okay.. is hating on this game like a joke? like.. really?
if nights into dreams came out today would people hate it?
does everyone hate whimsy & magical games?

i don't really like platforming games but this was actually really fun & cute! it was soo comfy & charming! it felt like dreams but you're walking instead of looping in the air. the costumes were super fun to swap to & learn how to use them in levels! i haven't finished it but i just played 9 hours & got to the 9th level which was hard but fun!

i honestly watched so many videos when this game came out by huge youtubers shitting on it, i even got a recommended video from 3 weeks ago about it sucking. people comparing it to mario odyssey even though there's really nothing similar except they're platformers..

i will update my review when i finish it but i really enjoyed it!

If there was one typically maligned game that I had expected to get more out of than the average person, it would’ve been this one, after all, it’s a colourful 3D platformer with a lot of weird ideas thrown into the mix. The amount of discussion surrounding such games to make them purely out as these punching bags to point and laugh at in bad faith is a tiresome thing to witness time and time again and my hatred for such a mindset is ultimately one of the many reasons why I strive to approach art with optimism. Unfortunately, while I definitely think I have a bit more appreciation for this than I often see, there’s a bit too much about Balan Wonderworld that is downright baffling to me, which when combined with how utterly milquetoast other elements of the game are, makes for a very stilted experience that never fully achieves the grander heights that it’s going for.

I think that the one button control scheme that the game goes for is one of the biggest missed opportunities here, as a lot of the groundwork for something really cool is in place, but the level design simply isn’t strong enough to accommodate for the weird ideas in play. There are over 60 costumes in the game, and due to the simplistic controls, each of these will only have one function, with an occasional 2nd one that will be activated in a less conventional way, and unfortunately, jumping counts as a function, so in this platformer game, you’ll be in situations at times where you’re unable to jump. This isn’t as inherently bad as it may seem, but the level design doesn’t seem to be thoughtfully designed around the potential limitations that the player will face. Another aspect that doesn’t help is that even though there are so many costumes with a lot of different effects, a solid chunk of these exist to interact in a very lock and key way with the environment, having only one specific use that’s blatantly stated, with no way of utilising it in any other ways. This results in a lot of costumes feeling extremely underwhelming to unlock, as you know that the only thing it’ll be good for is to open the paths in specifically designated areas, making it feel functionally worthless and boring in any other scenario.

Adding to the frustration is that getting hit a single time will make you entirely lose the costume you’re wearing, forcing you to go and recollect it if you want to use it again. This doesn’t really do anything beyond add a layer of tedium to it all, since it’s not like it even returns to an inventory or anything, it’s just gone. This feeds back into the frustration with not being able to consistently jump, depending on your costume loadout, since taking a hit can straight up leave you in a situation where you need to backtrack and grab another costume since you can’t progress otherwise. Despite my issues however, there’s definitely something here with the idea in its current form, it’s offbeat for sure, but not a totally lost cause either. Rather than crafting each stage to feel like the most barebones, basic 3D platformer stuff out there, the game would work a whole lot better if there were a bunch of different, branching paths within the stages that took advantage of specific abilities, or at least multiple ways to reach the same location so as to not completely lock you out of progression by getting hit once and still contribute to a sense of exploration, as a collectathon should feature in some capacity. This would lead to a more varied set of obstacles to tackle and would also be a great way of more deftly incorporating some hidden collectibles, having multiple ways to approach a situation, with each of them rewarding you for doing so.

This would also tie into the boss fights of the game much more smoothly to create a more cohesive experience on the whole, due to how they function and reward the player. While these fights are very simple for the most part, they’re also conceptually my favourite element of the game for how they’re able to work both as something very easy and approachable for the kids that are going to play the game, while still requiring a bit of thought for those who want to collect everything. Each boss has 3 different opportunities to hit it in its attack patterns, often requiring different costumes to hit its weak points, and for each way you utilise in the battle, you’re awarded one additional Balan statue, the collectible of the game. This shifts each encounter into a bit of a puzzle, since some of the methods of hurting the boss are pretty tricky to work out, and it adds a lot of nuance and intrigue to what usually are the blandest, or at least most simplistic elements of a platformer in this vein.

