Warning: This CD is for the fans of Nightwish and so is this review, if you dont know them yet, please read our review of Wishmaster for a description of the band.

This mini-CD of Nightwish, available only from XIII bis the french distributor of Nightwish records is a little bit strange.

On the music side, the surprise is to find no live tracks as one would have guessed from the album's title. The first track is Wishmaster taken straight out of the album. Nothing to add about this great song. Next is Sleepwalker, this song that was the bonus track of the finnish edition of Wishmaster is recorded here in its "heavy" version. "Passion And The Opera", track 3, is presented in a slightly edited version. "Nightquest" is the bonus track from the japanese version of Oceanborn and is the highlight of this record. The two last songs "A Return To The Sea" and "Once Upon A Troubadour" were present on some versions of "Angels Fall First" and are representative of that era.

All those tracks are good Nightwish songs and will satisfy all fans. But somehow something make me think that this CD is a commercial operation from the french publisher rather than a real release from the band. The packaging, for example, uses mostly archive photographs, or the fact that the song "Nightquest" is incorrectly listed as "Nightguest".

And the same applies to the CD-ROM track, the two videos (Sacrament Of Wilderness and Sleeping Sun) are in different formats (MPEG and Quicktime). An evaluation version the Xing MPEG player is included, but with multiples upgrade patches and even the crack file! To say the least this isn't professional at all, and this soft isn't even really needed to see the videos.

This CD is still a must for all Nightwish fans who can't afford to miss those rare songs but I was disappointed by the lack of care that the publisher showed in the details.