first playthrough reviews are hard to be written. especially when the guy who made the game you're reviewing says that your first run is a tutorial. if that’s so, i just beat TW101 and honestly that tutorial alone was one of my best gaming experiences.

firstly, what the fuck. what the actual fuck. remember what i said about auteurism and shit in my Viewtiful Joe review? Taking notes from that, TW101 is the Most “Kamiya” Kamiya Game Of All Time. at least, from what i played. it’s also the Most “Platinum Games” Platinum Games Game Of All Time. i swear, the developers went INSANE in this shit right here and now i can say Bayonetta 3 is no longer my favorite PG title. (but i’m still an apologist)

it multiplies the best and the worst of Kamiya by 101. it’s Kamiya in his 101% potential. it’s Kamiya making 101 games in one. it’s 101- ok sorry

but seriously, when Kamiya said “your first playthrough is the tutorial”, he meant it. the mechanics are fantastic, it’s probably the most creative combat system in any action game, and as curious and interested as i am, i explored most of the options offered to me, and when it works – it’s such an unique feeling. but when it doesn’t, it’s somehow because of its slow progression and tough learning curve, the game throws A LOT OF STUFF in your face but at the same time it doesn’t give you room enough to play around the “stuff”. “First playthrough” it’s definitely not one of Kamiya’s strengths and that’s one of the reasons why one-and-done players don’t vibe too much with his design philosophy (which is ironic since he tends to focus a lot on the spectacle part. kind of hit or miss), with Bayonetta being the worst offender and Viewtiful Joe the most polished one in that sense.

The Wonderful 101 though? it’s an unstoppable rollercoaster with some of the worst tutorials and most unintuitive progression of all time, environmental hazard all the fucking time (bayo1 ptsd), a lot of puzzles, a lot of setpieces, a lot of QTEs, color-coded enemies, a lot of exploration and secrets, and I can’t even count on my fingers how many minigames there are. i guess it’s 101

some environmental hazards are intuitive to make through, some puzzles are good, most of setpieces are impeccable, the QTEs are honestly my favorites from any game, some enemies with weapon-coded gimmicks are great, the exploration is genius, and the minigames… i wouldn’t say i prefer them over the moment-to-moment overall gameplay but it definitely has some of the best PG has ever made. (i think it’s the same case as Bayonetta 3 but for some reason the latter is much more criticized)

the game has A LOT of stuff and i’d say it’s the most "messy" Kamiya game with the highs being the best thing ever made in humanity and the lows super rage-inducing. in Viewtiful Joe i said i was happy all the time, but in TW101 i felt many other things besides happiness. i had a similar experience as i had playing Bayonetta for the first time but the difference is that TW101 captivated me much more. i was never bored or indifferent, i never thought of “stopping playing” because the game is ALWAYS reinventing itself in the most creative ways you can imagine

it also has probably the best storytelling of the genre. there are some really good ones like DMC3 and Sifu but TW101 it’s from another world. it’s not “really good”, it’s WONDERFUL. the ludonarrative is, honestly, perfect – capitalizing 101% of its mechanics and structure to convey a message and tell a story is something that only The Wonderful 101 can do. (there are some games that do this pretty well, but only up to the 100% limit)

the mindblowing and over-the-top conclusion pretty much synthesize everything i said here, going down in history as one of the best ending in gaming (now it’s probably in my top 5 since i can’t even write about it without getting static for every word, it’s really THAT good, it’s one of the only endings i can think about that pretty much 101% of it only works because it’s in a videogame)

i’m still jawdropped because of the ending but how would i end this review? in my Viewtiful Joe text i said i had high hopes for this game and now i can say that it met 101% of my expectations, that unfortunately backloggd has a 5-star limit but this game def deserves a 101 stars rating, that i'll definitely replay this game 101 times, that Kamiya and PG have 101% of my respect and i'm 101% sure that Project G.G. will be another masterpiece, that- ok it's not even funny at this point.

The Wonderful 101 was one of the most unique experiences I had in gaming and despite its frustrating pieces, bad tutorialization and the remastered problems, I'd say this is easily the best Platinum Games title (yes, recency bias) and it's one of the games I have that feeling "they made the game especially for me" but that would go against the meaning of the game.

