at the time of review i'm a few hours in, i'm currently making my way through stage 5. i also played the demo.

the game is alright. not necessarily the best game ever to me or the worst game ever, it's more so-so.

it could be me walking in from beating super mario odyssey but balan feels like a slight carbon copy of the game. the only real difference is while mario possesses the various creatures in the game, your character possesses costumes. this also takes on the aesthetics of nights (to be expected with ohshima's character design). many people complain about the one button function, and it's not a big issue with me. but it does make things disorienting when you get a costume and it's like 'press b to [action]!' and you then realize you can use literally ANY button in ABXY to do it. i also don't like how easy it is to lose the costumes, it's kind of aggravating. if you accidentally fall or don't hit a negati or boss properly you can lose your costume. the latter is worse when you're fighting a boss and you only have 2 costume boxes. so it's like you have to be careful with fighting, if you make one odd move when you're trying to get costumes it could mess you up. it's probably good to stock up on costumes, to avoid having to aggravate yourself and go back to stages just to get costumes.

there's also something called 'balans bout' and sports minigames involving balan, but can be tedious to get good scores. if you get one bad score, you won't be able to get a trophy. and when you play a balan bout, that's your only time you're ever able to play it. same with the sports mini games. if it's not perfect, you might have to restart the stage.

as some who's playing the 'cursed' switch edition, i don't think the graphics are too bad. when it comes to many of the other stages, the graphics are decent. but stage 1 is bad, probably because of all the action and movement packed into it. my favorite is definitely the bug girl stage, it was really gorgeous. probably the stage i've had the most fun in!

the plot doesn't have all that much to it and i guess it's understandable considering that yuji naka programmed it. but i was hoping that balan and other characters would speak more? speaking of the plot it's also weird to me how a lot of the bosses in stages don't make sense to the stage. one reviewer commented on that and i do agree, it's pretty weird. like shouldn't we be fighting the dolphin and not some random fish lady?

one of the things i love a lot about this game is the art style, the character designs, the colors, and the tims. the tim simulator is super fun (i'm running it as i'm typing this out)! i also like plenty of the costumes, but i do wish there were some that didn't feel repetitive and others that don't look too weird (the cursed vacuum one for example, haven't gotten to that yet but i fear).
box fox is the best one, hands down.

...i kid. i love all of the ones in the water stage the most so far.

but overall, i think this game is so-so, like i said earlier. i think it doesn't deserve all the intense hatred it gets. i also don't necessarily think it's the best game ever, but if you like it, that's totally fine!

i'd recommend this game to people who like cheesy old games from the 90's and don't mind something with awkward clunky controls (like maybe the first sonic adventure?). if you're a big fan of naka and ohshima, then i'd play it too. if you do buy it, i'd reccomend it when it's on sale. i bought my game for about... $42 (39 without tax)? if you don't like this game much, but want to find a similar enjoyable game, i'd recommend mario odyssey if you haven't played it.

EDIT: as i played more of this, there's plenty of stages that are kind of aggravating. i'm disappointed over how painful the stage with the girl and her cat and the stage with clown and the princess are. stage 11's boss fight is absymal, there's a lot of flashing red lights and i'm honestly shocked that this wasn't the boss fight people were calling out. i'm trying to play stage 12-1, but it's even worse. there's a lot of motion blurs and it made me, who never gets motion sick, anxious and nauseous. there's also something really tricky at the end of the stage that's hard to navigate without a walkthrough. overall this took away half a star.