created by Nintendo employees (the Wii Music devs, in particular), and there are some very clever ones in the mix if you look around. I know of some even better videos out there by individuals, and can add them to the thread later.

http://uk.wii.com/wii/en_GB/software/wii_music_staff_clips_2016.html

As much as I like Wii Music, I never feel like I can unilaterally recommend it since I really think to get the most out of it you need to like playing around with music. I think the best part is making your own arrangements and trying out different instruments with each other to see how they sound. You can also go totally off the beat to make something that sounds nothing like the original song however, it's easy to make really, really bad sounding arrangements that way.

I also really liked the lessons in there since it would tell you how to do the different parts to make them sound like jazz, classical, rock, etc. I think there are about 10 different music types with basic and more advanced lessons for each. I always had trouble with the rhythm section though and got really tired of Twinkle, Twinkle Little Star since it used that and Do Re Mi for most of the lessons but otherwise they were great.

There are a couple of mini-games that are fun too, but some of them only have about 5 songs. They aren't the main game but more just extra content.

Overall, I think you need to want to learn more about music or like playing around with different instruments and arrangements in order to get the most out of it.

Thanks guys, and gal. The game does sound fascinating, and I think I may enjoy it after all...

I do have a question though. Can you actually use Wii Music to create a song that isn't on the setlist? I know people complain about the small number of tracks, but that doesn't bother me if you can create your own somehow. So can you make your own, or is your experimentation limited to the confines of the songs that are there?

Also, I noticed there was a free-form jam option (forget what the option was actually called). What does that entail? (Jamming holds a lot of appeal for me...)

You never start out from scratch; you are always working with a particular song from the list, which includes 50 tracks that range from:

1) Simple pieces to get you started (Twinkle Twinkle Little Star)
2) Classical pieces (Ode to Joy)
3) Folk melodies from around the world (Little Drummer Boy)
4) Pop songs (Material Girl)
5) Nintendo tunes (F-Zero Mute City)

It doesn't fit the concept of the game at all to start out with nothing or with a blank slate; it's all about working within and simultaneously against the structure of the song you have selected. With a single song, though, you can produce infinite variations that bear no resemblance to one another, and you can even, if you're clever enough musically, twist the song into something that retains almost nothing of the original song and would be unrecognizable as a form of it.

Here are a couple examples from one of the best players on YouTube:

Happy Birthday (one of the simple tracks mocked by some who didn't understand the game) -- turned into a brilliant, entirely new song: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NHQLa3a2DIc

Ode to Joy -- but turned into something very different. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t7oMGz_9iIA

If you sit and watch some of the clips on the link in my first post, you'll see more examples in this vein.

That's what I hate most about GH/RB, losing. I don't understand why the force you to stop playing if you perform poorly. It makes no sense.

I hear you. On a semi-related note, while I think SingStar is a much more satisfying music game than Guitar Hero while still being a good party game, it annoys me that if I suddenly sing the harmony or back-up part because that's what I'm used to singing along with, it doesn't register that.

I don't know about first. Electroplankton was pretty darn good at this. Mario Paint might be an unfair comparison, but it also did. I think Parappa the Rappa did this, too, but I never played it. Still, whether it's first or not isn't important, and I guess those are more composition-based games rather than arrangement-based.

That's why I never tried this game. Thanks for setting the record straight.

I definitely am the kind of person, but the track list does seem disheartening. Most of the tracks I've heard are children's songs, bad pop songs, or overused classical songs. I don't see myself playing anything but Troika and a handful of Nintendo songs, which is serious discouragement. I don't know the full track list. Is this a legitimate concern?

The first arrangement of Mute City is awesome. I need to learn this on ukulele and get some light percussion instruments. There is no shortage of video game rock bands, but even something like Mute City sounds surprisingly great acoustic.

SingStar is great, get some drink and some friends round, and the evening has gone.

The vast variety of instruments is awesome. It even includes an NES horn. The minigames are great. I'm hoping a sequel is made that expands on the Mii Maestro game. The ability to conduct an orchestra at your own pace is incredible.

@Adam

You're right about Elektroplankton, and I should have mentioned it myself; that's such an enjoyable little game, seemingly simple but pretty darn addictive if you hook it up to a nice set of speakers and start playing around. On a related note, I wish they'd carve up the individual segments from that game and release them on DSiWare for cheap.