While Viewtiful Joe emphasizes a specific style with its metalinguistic narrative and aesthetic appeal, The Wonderful 101 emphasizes a specific theme using 101% of its game design and I'm not even joking; Devil May Cry with its aesthetics, Viewtiful Joe with its story, Bayonetta with the cutscenes style and… these games are always stylizing their own motto inside and outside the game design; but they are also always showing some love for the audiovisual in some sense. On the other hand, The Wonderful 101 tries to be the most pure gaming experience Kamiya ever made; in the stylistic sense of the word working together with the game design. Of course the mechanics play a big part of his other games even outside of the main appeal (combat), but I feel that PG and Kamiya went 101% crazy into how mechanical TW101 is as a whole. It’s also probably the one with the lowest frequency of “cinematic cutscenes”, most of them are either dialogues or… quick time events (and that speaks for itself).

Lastly, if Viewtiful Joe was about "everyone loves a hero", The Wonderful 101 is about "everyone can be a hero", and to end the review without this obvious interpretation (still true and genius tho), I'd like to add two actually relevant things:

1. i really need to watch some tokusatsu
2. they REALLY DID THAT FUCKING spoilers ahead

don't care that the frame rate is awful; don't care that the combat is asinine; don't care that the game is unpolished, janky, ugly, and poorly considered in every respect; don't care that it was subject to predatory dlc; don't care that accord's requests are emblematic of some of the worst there is in side quest design; don't care don't care don't care

what i do care about is that this is the ultimate manifestation of YT's disinclination to work in games juxtaposed with his earnest belief in the medium as a vessel for greater things. in his grimmest failure, he finds light at the end of the tunnel. an astonishing exercise in empathy generation, one of the best finales in a game, and the only one of yoko taro's works that makes great use of backwards scripting + sequential playthroughs

The core of Pikmin is excellent so this is still a good game, but most of the decisions made for the sequel really don't work for me. On the positive side, I like the addition of White and Purple Pikmin (even if the latter are a little bit broken in battle) which add a little more strategy to your daily loadout and what you need to take into caves. The variety of enemies also gets a little boost, with some expert planning required in order to limit your losses as much as possible, while the Pikmin themselves get a nice little improvement in AI and no longer feel like they have the IQ of a rock. Also the Piklopedia, treasure descriptions and Louie's recipes add a lot of humour and charm to the series, so much so that I think a good hour of my playtime was purely down to reading every entry and regularly chuckling to myself.

I don't mind the overall timer being taken away (even if I prefer it), but I'm not a fan of the cave system and there being no kind of time limit there at all. To me, Pikmin always needs some kind of urgency, whether that's an in-game day limit, needing to get your Pikmin to a safe space by nightfall or just through challenges and missions. Once you enter a cave, all that evaporates and the game becomes something very different, something more survival focused. Not necessarily bad, but not what I was expecting or hoping for. The first Pikmin was a shorter and smaller game, but I felt like I was exploring a world. Here, the overground sections felt like I was walking through a large menu to get to the next cave.

In isolation I could deal with that, but with non-curated levels, random enemy placement and the occasional bomb falling from the ceiling with no warning, my enjoyment levels did start to take a slight hit. It hits its nadir when all of the above combine with having treasure nearby - not because of the gameplay of collecting them but due to the incessant and incredibly annoying chirping of the treasure radar. It's distracting mid-battle, and the ringing just won't stop even after that point until its deposited safely - the only way it will go away is by turning all in-game sound effects off which isn't a great solution.

But as I said at the start, this is still Pikmin. They're still a bunch of little guys working together in a big world to collect objects and dissolve bulborbs. The review sounds quite negative but I still had a good time playing through - I just don't think I'll be returning to this entry in the series much compared to the first and third.

