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.

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.

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.

When I was a kid, I used to have this silly vision of how my brain worked.

I'd close my eyes and envision small, cartoon versions of myself, each with their own facet of my personality. They'd sit around at a command center, my view being the camera feed to directly speak with them. At the helm was the scientist version of myself, the smart one, sporting his science goggles, lab coat, and head mirror. He'd speak with me directly, his face taking up the frame like a fish eye lens as he'd lean forward towards the command center's keyboard, dictating to others what I had needed to do.

Next to him was the cool one, the greaser with the combed up hairdo and leather jacket, nonchalantly leaning in his seat-shaped brain matter. He'd sometimes speak up on mission briefings, but he was always too cool to participate, flicking his sunglasses on and leaning back in his chair with his legs firmly propped up, using his hands to support the weight of his slick pompadour.

Working somewhere in the back were the emotional ones, never at the forefront, filing cabinets and important business work. I don't remember much of what they did, but they were never the ones I imagined speaking to.

Having multiple ear infections as a toddler caused my ears to ring infrequently, and each time this happened, I believed I had leveled up like I was in a video game, hitting a milestone in growing up. I'd imagine the personalities in my head pumping their arms up in excitement and jumping for joy as a video gamey results screen counted up the score for a new level.

One day, I realized this wasn't how my brain worked. I never spoke to anyone about this mental image outloud to convince me this- it just occurred naturally to me that this was not real. This was not how my brain would actually work, and upon this realization, I felt as if a bit of magic inside me was snuffed out.

A part of you dies when you grow up. You learn to distrust people. You can be hurt by others, and the pain can range from unbearable to catastrophic. Schools teach you to stop thinking in abstractions and to start thinking constructively. Not to say that the systems that dictate these behaviors are completely careless and amoral — there's very good reasons for their existence — but this imprint, this bite of cynicism, begins to enclose in on you, anchoring you to reality.

All of this is to say that, Balan Wonderworld is a video game that I have played.

The "We-Have-Nights-At-Home" combo deal of musical motifs, character design, and story structure is an appetizing looking set of junk food for something that only cost me 6 dollars. Technically 3 dollars from a "Friend-Buying-Me-Megaman-Battle-Network-On-The-Switch-Specifically-So-I-Could-Trade-With-Him" savings. He was very mad at me when he found out I was playing Balan Wonderworld before I played the games he bought me.

And why wouldn't he be? I mean, you've seen what people say about Balan Wonderworld, yeah? The laughing stock of the internet for the month the game came out in 2021. A horrendous switch port with a frame rate that dips to the literal zeros, laughably bizzare cutscenes featuring poorly mocapped dance sequences, sloppy and slippery controls, the use of a single button doing everything within it's singular power to hinder the already lackluster gameplay, all for a full priced 60 dollar game. "Not even "so bad it's good", just bad!", they'd say.

Really now, why even bother with Balan Wonderworld? This is the same game where the creator was thrust out from the company 6 months prior, was eventually found guilty of insider trading for a Dragon Quest mobile game that'd dissipate like sand a year after it's arrival. That very same man was notorious with his reputation of being a nightmare to work with. Why play and support this stupid, broken, useless game?

A few reasons spring to mind. One, I've been fresh off the heels of NiGHTS: Into Dreams, and my infatuation with NiGHTS has lead me down the rockiest roads least traveled.

Two, a couple of people suggested to try out Balan Wonderworld. They claimed to have enjoyed the game despite the prevailing issues. Recently playing Gungrave: Gore invigorated me with a new perspective to try out games that were heavily criticized upon their initial release to form my own opinions. Balan Wonderworld fit this exact type of game like a glove.

Three, I had played the demo for Balan Wonderworld prior to the full game's release, and despite the obvious design flaws, I ended up enjoying what I had played. In many ways, the game reminded me of Billy Hatcher And The Giant Egg, a game I grew up with and was fond of.

For a point of reference, Billy Hatcher is not a life altering experience. The game teeters on the edge between mediocrity and hidden gem. I used to call it "the most 7/10 game to ever exist", (even if number ratings I found to be superfluous). Mechanically, the game was interesting and ambitious, with a style and presentation that I absolutely adored. There was untapped potential within Billy Hatcher that I had always wished was executed correctly, but was never attempted again due to poor sales.

And really, that's how I've felt about most of Sonic Team's games: they're ambitious, fascinating, cutting edge games that are full of disappointing, alienating, sometimes bizzare design decisions that never seemed to mesh well with me.