Despite the stages also not utilising it super well in a lot of cases, I also quite like the game’s artstyle, it’s very colourful and cute and absolutely shines in the boss fights especially, along with the character designs of Balan and Lance, further making me wish that a lot of other elements of the game were more fleshed out and vibrant. The one exception to my distaste over the fact that everything looks very “gamey” in the stages, for lack of a better term, is that it contributes to a certain vibe whenever you have the snow fairy costume that lets you completely break levels and skip large chunks of them, evoking a very similar feeling of exploring the boundaries of a game in the way that a lot of my favourite platformers hone in on. Hiding more stuff like this in especially out of reach and unconventional locations is another way that I think I’d have enjoyed the game more, it’s a very specific brand of weirdness that appeals to me greatly, and this game has all the tools to be able to accomplish such things with a few tweaks.

The one element of this game that I cannot really defend or appreciate in any major capacity is the Balan Bout however, these things SUCK in a way that very few game mechanics ever have to me. Having to do a QTE whenever you grab one of the Balan hats is tedious beyond belief, with a lot of the sequences that play out being over 2 minutes long and just, repeating sequences you’ve seen many times before, without any way to speed up or skip at all. The fact that you need to do these perfectly in order to get the Balan statue from them is a pain and a half as well, especially with certain telegraphs feeling borderline impossible to hit, and the fact that if you don’t get a perfect, the hat disappears and makes you beat the boss of the world if you want to respawn it, making each attempt at it an ordeal to get to. These made me genuinely mad and never stopped completely baffling me each time I had to think about them.

Overall, I liked Balan Wonderworld a bit less than I was hoping, the stages were dull and felt almost entirely lacking in progression, making the game feel stagnant, the weird mechanics were kinda just thrown into an otherwise extremely standard game, and the Balan Bouts are atrocious. With that said, I think the thing that disappoints me most is that there are elements of intrigue to be found here with how off kilter so many ideas truly are, even within the bits that I don’t really like in their current state. I love when a game is packed to the brim with idiosyncrasies, it just so happens that in this case, those idiosyncrasies do not gel well with the exceptionally standard foundation that the game is built around, it tries to feel dreamlike, but just ends up being either frustrating or pedestrian.

This is a game I’ve been morbidly curious about basically since it came out. I quite like 3D collectathon platformers, and if I can afford it, I try to play all the ones I can get my hands on, even if they’re not very good. It’s been a long wait, but I’ve been biding my time ever since waiting for it to get at or below the threshold at which I find it reasonable to buy a game even if I’ll end up disliking it. I ended up getting engaged with it a lot more than I at first thought I would, first beating it, and then spending the whole weekend finishing it out nearly 100% (a couple costumes and achievements I didn’t feel it was worth my time to slog through, but I got all 300 statues). It took me around 35 to 40 hours (the game doesn’t keep track, so far as I’m aware, so I had to give my best estimate) to do it all (and beating the game originally took me around 13 or 15 hours).

Balan Wonderworld’s story is somewhat infamously told with very, very little dialogue. After the opening cutscene of your main character stumbling into the titular Balan’s world, he gives you a well animated but surreal introduction, and the subtitles there are just about the last text you’ll see as far as the story goes. The rest of the story is told through pantomime as you make your way through one world at a time, helping the character associated with that world overcome their fears and doubts to do the difficult thing in their real life. It’s somewhere between Psychonauts and Nights (with which this game shares a lot of DNA), but it’s lighthearted and fun enough to give the action a fun premise and aesthetic.

Another somewhat infamous note about the story is that there is a book separately available that’s effectively a novelization of the game’s narrative, though I’d be hard pressed to say that the game is worse off for not having loads of text explaining its story. It’s not like Mario Odyssey is a good 3d platformer because it has hundreds of pages of text explaining some deep narrative, after all. Balan Wonderworld makes the smart decision to keep the in-game story as brief as it needs to be, and I found it a fun and well paced setting for the adventure to take place.

