You know, I can almost envision a reality where this game received the notoriety it so clearly deserved, and it wouldn't take much strain to imagine. Given the time period in which the game launched, it had everything it needed to click with anyone who laid eyes on it: a bright and colorful cast of characters that felt ripped right out of the system they were made for, a story of super heroes fighting off an alien invasion during an era where The Avengers were exploding in popularity, quirky gameplay mechanics you'd come to expect from a company like Platinum Games, an all star team of action game designers who had the experience and passion needed to bring this crazy concept to life and flourish, the works. With Hideki Kamiya at the helm, there was no chance this game could possibly fail, regardless of the system it was launching on.

So what went wrong?

Clearly something didn’t click with people despite Platinum’s best efforts. There are many reasons this could be the case (unorthodox control scheme, confused marketing, niche appeal of the action genre, etc.) but it would be difficult to pin down one specific thing that turned people away.

In my eyes however, what matters most is not that the game lacked something to wrangle in the highest number of potential customers, but that the game did not restrain itself in what it sought out to do.

Let me set the scene for you: June 2020, one of the worst years in recent history and it refuses to let up. Due to the recent shutdown of my job given the status of the world at that time, I had devoted a lot of my free time to playing games, as many others in my position likely do as well. Everything in my life is starting to drag, and I can tell nothing will get better any time soon. However, there is a momentary glimmer of joy coming my way. The Wonderful 101 recently had an incredibly successful kickstarter, and having heard many positive things about the game, I decided to give it a blind shot. Many of my favorite games were action games, so while Platinum didn’t have a perfect track record in my experience, I was interested in trying something I knew so little about. Even if it was disappointing, it probably had some interesting elements to dig into.

I didn’t expect my expectations to be shattered like they were after finishing the game.

I’ve never played a game before that appealed to all my sensibilities like The Wonderful 101 does, and even after nearly 200 hours of play, I’m still picking up on new things to love that I never noticed before. I won’t bore you with the semantics, but every element of the game is emblematic of everything I love about the medium. The story felt cartoonish and stupid in all the best ways, the gameplay presented incredibly distinct systems to set it apart from other action games while tackling problems about the genre in interesting ways I had never considered before, and the whole experience was uncompromising in it’s vision in a truly inspiring way.

In many ways, The Wonderful 101 made me feel like a kid again and ignited a passion for life in my heart at a point where everything felt so aimless and dark. As this global pandemic slows down and eventually fades into nothingness, I’ll be sure to leave a lot of things from this era in the past, but this game is sure to stick with me for years to come.

Regardless of how you may feel about the final product, what can’t be denied is that The Wonderful 101 is everything it wanted to be and didn’t settle for less. And for the time period when it came into my life, that’s all I needed it to be.

Reviewed on Jun 08, 2021


1 Comment


9 months ago

I know it’s probably too late to be updating a review this old, but a while back I actually wrote a piece on The Wonderful 101 that goes way more in-depth into the game’s mechanics, and you can find that here if you’d like to give it a look. 👍