Balan Wonderworld definitely carries the torch in this regard. Balan Wonderworld is a 3D platformer where you can transform into 81 separate costumes, each with their own unique ability tied to them. Some costumes are full-on mini-games that don't truly count, some are the same ability albeit slightly varied, but each come across as unique. You can use these costumes in any context you so desire, which means replaying these levels comes with the reward of being able to find new collectibles that you otherwise couldn't your first time around.

Each level is a stage, and each stage displays a performance by the man on the tin, Balan, who within story cutscenes helps out folk with their problems, sounding a whole lot like NiGHTS conceptually.

The NiGHTS similarities don't end there. Similar to the Nightopian and Chao systems in the Nights and Sonic Adventure series respectfully, there's an entire artificial life simulator that let's you relax after you've finished exploring a new level. In the hub world, you can find different breeds of these tiny chicken babies called Tims that can change colors, wear little hats, and simply play on a jungle gym called the Isle of Tims. You breed them by collecting these crystallized seeds within the platformer levels, feeding them all the seeds you've collected, and then once they become big enough, you throw a Tim at the now big Tim, causing a newborn to appear. As the Tims play on their little play set, a number tracker raises every time a Tim spins a fan or goes through certain holes on the jungle gym. Once you reach a certain threshold, you unlock new toys for the Tims to play with.

This system takes the simplicity from NiGHTS's Nightopian system, while incorporating elements learned and refined from the Chao Garden of Sonic Adventure. I believe this is the most fundamentally solid portion of Balan Wonderworld, and I would say in some regards that this system surpasses it's predecessors.

Unfortunately, there's a gigantic issue. The rest of the game is not fundementally solid to hold the baton that either of these games held. Balan Wonderworld doesn't have the same staying power of a Sonic Adventure level nor the finesse of Nights and it's ranking system to prop up this gameplay loop. If Billy Hatcher was the most 7/10 game in existence, this would be the most 6/10.

This is due to a number of factors. For starters, these levels aren't exactly built for replay value. They're linearly designed, with the most incentive to replay coming from the seed collection and finding previously unobtainable Balan Trophies with costumes you hadn't unlocked yet. With Sonic, your speed and rank were the main contributors to replaying. Same with NiGHTS. In Balan, you can find new ways to traverse through levels, but at some point, you're going to run out of interesting collectibles to find. The 3D platformer collectathon is simply not indicitive for this type of design.

This would be less of a problem if these stages were anything to write home about. Cutting edge would not be a phrase I would associate with this game. Most levels meander with a new costume for a few moments, then move onto another costume, then the next until you finally finish. I'd be hard pressed to call this tedious, but this is very much a basic implementation. There's not enough ground to cover for traversal to be interesting and engaging, and that's a major problem for a 3D platformer. The game simply stews in it's own mediocrity, never really being offensive besides an off level or two. Depending on who you ask, this could either be the greatest sin for a game to commit, or completely and utter fine. The bare minimum in fine.

But then on top of all of this, you have these tiny, minute decisions that are baffling in the fact they weren't caught sooner in development. Why does the character feel so sluggish to move about? Why is everything mapped to a single button? Why do some abilities possess a jump, but others don't? Why must the player switch to a different ability simply to perform this most basic action within the entire game? Why does switching to a new ability take 5 seconds? Why can't I switch to other costumes on the fly? Why can't I combo these costume abilities with one another to create some form of higher level play? Why are these stages numbered, but they appear within the hub world in a random order? Why make your hub world like this when all this does is create confusion? These are all very apparent decisions you can immediately pick up on as soon as you play the game, and yet they were never even addressed by the finished product's release.

Maybe part of this had to do with Yuji Naka's booting from the last remaining 6 months of development by higher ups at Square Enix. Sometimes in game development, issues that are ironed out far, far late in development end up finally shaping the entire game and forming something that's actually fun.

Yet again, perhaps this is simply a lie Yuji Naka told in order to save face for his next hire.

Yet again once again, a Japanese developer speaking out against an employer is also a rarity due to cultural workplace difference, so maybe there was good reason for this to be stated outloud.

Whatever the case may be, Balan Wonderworld is left in the rubble as a mess of design decisions. It's genuinely no wonder the game was raked over the coals as much as it was. A proflic mind at the helm created a game that was an unnatural disaster.