The gameplay of Balan is a stage-based 3D platformer which uses a similar approach to something like Banjo Kazooie. In each stage, there are 6+ Balan statues (the equivalent of a jiggy or power star) to find. Six are scattered about, and an extra 1 to 3 are unlocked by perfecting Balan’s Bouts (which I will explain later). You need a certain total number of statues to unlock more worlds to explore, and there are 12 worlds in total with 2 acts each, with a third act to each world being unlocked after you’ve beaten the final boss. The main difference to something like Mario 64 or Banjo Kazooie is that, even though you do have the statues to collect, each level does have an end point you need to reach to complete it. This lends to a more well paced level design generally, and it also makes the Balan statues a bit easier to find. Ones you’ve found are listed in order in the upper left, so it’s a bit easier to try and guess where you might’ve missed one by using process of determination based on the ones you’ve already found.

The way you actually navigate these stages is by running and jumping around them via the aid of costumes you find in the levels. A big deal was made during its release that Balan Wonderworld is a “one-button game”. While not entirely true (you use the shoulder buttons to swap between costumes and the pause button opens the menu, for example), just about every button does the same thing, so the costumes are how the game gives you more depth to your exploration despite the simplicity. You can bring any costume to any stage, and you can stockpile extra copies in your little wardrobe you can access at checkpoints. Getting hit once will lose you your costume, but it’s generally not too difficult to avoid getting hit. It’s a good motivator to be extra careful with your best and favorite costumes, at the very least.

While the one-button gameplay does make navigating some menus a little bit more cumbersome than it feels like it should be, I found it to be a nice accessibility feature that the game is well designed around. Finding new costumes and experimenting with what they could do was always fun, and each of the 12 worlds is designed around the abilities its respective costumes give you, making the puzzle design generally nice and intuitive as well. I say “generally” because just about every stage has at least some statues that can’t be acquired using only the costumes found within it. Sometimes you’ll be waiting a very long time to get the costume that makes a much earlier world’s final statues collectible. This isn’t a super problem, given that you only need less than half of the statues to beat the game, but as an element of design philosophy, it’s one I’m not a fan of. I much prefer the approach the original Banjo Kazooie takes, were even though you’re progressively unlocking new abilities, every world can be completed as soon as you get to it. The fact that some statues are just impossible to get at first approach can make ones that are otherwise just difficult to access seem actually impossible, and it just makes for a somewhat frustrating waste of time trying to collect them sometimes.

Each stages has tons of little colored crystals to collect, and you can multiply your currently held crystal total by completing the Balan’s Bouts. These are QTE-based cutscenes that you can activate by finding Balan’s hat hidden in the stage. They’re just easy enough to be far from impossible, but also not so easy as to be trivial. The fight animations in them are quite pretty and the music is fun too, so I didn’t mind replaying them in my long quest to acquire all 300 statues in the game. That said, even if you hate them, collecting crystals is ultimately entirely optional, and you only need 110 of the 228 total statues available in the main game to beat it, so you can ignore the Balan’s Bouts entirely if you want (which I certainly appreciate, even if I did like them).

The purpose of all those crystals, however, is to feed your Tims on the Isle of Tims in the hub world. You can either breed them by feeding them crystals or find eggs in stages to get more Tims. In stages, you’ll have little fluffy companions following you around. They’ll sometimes bring you crystals, keys, or even eggs or new Tims themselves as well as help you fight enemies. These Tims are very much like the Chao Gardens were in the Sonic Adventure games. They’re ultimately something not required to beat the game, but the crystal collecting and Tim raising is a nice activity to give extra purpose to replaying stages as well as a fun side activity in and of itself. Feed the Tims more crystals and they’ll play in the Tower o’ Tims in the hub world, and playing in it makes a counter go up which will make the Tower o’ Tims grow ever larger and more complex. The fact that you need to wait for the counter to go up can be a bit annoying if you’re power gaming for achievements and whatnot, but it’s ultimately an entirely optional activity, so I find it difficult to complain about too seriously.

