The Wonderful 101

The Wonderful 101 is not something that everyone will like.

This is a game from excellent developer Platinum, responsible for Metal Gear Rising: Revengeance and Bayonetta [ベヨネッタ]. It is helmed by Hideki Kamiya, mastermind of Platinum's design philosophies and of Devil May Cry [デビル メイ クライ]. He's a legend and is one of the video game icons I respect most. I love Bayonetta, Dante, Metal Gear Rising and even Transformers: Devastation. But I don't love this game.

Let's start with the good: mechanically speaking, this game is pretty excellent. There's no hand-holding here, so most players will not realize this early on. I spent most of the first few missions stumbling around clumsily and taking damage constantly. I'm assuming this will happen to most players. However, at some point, if you play like me, there will be a moment where it finally clicks, and it feels pretty amazing. Everything feels smoother, more stylish, like those classic Platinum/Kamiya games that I mentioned.

This game doesn't play all that much like those games though. You control a crowd; not one character, but a crowd, and you see them from a bird's eye view. It's weird and takes some serious getting used to, but it controls better than it should. You can use various members of the crowd to execute different types of attacks (fists, sword, whip, gun, etc) and can switch between them pretty seamlessly, even stylishly. With an added ability, these transformations can even do damage and up a combo; the crowd, and transforming it at will, becomes an important tool and stops being the annoyance it will likely appear to be at first. Input is very responsive, which is shocking when you're controlling this many people. Recruiting new people is rewarding and satisfying, and there's no feeling better than approaching a boss door with a crowd of hundreds. Again, mechanically, this game is pretty much fantastic, and is even one of the best Platinum games. If that sounds like enough for you, try it out. It's good in that department.

It's missing everything else.

If Bayonetta had all of its same mechanics, but was missing the style and flair of the cutscenes, characters and settings, it would, in my opinion, be a much worse game. It wouldn't be a bad game by any stretch of the imagination, but I don't think I would like it as much. The same goes for Devil May Cry; without the attitude, that game loses some of its charm. Thankfully, in those games, there is charm aplenty; personality overflows from those games, helping to make them as iconic as they are. The Wonderful 101 really doesn't have that. The characters are generic and forgettable at best, and annoying and obnoxious at worst. The cutscenes are long and pointless, and the plot is so forgettable that, after I turned off the game five minutes prior to writing this review, I've already forgotten what it was about. The dialogue is cheesy and annoying. The settings, partially due to the viewpoint, all feel like reskins of each other, so the sense of wonder and exploration of all of those games I keep hammering on about is lost. Some people talk about games having style over substance; I think both are almost mandatory to a great experience.

You don't have to agree with me. If all of that sounds like nitpicking at an excellent game, that's fine. The mechanics really are pretty fantastic. However, most of the missions feel pretty similar to each other; there aren't that many different types of enemies, so you'll master every encounter long before you see it for the last time. The bosses are largely unmemorable, with a few exceptions. I was starting to get bored of the game about halfway through, and there was little left to change my mind.

Also, the load times are horrific and inexcusable for a game like this. I don't know enough about the technical side of video games to really explain why they're so bad, but they take forever.

Lastly, there are so many gimmick missions in this game. Like, an obscene amount. This seems to be something Platinum likes doing, but I don't. Some of them are inoffensive. Some of them are horrible. None of them are great.

All things considered, I think this is about halfway to being a masterpiece. They figured out the gameplay, but not everything else.

(written sep 28, 2017)

To be a hero is our most human desire. Watching superheroes fly above skyscrapers or fight on ground inspires our most fundamental instincts: prioritizing goodness, triumphing over evil, and looking great while doing it. Hideki Kamiya is a man who understood this desire and passionately captured it in the best game on the Wii U.

In The Wonderful 101, the player doesn’t take the role of one main character. The player is the choreographer, the collective will of the Wonderful 100. Drawing a circle on the GamePad or with the right stick clumps several heroes into the shape of a giant fist that Wonder-Red, the leader of the group, wields. That’s only one of the several “Unite Morphs” the player can attack with; the Wonderful Ones can bundle up into swords, guns, and bombs. The player can stack weapons on top of weapons, or scatter heroes to independently attack the enemy. It’s the hustle-n-bustle of Pikmin married with Kamiya’s signature smokin’ sick style. Having directorial control over a playstyle this fast-paced instills a deep sense of leadership and teamwork within the player.

