Fuji Leaves is more of a music box than a game. You position rocks over sets of magical leaves and create little melodies as said rocks bounce off of the strangely solid vegetation. It can be a mesmerizing experience — if a little short-lived.
Drop it like it’s rock
You resize and re-position leaves and rocks using multitouch to create cute little melodies as the rocks go tumbling down the screen and collide with the leaves at different angles. It’s like making a musical Pachinko machine with natural objects, and it’s quite amazing when you first see it. Each of the rocks bounces perfectly off of the leaves, and they’ll even make ripples when they fall into the water at the bottom of the screen.
It’s fun to add or take away from a melody by fine tuning the components on screen, but, given that each melody can only last a good 5-15 seconds at best, even your coolest tune can get old pretty quickly. If you were skilled enough, you could theoretically manipulate the rocks and leaves on the go to create a changing, evolving tune, but the save options within Fuji Leaves only save static positions of rocks and leaves – you can’t just record the sounds.
Somebody save me
The omission of a more flexible save file is a bit of a shame, especially when you consider how much developers like Smule have benefitted from social/sharing features. Part of the fascination of the Ocarina app was listening to the pros do something amazing with it, while you make the Zelda equivalent of fart sounds. You can share and download songs in Fuji Leaves, but you only view tunes by file name (no sound preview), and I only downloaded two or three files before the process got a little aggravating.
Fuji Leaves has a great look and an interesting premise, but it could be more than a quick $2.99 distraction if the developers made it easier and more interesting to save and share tunes. I still think it’s a very finely crafted music box on your iPhone, but given that other music apps (Voice Band, I am T-Pain, Ocarina) feature much more flexibility, I honestly don’t see myself opening Fuji Leaves again after the handful of times I did so for this review. It’s also in the wrong category (why Games and not Music?).
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Fuji Leaves is available for $2.99 on the App Store.
The app was provided by Andreas Ehnbom for review on Just Another iPhone Blog. For further information regarding our site’s review policies, please see the “About” page.
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