The Wonderful 101

This is where you can deliberate anything relating to videogames - past, present and future
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JaySevenZero
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The Wonderful 101

Post by JaySevenZero »

Here's where you can contribute your thoughts and opinions for The Wonderful 101 for potential inclusion in the forthcoming podcast.

A friendly reminder that where the feedback for the podcast is concerned, we love it - but keeping it brief is appreciated. We do want to include a breadth of opinions where appropriate, but no-one wants a discussion podcast that’s mostly reading out essays. Better to save yourself time and cut to the chase if you can.
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DaMonth
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Re: 515: The Wonderful 101

Post by DaMonth »

Wonderful 101 is in my top 10 games of all time. Yes some of the minigame sections are a slog and I hate going through 6-2 with the flashback and ship combat but this is easily the best thing Platinum has ever done. The best implantation of QTE's, the best use of the Wii U hardware and basically the only reason to go back to that console (Switch just can't compare to 2 screens), one of the best bombastic endings. The feedback of using the hold button to grow the size of the weapon, learning you can whip the spike bots out of their armor with a full 100 instantly, the catharsis of dropping a full-sized hammer on someone, all the secret unites. And I'm sure one of you engaged unlimited form and put up a thumbs up with the cast. Power Rangers Pikmin May Cry is so good that it makes Hair Gunwitch seem boring by comparison.

Also, word to the wise, don't use the stylus or whatever to draw the shapes, the right stick is just a lot more responsive. And Wonderful.
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Buskalilly
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Re: 515: The Wonderful 101

Post by Buskalilly »

I love Platinum's brand of simple-to-learn, difficult-to-master, hairtrigger-dodging combat but this combines it with a colourful, bombastic world that is just so fun. It feels so perfectly at home among a Nintendo console's line-up, and that theme music gets me genuinely pumped. It's a mainstay of the gym playlist for me, and it makes me nostalgic for a childhood that maybe never even existed.

Truly wonderful.
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Jobobonobo
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Re: 515: The Wonderful 101

Post by Jobobonobo »

You can tell this is a love letter to the works of Clover Studio with the superhero antics of Viewtiful Joe and unleashing your powers by painting mechanic of Okami. Its gameplay of beat em up action underneath a superficial real time strategy shell really makes this game stand out from anything else out there. The abilities for each character are utilised well and switching between characters is usually streamlined enough that going through the levels can be a buttery smooth experience when you know what you are doing. The bosses are some of the best I have ever played and the music that plays when you have got them on the ropes is some of the most exhilarating pieces of boss music I have ever heard, it really sells on convincing the player that they are the defenders of Earth fighting intergalactic evil.

Playing the Remastered version on PS4, you can tell from certain sections of the game that this was really built to take advantage of the Wii U gamepad and the option of using the touch pad on the Dual Shock 4 was a somewhat necessary if disappointing compromise. The sections where you had to use both screens in order to solve a puzzle were implemented as best as they could in this format but I have the feeling that they would have been a lot smoother to pull off in the original. They were one of the rare moments where the nonstop action gameplay would just stop to an abrupt halt and I had to struggle between two screens to figure out what I was doing. It did not help that whenever I was in a building I would instinctively use the right stick to move the camera and instead I would be changing my power inadvertently. Definitely took some getting used to.

My other issue concerned getting the hang of unite powers when I would first get them. The hammer and bomb were especially tricky first time around but thankfully with later levels it does become second nature. The bomb was especially annoying as seeing as the character that uses bombs is called Wonder Black, I was waiting for a black colour to appear when I first drew a bomb so I got really frustrated when I kept failing to defeat the enemies that were used to introduce this power. It was only by looking at the top left corner of the screen that I realised his power colour is purple! In hindsight, it is not the end of the world but it was a real annoyance when I first started out and it could have been communicated a little better.

Apart from these issues, this game was an absolute joy from start to finish. It revels in its Saturday morning cartoon cheesiness so much that it gives it a real goofy likeability. When it is at its best, it showcases why Platinum are so good at delivering high octane gameplay and captures the essence of some of the best classic studios like Treasure had to offer. I think if I played this on Wii U, I would really have gotten the best out of this game. As it is, the Remaster is still a really good time but be aware of the limitations that the developers had to get around to get it to play on other consoles. If you are looking for something action packed and a bit different to try out, the Wonderful 101 comes highly recommended.

3WR: Wonstoppable, wonbeatable, wonderful
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Toon Scottoon
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Re: 515: The Wonderful 101

Post by Toon Scottoon »

The Wonderful 101 takes ideas and mechanics from fifty years of gaming and pop culture, throws them into the Wonderful Mixer and spits out a smoothie of a game garnished with high quality music and art direction polished to a Platinum shine, and expects fans to suck it up through a straw.

I certainly sucked this game up. I mean I sucked it up real bad. I am terrible at The Wonderful 101. I battled through the game on normal difficulty earning an avalanche of consolation prizes. Some of this has to do with the fact that I've never been all that comfortable with action games, and some of this comes from the game changing its mechanics and gameplay style all the time so that the player is always off balance, and some of it comes from the fact that I played the first 2 thirds of the game on handheld mode on my Switch, which really was a mistake I didn't even realize I was making until I docked the devices and earned my first pure platinum score on the big screen.

Once I had the larger character models to work with, and a slightly better handle on how to augment my player with the stamp thingies, my scores in the game improved, but there were still plenty of moments as I brought down the Geathjerk Federation where I felt less like the commander of a squadron of elite supersoldiers, and more like I'd turned up at a Halloween party where everyone was overserved, and may end up injured, undressed, and spouting nonsense at any moment. I'm not done playing with Platinum, but I didn't find this title all that precious.

Three word review - Sketchy on Switch
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Girard
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Re: 515: The Wonderful 101

Post by Girard »

Maybe it's because I was coming off of such a cleanly-designed game as Hades, but Wonderful 101 felt like a total mess to me. An ever-growing spaghetti-pile of poorly-explained and unintuitive mechanics, and levels with 'challenges' (enemies, environments, etc.) that seem to want you to use one particular mechanic, but do nothing to actually communicate it to you. (And then it has the gall to "grade" your performance.)

Unlike Platinum's bigger-name game, Bayonetta, there wasn't really anything there in terms of tone, humor, story, or character to compel me even at times when I didn't feel up to engaging with the idiosyncratic mechanics. At one point a boss fight was really dragging, but it didn't seem like I was doing anything wrong, so I eventually paused and looked up a YouTube video...and the video was 15 minutes long, and the boss was just as bullet-spongey as I'd feared. But also there was one obscure brief moment when I was supposed to use a little-used contextual mechanic to build a bridge to another area to continue fighting, which the game did not communicate at all. That's the Wonderful 101 experience.

I'm not usually one to return a game, and even more rarely one to return a gift. But days after receiving the game, I found myself getting actively angry/stressed out by some roulette mini-game that communicated nothing about its win condition, and which I'd only reached by brute-forcing through a number of fights where I had no idea what the cause of my deaths were or how they could be averted. I realized that I was unlikely to have anything resembling a good time with this game. So I boxed it up and took advantage of Amazon's generous gift return policy to send it back.
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raisinbman
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Re: The Wonderful 101

Post by raisinbman »

just a heads up, Evangelion spoiler on this ep.

While some may think the series is very old and thus there's a statute of limitations, so to speak, the "final" eva part was released(a year?) ago.
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