The Wonderful 101 (2013)

Like most of Kamiya's games, and even moreso, most Wii U games, the controls are kind of confounding and the gimmicks nearly never feel wholly necessary. That being said, Wonderful 101 is a blast. Playing it through again, and this time on the switch and NOT with a gamepad, the work necessary to pull off some crazy combos and to really challenge yourself with combat difficulty is far more accessible than before.

Collecting all the wonderful ones is so fun and the creativity here is a pleasure to experience. This game is definitely very flawed and would have benefitted from an average joe saying "I can't tell what is happening on my screen too much of the time" but ultimately the goal was probably a technical experience rather than a patently logical one.

Play if you want to sink some time into learning a new game, but maybe less time into playing said game after youve figured it out.

This is perhaps Platinum Games' most Platinum Gamey game ever. There is sheer spectacle to be found at all times, epic battles that are absurdly fun, a fantastic sense of humor that acknowledges its absurdity, and a very deep and engaging combat system that is extremely original and provides a long path to mastery. The presentation and characters make this an offering that would engage kids immediately, and it turns adults into kids with its superhero wonder. I love that instead of a lone savior, you get hundreds of heroes working together to save the day.

My main gripe with this game is that it also embraces the bad side of Platinum: the lack of focus. The game has many sections that switch up the gameplay: star fox spaceship shootouts, boxing matches, sections with individual heroes, and many more. Even though they are creative and at times fun, they are also very half baked and unpolished. Its hard to achieve the demanded level of mastery here, and at times it can be infuriating. Every time I was playing one of these, I wished I was playing the main game instead.

Because man, that core gameplay is perhaps one of the best ones in an action game to date. Too bad you can't engage with it for a third of the game's length.

Wrapped up The Wonderful 101 last night. Wound up glad to have played it, though not quite as positive as some of the people around here.

I really enjoyed the main combat system, and liked the sheer energy and spectacle. They obviously had a lot of fun making it.

But every game segment that isn't in the main combat system just isn't on the same level, and there are so many of them. I know they serve to vary the pacing and help sell the story, but I definitely got to the point of groaning every time a new one started.

But the biggest misstep is the save/continue system. Not sure if the goal was to be more forgiving than usual for the genre, but having the assumption be that you'll just continue as many times as needed with the only penalty being to score severely undermines the genre's appeal for me. I want to have to engage with the game systems, build up skills, learn patterns, and execute some degree of mastery in order to continue. The traditional checkpoint system is great for that -- if I fail at a particular fight or mission, I can just try again, as often as it takes, seeing improvement with subsequent attempts. There is a degree of enforced challenge in just getting to the end of Bayonetta, DmC, or Revengeance that just doesn't exist in W101, where you can "credit-feed" all the way through. Actually, it's not just that you can credit-feed, but you kind of have to, as choosing not to continue sends you all the way back to the beginning of the entire operation.

On the other hand, having to try clumsy rock-dodging in one of the spaceship segments over and over again sounds pretty awful, too, so maybe it's for the best.

In some alternate universe, there's a version of this game where the minigames are cut down to 1/3 length and there's an option to instantly restart the current battle/mission on death (or on command from the menu). The version of me in that universe is immediately jumping back in on hard, and I'm jealous of him.