... And yet, underneath the rubble, with the rebar prodding out forming the jagged edges of this game, Balan Wonderworld had managed to make me feel something. Not just once, but twice.

The first was World 8, The Lady Too Scared To Love. This is the story of a woman who's whole life was ahead of her. She was about to be married, her loving parents accepting him whole heartedly into her family. A piece they never knew was missing had finally fell right into place.

Unexpectedly, both of her parents die simultaneously.

Grief strucken, the woman shields herself away from her fiancé, closing her heart in fear that this tragedy may happen again. Afraid to love, to be happy once more.

This scene crashed into me like a wave. I was in a call with friends, and all I could mutter was a mere "oh..." as tears masked my eyes.

The Battle Network friend only laughed hysterically. "Ha ha, dead parents" he'd say jokingly.

Maybe I'm just too sappy.

Regardless, it was in this moment that I realized what the point to Balan Wonderworld was. Somewhat similar to NiGHTS's role as the hero of dreams, the Wonderworld acts as a gateway for these wandering, damaged souls to escape. A dissociation towards the real world. Each character pertaining to this world's story would enter this imaginary world, following you around as you made your way through their ideal manifestations. Then, they'd begin to think about what brought them here. The feeling they'd spent all this time trying to forget. Grief, hurt, pain, humiliation, rejection, pride, anger. This would then transform these subjects into monsters, acting as a boss battle that could be defeated. Each section would end with them back within reality, dealing their issues head on, and coming out the other side triumphant.

The second moment that dug at my soul was the ending. After defeating Lance, the antagonist of this game, all the folks you helped freed are in unison thanking Balan, saying their goodbyes as they leave out the door they once came in through. All that's left are the two main playable characters, who rush to Balan and hug him tightly. This causes Balan to cry. As he does, he begins to sparkle and transforms in a blinding light. The light fades and reveals his human form.

He looks just like Lance.

Lance was a part of him all along. Wonderworld was his own escape, and the shadows of himself caused an imbalance to this world.

He's been suffering along with everyone else.

And that's something that really stood out to me. Here was a character that was cool, fun, playful, and really captured the imagination with his mere presence. A shining sun in the dark rain clouds above. Yet this whole time, he was like everyone else. He was merely human. Balan was never his true self, but someone who he wished to be. In that respect, he turned into someone whom he wished to be. Yet, he was still met with consequences of running from who he was. In the end, he accepts himself, and goes off to the real world along with everybody else.

The essence of NiGHTS conceptually is carried over to Balan Wonderworld, but instead of simply taking the same formula set up of NiGHTS's story, they reshape this into something I found genuinely more effective. There's a certain magic found within Balan Wonderworld that I can't help but smile at. Somewhere in Yuji Naka's cold, money grubbing body lies a warm, beating heart that wants to spark the imagination of children everywhere, and with a strong help from Naoto Ohshima and his crew, he managed to set out that goal and accomplish this task. They did the same for Sonic, they did the same for NiGHTS, they did the same for even Billy Hatcher. Each of these characters acted as a costume for kids and adults alike to believe in the power of your own imagination.

Which reminds me of the feeling I held when I was a kid. The characters in my head weren't real. They too were costumes. Aspects of myself I wanted, but never really had. I wasn't a smart scientist. I certainly wasn't anywhere near that cool. These personas were facets of my personality I wished I was more like. Yet, they were a part of me all along.

A part of you may die when you grow up, but I don't think you should let it stay dead. Take what you've built from learning in a society that has pigeon holed you into a certain way of thinking and break the mold of it in half. Step outside your comfort zone, formulate your own opinion, learn from new experiences, yes, but also dream big, be playful, imagine deeper, build anything, keep wondering.

I can hear my ears ringing, all because I played Balan Wonderworld. Of all fucking things.

One button. One dream. One star (just kidding, I'll give it two for effort).

Platformer that is inspired by Mario, Yooka-Laylee, Banjo Kazooie etc. It's not exactly inspired with "costumes", a character/ability switching gimmick many remember from Donkey Kong 64. However, balance is thrown out of wack because the abilities overlap. "One button does everything" means you can't jump when you really want to unless you have the proper costume. Dialogue is in Japanese only. Levels are cutely presented, short and to the point, but some things aren't possible to accomplish until you unlock the proper costume. Story makes positively no sense, everybody dances one of two available songs when the darkness is purged. Difficulty isn't exactly consistent. Soundtrack and people memeing farmer Sneed are two redeeming factors - but not much else is good about this game.

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