The NGamer blog folks sat down and interviewed the man behind NiGHTS for the Wii, Takeshi Iizuka and covers many interesting topics. I’ve got a few sample quotes below from the interview, but check out the full article at the link as it’s got lots more info concerning the game, it’s graphics, gameplay, and sound.

Christmas NiGHTS cleverly employed the Saturn’s internal clock to alter the game world, particularly the weather conditions. Any chance of the Wii Weather Channel being used for some similar effects?
Takeshi Iizuka: What’s exciting about the Wii is that it has a lot of great functions that we would like to take advantage of…we have some really special surprises for all!

And what about using Miis?
Takeshi Iizuka: The sequel is being designed around real human struggles. The story is about self-discovery and the belief in oneself. So, we’re designing the game around human characters that interact with NiGHTS in the dreamworld of Nightopia.

Does the game use the game engine from Sonic and the Secret Rings?
Takeshi Iizuka: Journey of Dreams is being created from the ground-up and is running on a completely new engine engineered specifically for the Wii. We’re finding that there are some very interesting graphical effects and processes that are being merged into our engine. We excited to see how far we can push the hardware this time.