As far as the limitations of the track-list, I have more to say about that and how to think of it, but I'm on my way out the door. I do think anyone considering a purchase should understand what they're getting into -- the kind of freedom it gives you is very difficult to describe, and it's certainly more akin to playing around with Elektroplankton than it is to literally composing note by note as you do in Mario Paint.

EDIT: Okay, so now to address your question regarding your limited interested in the game's tracklist ("is this a legitimate concern?"). I would say that the tracks don't actually matter nearly as much as you might think, but that really depends on how you play the game. I don't start up a particular song because I suddenly want, say, to play Material Girl; I choose a song based on what kind of melody / rhythm / chord structure I want to have as a base to start toying with. It's certainly not easy to get the hang of it, but in time, you can start doing all sorts of interesting things with the songs, but always only by spending a long time trying out different phrasings and textures and seeing how your movements play out against the song.

Every note you play (except on the rhythm instruments of course, which are fundamentally open) is determined by several things -- the role you have assigned to your instrument (melody, harmony, chord, bass), the point in the song and in the measure, so that the note will always fit with the underlying original chord structure of the tune and will play either with or harmonically against the melody line depending on the role, and your phrasing, so that different variations will produce very different results. Again, it's hard to understand unless you start playing around with it, and at first you will feel like you have very little freedom, but if you understand music well, you'll slowly begin to get the feel for it and will be able to bend the songs into whatever ideas you come up with.

It comes down to whether you really enjoy this sort of playing with the structure, arrangement, and details of a song, completely irrespective of whether you liked the song to begin with. If you do enjoy that sort of thing, and fundamentally enjoy it to the degree that your interest in the original tune is less important, the tracklist is not a problem.

I also own and enjoy this title, though I have to be in the mood for it, usually when I'm listening to a lot of jazz I get a hankerin' to mess about with some songs.

I have actually experimented with trying to do my own thang and ignore the chosen song, but it's quite difficult given you have a bouncing ball making a metronome sound at the bottom of the screen which is nigh impossible to ignore. The worst that will happen is your bandmates will make faces due to your not being in-time.

I did have some initial frustration with the amount of tutorials you start out with. The game forces you to play around with a limited track list to start and do some rearranging and playing of mini-games until unlocking other songs and modes, but as indicated after playing about with it for a couple of hours you'll get a nice amount of songs and scores of instruments as well as the ability to choose different styles for playing the songs.

The track list could have used more public domain songs; I really would have liked a lot more classical and some jazz pieces in there. Clearly downloadable content would have to factor into any future instalment of this as well as code-free video sharing, which is really disappointing, thought at least it's only Wii system codes and not Wii Music codes that are being exchanged.

If anyone is interested in seeing some of my freshman efforts, please feel free to post codes because I'd love to see some of your stuff as well!

Who needs this, I have Mario Paint! Video

@Sean Aaron

I know there's a long, generic friend codes thread on the forum, but I don't see why we can't double this thread's purpose and start including friend codes for anyone interested in Wii Music specifically. Post yours and I will certainly add.
8378 9716 1696 8633

@sirgrim: They're really entirely different experiences, as warioswoods stated above. Mario Paint is great, sure, but it's just not the same as Wii Music, which this thread is about.

@warioswoods: The videos you posted url's for were AMAZING! I played the game shortly after release, but never actually bought a copy (been meaning to, but my money's tied up elsewhere). Watching those REALLY makes me want to take another crack at it. I agree with what you said about the reviews for the game, too. None of the reviewers was looking at it from the right perspective, and just couldn't comprehend the point of it. A classic example of why I take more than just reviews into account when deciding what I want to play. Checking up on things, I notice that THIS site's review was well-written from the proper perspective, and big props to the author for that! And my store manager says I shouldn't cite reviews from a website like this when recommending games to customers...

Dude.

That is EXACTLY what I'd like to do with a game like this.

I have no idea how much experience you'd need with the game to even come close to something like that but...

...I want it. Haha. That one clip has made me decide to buy the game. That's effing wonderful. (I don't want to bore you all with the story, but I used to be in a pretty excellent jam band before I moved, and now I'm the only musically-inclined person I know. In some small way, doing things like this in the game might be a good outlet for my creative urges.)

Thanks man.

Bore us with the story!