The downloadable game systems that are now available on all current generation platforms give indie developers a golden chance to show the value of their small, but very talented team of developers. Going through the tough process of creating and publishing expensive retail titles that would directly compete against the industry's big sellers is nearly impossible for such tiny studios. Fortunately digital distribution allowed gems that wouldn't make it past initial art drawings and brainstorming sections to see the light of the day.

As far as WiiWare titles go the three-part epic adventure of LostWinds stands on a category of its own. After playing through the first title – one of the system's launch games – I was absolutely amazed to see what Frontier was able to do with so many limitations. Despite the game's short length – about four hours – it presented outstanding visuals, both artistically and technically, while featuring one of the cleverest uses for the Wii's pointer, vastly enhancing the title's gameplay.

After completing the first third of the adventure I thought that despite its overwhelming qualities the title did belong to a downloadable service, simply because it lacked the big ambitious scope of what one expects from a full-fledged retail title. That is far from being a negative aspect though, but nevertheless I felt that the original game had some unexplored potential in it.

Last week when I purchased Winter of the Melodias, the second part of the adventure, I was simply expecting a follow-up game that wouldn't improve much on what its predecessor achieved. After all, I naively thought, Frontier was probably satisfied with the positive buzz generated by the original. Needless to say I was as wrong as I could possibly be.

Winter of the Melodias highly improves on everything the first game did. On its still short four hours of gameplay it is easy to feel the sequel to LostWinds is a game constantly trying to prove that it could easily be a massive quality retail game due to the many gameplay ideas thrown into the adventure. Winter of the Melodias is as immersive as some Metroid worlds, as puzzling as the most inventive Zelda dungeons and visually superior to a huge part of the Wii's retail lineup.

It is still early to say whether or not series initially planned as downloadable-only could expand into full-fledged bigger, better games in the future as there is no such a thing as a track record for downloadable home console games. However, after playing Winter of the Melodias I was able to see that while money may be lacking to most of these producers there is no shortage of potential in their work.

My review for the game will be up in a week or two.