"You know, there are many different approaches you can take to game design. One approach, which we took in SF3, is to design your game around "unanswerables." I think with any game, players will search for the best tactic, the best strategy... like, if X happens, you should always do Y; if you do this here, you'll always win. There's competitive games like that, where the match is essentially a confrontation of theoretical knowledge that each player has built up. But Street Fighter 3 is a game that, by design, doesn't have a fixed answer to those questions. There is no "best" tactic; you can spend your whole life trying to find the perfect theoretical approach to a situation in SF3, but it will never be quite right. You always have to be reading your opponent in the moment; you can't just fall back on your theories. It's a game that lets you search for answers... Forever."
- Shinichiro Obata, Street Fighter III planner, Capcom Japan

“he’d love to spend the night in zion / he’s been a long while in babylon / he’d like a lover’s wings to fly on / to a tropic isle of avalon” - digital man, rush

dense, layered, and easy to get lost in all the same as its island centerpiece, flower sun and rain endures as personally-tailored perfection in a video game.

some years ago when i was working my way through kill the past, a good friend of mine advised me to not bother with the completely optional and not at all mandatory lost & found puzzles, as “they suck and they ruin the pacing of the game”. as a matter of pride i simply decided to not heed that advice and go through the game solving as many of the lost & found puzzles as i possibly could. in doing so i’ve made the playthrough likely much longer and more drawn out than it should have been, but it’s only until as of writing this in 2023 that i’ve realized that doing these puzzles actually held some value to me.

flower sun and rain is a game of multifaceted allegory and metaphor, where no ‘truth’ is singular (despite what sumio initially says) and just about any way of reading into it is a valid reading. to me, flower sun and rain is a metaphor about a man unwilling to acknowledge the past and move on to the future; a man eternally stuck in the present. the titular hotel claims its stake on being a paradise to forget about time in, and like a moth to a flame, sumio does as much as he can to waste away in paradise for as long as he possibly can. he lets himself get distracted with the denizens and their issues, letting paradise pull him deeper into itself so sumio doesn’t have to think about the airport and everything outside of this paradise. 25th ward puts a wrenchingly satisfying end to this thread as his life outside of paradise has become completely void of enjoyment. in the end he lets paradise subsume him, never to move on again.

paradise as an idea is something i had touched upon earlier in my thoughts on kaizen game works’ paradise killer, which for anyone who’s played a decent number of suda51 games, can very much see the unabashed ktp cribbing it proudly flaunts. it is rooted in a need to escape human problems ironically caused by humans and the societies they’ve built up. in building these paradises, it comes down to exploitation of resources and people to cultivate these getaways and romanticizing a world fundamentally incompatible with the systems that even lets a vacation spot like this exist in the first place. vacation spots like the flower sun and rain hotel are inextricably linked to colonial structures thriving off of that exploitation. this brings flower sun and rain close to an idea proposed by writer mark “k-punk” fisher known as capitalist realism, in which he proposes that due to the sheer widespread influence of global capitalism, it’s believed that it is the only viable political and economic system and that it would simply be impossible to even begin to imagine any viable alternative. in that sense there’s no such thing as a true-to-definition paradise; it is at best only a temporary state of mind, but it’s one that a person can find themselves unfathomably lost in.

there’s probably not a lot of people who went out of their way to do the ds port’s lost & found puzzles, as they’re technically not really rewarding the player with any juicy lore or narrative revelations, just some stuff to look at in the game’s model viewer and maybe the satisfaction of solving esoteric puzzles that have nothing to do with anything. or so one thinks they have nothing to do with anything relevant. for the player to deliberately seek out the lost & found puzzles and forget about time solving them, it is, to me, the perfect way to reinforce the narrative flower sun and rain presents. sumio is a man who lets frivolous people distract him and seeks out these meaningless problems to solve for others, and for the player to do these lost & found puzzles, they act as an extension of sumio to drag out every second possible to indulge in paradise. one of the most potent executions of a ludonarrative tool i’ve seen in a video game, and it’s entirely done through optional puzzles that a good deal of the people who played this game likely did not do.

i don’t regret doing the lost & found puzzles. i think they’re the best part of the game.

probably my favourite system mechanics in any fighting game, battle hub perfectly encapsulates the arcade setting as cordial yet caustic, netcode is excellent, this is the best starting roster any of these games has ever had, world tour gets dry after a little bit but finally manages to capture these characters essences in a personable and human way which has been a rarity in SF up to this point, endless quality of life features officially make this the new standard to aspire to for all pending releases, dhalsim sounds like he’s telling opponents to kill themselves whenever i land drive impact. five stars