The presentation of Balan Wonderworld is where it shines brightest, in my opinion. Character design, particularly of Balan, his rival Lance, and the game’s bosses, are excellent, and seeing new worlds and boss designs was always such a treat. The mechanical design of the bosses is even clever too, as each has 3 primary ways to hit it, and doing each respectively will net you another statue for each one. The costumes are all super cute and fun as well, and the same goes for the enemy design. The world design can feel a bit overly blocky and simple at times, but this is in service of making the world very mechanically consistent. You never need to worry if a door or a barrel is secretly breakable from some future costume, because the only breakable objects are the very clearly marked cracked blocks, for example. That said, the simplicity sometimes works against it. There are some costumes that let you get around vertically quite a lot, and while the game has a surprising lack of invisible walls preventing you from climbing the scenery, it is not completely devoid of them. This can lead to some frustrating deaths if you’re going for the harder to reach statues as you try to do a little bit of guesswork on what weird outcroppings can actually be stood on vs. those that can’t. This is a rare problem, but it’s certainly a present one.

The music is also very nice. A lot of memes and jokes were made of the little dance party scenes that play when you beat bosses, but the music in them is still fun and well done. My personal favorite track is the song that plays during the Balan’s Bouts, which made replaying them for statues even more fun x3. The animated cutscenes before and after bosses are also very pretty, even though the game itself looks pretty rough for a game on PS4 quite frequently. Therein actually lies my biggest complaint with the game: it’s pretty damn poorly optimized. I had to download a 2gb patch to play this when I first installed it on my PS4, and even then, a year and a half after release, there are some areas that have some really bad framerate drops. Only the framerate, not the action, actually drops, meaning if you just stay the course you won’t die, but it can still lead to some quite frustrating deaths in ways that really should not be the case. The game just doesn’t look good enough to be having these types of technical problems, and though I’ve heard the game runs with basically no problems on PC, let this be a warning for anyone considering picking up the PS4 version at least.

Verdict: Recommended. Technical issues aside, I was really surprised at how much I enjoyed my time with Balan Wonderworld. While it’s certainly not perfect, and exactly to whom to recommend it to is a little tricky (the difficult curve for example starts a a bit too easy for veterans yet it ends a bit too hard for beginners, I’d say), it’s still a very competent game. Outside of how it was certainly not worth $60 at launch, this is a situation a lot like I experienced with Mighty No. 9 last year. The game itself holds up pretty damn well for something with such a toxic reputation, so it was weird to me just how solid it was. It’s absolutely worth it at the current price point, and while it’s not the easiest game to recommend 100%-ing like I did, it’s absolutely worth picking up for any fans of 3D platformers. At the very least, I’d say it’s a far more polished and well put together game than other modern 3D platformers I’ve played like Yooka Laylee or Super Lucky’s Tale, so if those didn’t exactly wow you like they didn’t wow me, Balan Wonderworld just might do it for you~

I, like Icarus, have flown too close to the sun and my ownership of this game is evidence of my hubris. The overwhelmingly bad reviews did not stop me from buying this for $5 at a Game Stop. "I have fun with bad games" I had thought "Surely it would be fun to at least rip on", Wrong. This game commits the greatest crime a videogame can commit. Not being poorly written, or buggy, or ugly, or anything of the sort. It commits the unforgivable crime of being boring. This game is so boring it's not even funny. Not only is the game play not stimulating in any way but there's not even anything to Joke about. The first time they dance is a little funny but after that you are nothing but a machine mindlessly completing tasks

A lot of the art is pretty tho ngl. Like the physical copy came with a little ticket thing and it is cute.

Balan Wonderworld is a masterpiece that showcases Square Enix's innovative approach to gaming. The game's use of NFTs adds a new layer of depth, allowing players to truly immerse themselves in the world of Wonderworld. The 3D platforming mechanics are flawless, providing a seamless and enjoyable gameplay experience. Yuji Naka's vision is fully realized in this game, and it sets a new standard for what a 3D platformer can achieve. Balan Wonderworld is a must-play for any gamer looking for a truly unique and unforgettable experience.

Score: 10/10

Baffling on every level, but compelling. Incredibly memorable. It feels like Yuji Naka wanted to make some sort of universal game language, something that could unite all cultures and religions, and decided "Banjo Kazooie designed by an alien" was the way to go.

