Wii U Panorama View Kyoto Sightseeing

Genre: Application

Players: 1

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Review:

Wii U Panorama View Kyoto Sightseeing, released on the Wii U in 2013, is a video Application that offers, for $2, a sort of virtual experience that uses the Wii U gamepad to put you in the middle of a brief guided tour. Or, to put it another way, Wii U Panorama View Kyoto Sightseeing is a $2 glorified tech demo that is little more than a glorified seven-minute 360-degree video. You know, the same sort you can access for free on YouTube and play on your phone or tablet?

This particular video has the viewer joining a Japanese woman dressed as a geisha as you embark on a brief sightseeing tour on a rickshaw through the Japanese city of Kyoto, disembarking to briefly duck into a private garden. As you proceed through the tour with light and forgettable music playing over the experience, the rickshaw driver acts as your tour guide, talking to you and the geisha, to which she occasionally responds, and with her sometimes looking over toward you. I should note that none of the Japanese spoken here is subtitled or features any sort of translation, so if you don’t speak Japanese, you can only guess at what’s being spoken.

Players are free to move around the Wii U gamepad, in 360 degrees, looking at everything around you and even the sky above if you choose (though there’s not much to see up there). Looking straight down makes for a blurry video distortion, as apparently the cameraman didn’t capture footage of his feet. Players can use the right analog stick to zoom in, use the left stick to slightly tilt the camera in any direction, and can press L or R to instantly see 180 degrees behind you, like a rear-view camera in a racing game. And at any time, you can press + to pause the video, and fast-forward or rewind to any point.

As a tech demo for the Wii U, I suppose this makes sense – it demonstrates the Wii U gamepad’s screen and motion-sensing capabilities. However, charging money for this, even as little as $2, is absurd, and not only because you can get the same thing on YouTube for free, for countless videos no less. The other issue this has is that the screen resolution is embarrassingly bad, with some absolutely nasty artifacting going on in the video. The Wii U is an HD console! How could you have not gotten this right!?

I suppose, if you’re looking to add a tech demo to your Wii U library before the Wii U eShop closes… well, this is that. But unless you have some deep interest in the topic matter and cannot be bothered to look up 360-degree videos on YouTube, I see no reason to spend your money on this.

tl;dr – Wii U Panorama View Kyoto Sightseeing is a 7-minute 360-degree video where the viewer joins a geisha on a rickshaw tour of Kyoto. Even at $2, this feels like an absolute ripoff when you can get a similar experience on YouTube for free, and even if this wasn’t the case, the fact that the people who produced this video couldn’t be bothered to record it with anything even remotely resembling a decent image quality is outright insulting.

Grade: F

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