That feeling is reflected by Wonder-Red, the passionate leader of the Wonderful Ones who insists on using the official and tangential titles of his friends and enemies. Wonder-Red fights undercover, his public persona being a grade school teacher, alongside his teammates. The chemistry Wonder-Red has with the various heroes he meets along the way sets a light-hearted but sincere tone, making the player feel like they’ve realized what went through their head during childhood, playing pretend with action figures on a much grander scale.

Don’t mistake the charm for insincerity. Underneath The Wonderful 101‘s gags and quips is a beating heart. PlatinumGames aren’t the most crafty storytellers, Metal Gear Rising: Revengeance and Bayonetta suffer from loose ties between action and anecdotes, but The Wonderful 101 is compelling to the credits. There’s a consistent “wink-wink nudge-nudge” tone, but it’s a coating over characters that genuinely grow, talk, and feel. It elevates above the average Saturday morning cartoon enough to motivate the player, letting them know what makes these guys so wonderful.

It’s a master-class in establishing scale, working up through the intensive hour-long chapters elevates the player from a small town to a robot twice the size of planet Earth. Platinum uses every second of their escalating escapade to build up the stakes, the drama, the action, lets it cool, then builds it back bigger.

When going in blind, the player has a lot on their plate. A genre-mishmash whose true potential unlocks after several upgrades is too much to take in for some. It’s similar to fighting games in how dedication and skill is required for everything to click, but a fighting game The Wonderful 101 is not. This can raise many questions about the limits of teaching the player, how much a designer should expect from the player, but here’s my question: who ever said being a hero is easy?

One needs to enter a certain mindset when playing The Wonderful 101, the mindset of a hero who sets their sights on larger-than-life obstacles and fights through them to the end. Games offer players the ability to grasp impossible worlds, to get a tactile sense of someone’s vision, and it’s absolutely worth the effort to master that sensation. When I’m playing The Wonderful 101, I’m in a world that I’m willing to fight for.

The Wonderful 101 celebrates everything it stands for. Kamiya paints himself in every corner of the tilt-shift cities and lairs the Wonderful Ones battle in; brazen callbacks and comically epic QTEs deliver so much in a canvas as constrained as the Wii U. It’s a game so rich with hyperbolic style and deep technique, you can feel queasy when taking it all in, but start with small bites, and you’ll see why The Wonderful 101 is a gourmet treat.

What initially seems like an absolutely absurd, incomprehensible mess of ideas that almost seemed to hate those who decided to pick this up ends up being one of the single greatest gaming experiences I've had. Nothing about this game seemingly makes sense, but once you start really getting into it you realise just what you've been missing out on by considering it all as such. An idiosyncratic experience through and through that's willing to push boundaries and experiment a whole lot with its core mechanics to make it stand out strongly from the pack while also showcasing nothing but an unabashed love for the genre. It's got the standard ideas that you'll find in a lot of the Platinum Games lineup with the way it insists on being a mishmash of differing styles, has an insane skill ceiling that'll make you feel like a fool on your first playthrough in all likelihood, and also going absolutely all out in its sense of pure maximalism. The big difference that separates a lot of what this game does compared to a game such as Bayonetta is the way that it takes extra measures to do as much as possible to unify these styles, having them feel more in line with the rest of the game experience as to not entirely distract while still providing a nice bit of absurdity to the sharp left turns it can take to further reinforce its incredibly full on, over the top vibe.

One of the most truly bizarre aspects of this game is the way that almost all of its defining features can be seen as pure negatives when you start off before they eventually reveal their significance once you've gotten a bit better. The weapon drawing is definitely the biggest example of this with the way that it initially seems as if it's adding another layer of complexity to something that doesn't require it that also adds an additional thing that the player could get wrong. There are a few benefits to this however that end up making it extremely well worth it as a mechanic. Most importantly is the way this opens the door to a far more seamless method of swapping between the absurd amount of weapons at your disposal, with the player having access to 10 different ones by the end of the game and then a couple extra for repeat playthroughs, giving the player this method of quickly and (relatively) easily swapping between them all in a fast paced, chaotic game like this is a perfect fit, not to mention that the additional nuance of the different sizes for each weapon is another benefit of this. Furthermore, additional elements to do with actually drawing are quite interesting too, with enemy positioning and room layout potentially obstructing you and forcing you to make certain compromises or devise another strategy to deal with the situation at hand, providing a slight additional wrinkle to how the player approaches combat without becoming an extremely dominant element either, providing depth without being frustrating.