This game is the opposite of Yooka Laylee. YL weaponized nostalgia to move copies of a mediocre game. Balan Wonderworld weaponizes nostalgia like a tactical nuke. Every design hallmark that has been established by over 30 years of platforming was completely ignored in the design of this game in favor of something opposing, or usually just orthogonal. Every instinct I've developed for these kind of games was wrong in a jarring and surreal way. It feels like a dream that's verging on nightmare but never quite getting there.

I respect it, I even like it, but it's too weird to actually recommend to anyone. But at the right price (about ten bucks) I think anyone curious should absolutely try it. There's nothing else like it.

Mucha gente dice que este juego es malo, y saben que? Están todos equivocados, decir que es malo es solo un 0,0000000000000001% de lo aberrante que llega a ser, solo lo aguanté 3 mundos, la música es lo más rescatable pero hasta ahí no más, da cringe, los gráficos son horribles, se reutilizan animaciones, los devs parece que nunca jugaron un videojuego porque con un control de 8 botones se usa solo 1 para jugar, todo lo que plantea lo hace mal y peor, no entiendo lo historia, no se explica nada, las cosas pasan porque si, y podría hablar 700 horas de lo malo que es este juego solo habiendo jugado 3 mundos, no necesito más.

Lo que puedo concluir aquí es que solamente por este juego yuji naka debería tener 3 cadenas perpetuas.

I haven't dropped a game in a long time. Balan Wonderworld changed that.

As a longtime fan of Sonic Team's work, I was absolutely stoked to hear that Sonic series creators Yuji Naka and Naoto Oshima were returning to collaborate again after years of separation. That optimism turned to skepticism the moment I saw this game in motion, and skepticism to disappointment when the reviews started rolling in. This game quickly became the biggest joke on the block, and after all this time I wondered, "could it truly have been that bad?" After all, I still enjoyed many of Naka's other projects despite their shortcomings. I decided to give Balan Wonderworld an honest shot. Big mistake.

This game forgoes so many 3D platformer game design hallmarks and traditions to the point where I have to wonder if the team persued feedback on certain things. The first and possibly largest offense - mapping everything to one button. Everything. Jumping, attacking, menu navigation - every button does the same thing, even the triggers. This proves to be incredibly tedious and frustrating as time goes on.

The second worst thing this game does just so happens to be its central mechanic, the outfit/powerup system. Powerups are incredibly situational and specific, and there are far too many for the game's own good. Half of them could have been meshed into singular, more versatile powerups - not only to mitigate the tedium of using them, but to lend themselves to more interesting stage mechanics and puzzles. Combine their one-note gimmicky nature with the fact that every button has one function, and that's where this game's faults peek through in plain sight. Have a powerup that focuses on attack? You can no longer jump until you find a powerup that allows for it.

Balan also likes to hide its secrets behind these powerups. Stages often hide their collectibles in plain sight, but require the use of an ability that you haven't encountered yet. This makes completing stages nigh unbearable. Other games hide their secrets similarly, but newfound abilities are typically integrated of into player's move set. Balan decides to take a decidedly more complicated approach, requiring the use of a changing room to swap outfits. On paper this isn't too bad an idea - but the fact that outfits are based on stock and must be individually collected from other stages is where Balan's progression becomes a lot more grating.

Music and visuals are nothing to write home about at all. Stage themes are uninteresting and cluttered, the general visual style is flat and uninteresting, and every tune went in one ear and out the other. Sadly ironic, considering that music and visuals were consistently some of the best parts of Naka and Oshima's previous works. The character designs are a treat to look at, but without appealing environments to stage them in I just find myself wishing they were in a better game.

All in all, this game drained me like few things have before and I only managed to get halfway. I need a palette cleanser. Time to start Spyro 2.

A loathsome, bad game on most levels. I don't understand what they were thinking on many levels. Why does a game that prominently uses platforming not have a dedicated jump button? Why do only some powers have the ability to jump? Why do they have the god forsaken hoedowns at the end of every world?

As someone who tries to see the beauty in bad games, I truly don't see a world where the 'best' version of this game is anything better than like a 2/10. Only play this if you're curious about how truly bad the platforming genre can get.