BORN TO DIE
WONDERWORLD IS A FUCK
中裕司 Insider Trade 'Em All 2023
I am balan man
171,000,000¥ IN FINES

I can't remember the last time I fell asleep while playing a game. I'm not even trying to be funny, it happened. One second I was climbing the webs on World 3, the next second I woke up to a "The UE4-Happiness game has crashed - Fatal Error!" message on my screen, probably thanks to my face resting on top of the keyboard and screwing something up from so many inputs. (Gotta say, "Happiness Game" is a REALLY funny code name)

So, I decided to check this out as a little intermission in my Sonic marathon before moving on to Sonic Frontiers. I played NiGHTS for the marathon as well, so, y'know, I figured that Balan would have some of its DNA considering the pedigree behind it.
This game has so many things going for it. I ADORE the art direction, and the CG quality is absurd. Legit, it has one of the prettiest intro cutscenes I've ever seen, that hair tech is INSANE. The soundtrack is very bouncy and fun, exactly what I expect out of a collectathon platformer, shoutouts to Corn for Days, and the story is very interesting in concept. An adventure where you go through the mind palaces of people who are disillusioned or down on their luck and beat the shit out of their inner demons to help them get through it? It's a cool idea, and it's represented very well through its visuals. The scenery bends and twists in unexpected ways, objects and platforms float and move about, it's all very dreamlike.

But god damn, this was a BORE to play through. Yes, the art direction is very strong and the setup was intriguing, but that's where it ends bro. There is NOTHING here, 5 worlds in and I had to pass. Any other platformer can do what this game does, and much better at that.
For starters: One button for every action in the game. One fucking button. Why is this a thing? Why would you come up with a system that limits your ability to jump depending on the costume you're using, in a 3D PLATFORMING game? And it's not like it makes for any interesting decisions, there are no scenarios where the limitation is justified. You can just swap to a different costume that is able to jump whenever the situation calls for it, so why bother? Why not make it a 2-button game if you're going for simplicity? One button for jumping, a mechanic that should be universal for a game like this, and another button for costume-specific actions. That's it, job done.
But even then, why the fuck would you go for such a limited control scheme? Some of the coolest things about collectathon platformers(at least from an outside perspective, given that I haven't played many of them) are the ways you go about collecting things, the movement options you have to get to your objectives, the kind of obstacle courses the game throws at you and the freedom you have to ignore said obstacles with the aforementioned movement options. There's a reason why Super Mario 64 is still played extensively to this day especially in speedruns: That game feels amazing to control, and it gives you a ton of different ways of interacting with your environment. Mario has like, 5 different kinds of jumps depending on when and how you jump.
Balan has some differences in the way you jump, but they're not universal. Each mechanic is locked to a specific costume, and you can only carry 3 of them with you. Get hit once and you lose your costume, btw.
Going back to Mario, imagine if you could only long jump when using a specific cap. And even then, once you pick that cap up, you can ONLY long jump, nothing else.

I was going to give the game some credit for the levels, seeing as how you can jump on nearly everything and explore that way. Very few invisible walls, which made me think there would be a TON of secrets hidden around the place. There aren't.
There's this part where you're jumping towards a clock tower, and you can just barely see that the side of the tower has a spot you can stand on. Once you're there, the game teases you again by showing that you can keep going around the tower.
In ANY OTHER platformer, hell, in Sonic Unleashed, the back of that tower would have SOMETHING. ANYTHING. A 1-up, a coin, a nut. Balan gave me nothing.

And that about sums it up tbh. Great production values and a promising premise, but it gave me nothing to play.

More and more I find myself wondering if it's all worth fighting for. For a future without Balan Wonderworld... Yeah, it's worth it.

Much like the Shadow the Hedgehog happy meal toy from McDonald's, the genius minds behind this game decided it would be played with a single button, leading to some truly innovative outcomes. Do you like platformers where you lose the ability to jump? Well then they have you covered. Yuji's hubris ultimately led to his own downfall, demanding over 80 unique costumes and abilities associated with them, which of course is hardly feasible unless you want a game filled with gimmicks. Many of the costumes actually overlap and make each other completely redundant, on top of the fact you lose the costume upon being hit.

So what's the deal here anyway? It seems like funny Balan invites people with some kind of inner turmoil into this dream world so they can get some kind of resolution. A farmer who lost all of his yield in a tornado, but finds one surviving crop, giving him hope. A woman who almost drowned getting over her fear of seeing the dolphin she was friends with again. And then of course, turning back time to revive a dead cat so the girl isn't sad anymore? One of these isn't like the others. It seems Balan is actually some kind of godlike entity who can manipulate the laws of reality at will. Or perhaps as everything seems to suggest, the entire game is merely some kind of stage play and none of it is real. Who knows what was being cooked.

The tower of tims deserves a special mention here. Gone are the days of stat raising in the Chao garden, and now we have what is essentially a glorified pachinko machine. Instead of using money, you relinquish something more valuable, and that is your time. It's no exaggeration to say that by participating in this facet of supposed content, the game is actively killing you in real life in a slow and tedious process. All you're really doing is feeding some birds and watching them jump into a clockwork machine which doesn't even work. The developers couldn't even get the tims to traverse this monstrosity and most of the time they end up falling from the top. Riveting.

Who likes quick time events? I LOVE the part of the game where you have to do like 70 of them perfectly, or close the game entirely to try again. The alternative would be to fail, resulting in you needing to go and kill the world boss again, just so you can have another attempt. Everything in this game is trying to inconvenience you. None of it is fun. The most entertaining part was playing with two players and trying to break the game by combining different abilities to skip most of the levels. Yet, in the end I went back and got that coveted 100% completion. Yay.

The verdict is in. The punishment for insider trading should be to get 100% completion in this game, live on stream from prison. Let this man feel the consequences of his actions. Yuji Naka, may you never cook again.