The other big point with the game that seems bad at first but has its own little positives is the camera, which I will admit feels closer to being equal parts horrible and genius. I'll definitely say that the camera in the game feels too zoomed in or outright misplaced in certain situations and it's absolute agony at times, but there are also other benefits that it has that end up justifying it and make the problem feel more akin to "they just needed to fix up a few spots here and there". My favourite effect of the zoomed out isometric camera style is the way that it makes every threat truly feel gargantuan with the way that your army will look like a colony of ants scurrying around against even a lot of the regular fodder enemies that are sent your way. The sheer spectacle of this cannot be understated and also adds a lot to highlighting the game's core theme about teamwork being what will help fight against insurmountable odds. It's also not as bad as it seems because while it might be hard to see your individual character, the morph weapons are positioned in such a way to act almost as beacons when activated, standing tall with these incredibly bright colours that make it impossible to truly get lost in even the most visually busy scenes.

Of all the flawed masterpieces that I've experienced, this might just be the most flawed with how often it feels as if the game's almost taking pleasure in slapping you around with outright infuriating scenarios and a mix of genres that sometimes just flat out don't work, but at the same time, the highlights are otherworldly and a lot of the frustration feels far more constructive compared to a lot of other difficult experiences. In most cases outside of the spiked enemies requiring the whip, when things feel as if they're taking forever, it doesn't quite feel like the enemies are too much to overcome, but rather than the player themselves are approaching the situation incorrectly and need to further explore the seemingly limitless possibilities of their immense arsenal. So many of the tough moments here feel less like traditional action encounters and more like minor puzzles, constantly asking you to work out how to further optimise your gameplay, usually showing off just enough for you to be able to figure things out if you're paying attention and are being inquisitive while simultaneously never completely bashing you over the head with the correct answer to further make it feel like your own accomplishment with each time you're able to take down these enemies slightly faster than before. I also feel like this was the reason for the relatively few types of common enemy in the game, because it instead wants the player to build familiarity with this smaller selection to truly master what they can do, because at the end of the day, Wonderful 101 is a game that encourages players to master the systems and dynamics at play in a way that I don't really see too often. It's not really fully content with players just stumbling through to the end, it wants them to fully get a grip on everything it has to offer, and the incredibly forgiving continue system is a huge indicator of this, clearly not really being concerned about whether the player is able to beat the game, but how well they can do it, which I do think is cool in a game as dense as this.

Above all, this really does feel like one of the purest expressions of adoration for the video game medium as a whole, and it's a big reason why I think it's a masterpiece. There's an outright ridiculous amount of effort put into even the smallest of details that simply would not be so strongly considered in other games, let alone one where you probably won't even be able to see a lot of it too well thanks to the camera perspective. The fact that each of the titular 101 heroes of the game each have their own unique model and little character bio is one such aspect I love, how even though you're likely not going to be seeing them in any detail beyond "these look like tiny ants", they're fully implemented without any signs of concessions having to be made, each of them also being really funny and charming in how they look. The ever intensifying stakes are also really cool to witness in the way that it's also represented through the gameplay ramping up in ways that not only feel more difficult, but more exciting too.

Rather than frontloading the experience in an attempt to hook people with the sacrifice of making the later portions often feel somewhat less climactic and interesting in comparison, the final 2 missions of this game are instead where things get kicked into overdrive with some of the most insane and silly things I've seen in a game. Nothing about the way the game presents itself is subtle at all but I think it works exceptionally well with the way it plays so strongly into replicating the feeling of goofy superhero cartoons, never straying from making clearly dumb jokes or throwing things all at the wall for no reason more than just "I thought it'd be neat", because above all, it just wants to be a fun, maximalist experience! I haven't quite played something like Wonderful 101 before and I'm not sure if I will again, but I can always hope to find another game that feels so committed to being such a joyful time that fully embraces and adores games as a whole that I am willing to call it one of the best things ever despite having so many points that frustrated me to the point of becoming an angry goblin creature who wanted to break her controller.