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The Wonderful 101: Remastered Review


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1088372103_Wonderful101Remasteredboxart.jpg.4e21b6d2f60ac6955b1fe04aa49422fa.jpgThe Wii U has been positively hemorrhaging its short but strong exclusives catalog. But after Bayonetta and its sequel made the jump to the Switch, it shouldn't be too surprising that another title from Platinum Games would also find a new home on more recent consoles. Plus, The Wonderful 101: Remastered gives a much bigger audience a chance to experience its wacky superhero story and insane action gameplay. For new players though, some of the game's flaws might feel a little more stark compared to fans who already have nostalgia for the original release.
 
You play as a member of the Wonderful 100, a team of heroes equipped with powerful Centinel suits that are able to band together to defend the world from alien invaders. The GEATHJERK Federation is attacking the planet once again, and it's up to you and your fellow heroes to stop them. The writing in The Wonderful 101 absolutely revels in its cheesy Saturday morning cartoon vibes, from the exaggerated Super Sentai/Power Rangers hero team to the goofy (and occasionally fourth-wall-breaking) jokes. The characters can be a bit trope-heavy at times, but even if the story beats feel rather familiar it's still a fun hero story and well told.
 
Like a lot of Platinum Games titles, The Wonderful 101 can seem completely chaotic when you first jump in. All of their games feature fast-paced action, crazy combat combos, and seem to require you to hold off on blinking for minutes at a time to ensure you don't mess up the timing on any attack, and that all describes this game to a tee. It's a wild ride and sometimes it feels like all you can do to keep your head above the water. In fact, The Wonderful 101 can feel particularly insane, even by the standards of similar action games, since you're controlling a group of tiny characters and sometimes the actual action can get lost in all of the colorful effects happening on screen. It's actually a bit of a problem at times, and the game's camera isn't always up to the task of ensuring everything happening on screen is clearly readable. Somehow it manages to ping-pong to both extremes—sometimes the camera is too far away and you'll lose track of your character, other times it's so close that you can't see nearby attacks coming in from off-screen. The indoors segments also make an awkward transition from the Wii U version of the game, where they played out on the Gamepad to give you an up-close view of the action. Now, limited to a single screen, the game uses a picture-in-picture technique which is serviceable but not ideal.
 
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And even more so than other Platinum Games titles, The Wonderful 101 has a pretty steep learning curve. It's difficult to learn how to play perfectly in any of their games—they're all essentially made to be played repeatedly, so that each playthrough further refines your skills—but a lot of best practices are particularly opaque in The Wonderful 101, such as learning when best to block and when best to dodge, or how to interrupt enemies or pull back and pick your moment to strike. The oftentimes relentless speed of combat in this game can make the learning process a real trial by fire. Once you do learn the ins and outs the combat can be a lot of fun, it's just a little discouraging to reach that point.
 
Plus the least interesting parts of the combat are undeniably the times where you're required to use a specific weapon or technique. One of the coolest things about the game—in fact, the whole hook of its combat system—is the way you can draw shapes to morph your Wonderful 100 heroes into different weapons, such as a fist, sword, or gun. Stringing together chains of attacks with different morphed weapons is flashy and fun, and smacking around colossal enemies with a giant fist made up of heroes linked together is pretty damn satisfying. The annoying parts of the game are when you have to use a specific weapon due to a specific enemy weakness, such as heavily armored enemies that need to be cracked open with the hammer before you can deal any real damage. Limiting you to a single weapon is a bit tedious, and I would argue that the hammer in particular is one of the least fun weapons to use, so the requirement feels like a real hassle.
 
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I have to address the change in controllers as well, since drawing shapes is quite different when you can only use the right control stick instead of drawing directly on the Gamepad's screen. The Switch can technically do either since you can use the touchscreen in handheld mode, but playing on the TV limits you to the control stick which can be rather obnoxious when it comes to the more complex shapes. Quickly drawing a circle or straight line with the control stick is no problem, but anything more complex had me missing the Gamepad quite a bit, where the combo allowed for both precision (with the touch screen) or speed (with the control stick). Obviously the solution is to just play in handheld mode, but it's limiting, and only further exacerbates some of the game's camera issues.
 
All that said, when you get down to the core gameplay of The Wonderful 101, it can be a blast. Combat is challenging (and occasionally feels rather punishing) but the fast-paced action is satisfying, and the game peppers in a lot of variety in the form of chases, shooter segments, and even a boss fight that uses Punch-Out mechanics. However, the pacing of the game does seem to drag at times. Each level of the game consists of several smaller missions, and sometimes these missions just go on and on. Breaking them up a bit more might have made the fifteen hour length feel a bit less plodding.
 
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The game's presentation remains a colorful blend of insane action scenes with a cartoony art style. It may not be the kind of action game you'd normally expect to see but there's no denying the big action set-pieces are dazzling. The soundtrack is also one of the few areas of the game to see a significant remastering as songs are remixed. The change might only be noticeable to die hard fans though as the game's original soundtrack was already a fast-paced, high energy musical accompaniment to the heroic action on screen.
 
The Wonderful 101: Remastered gives a niche action game a chance to reach a far wider audience, and in that regard it should be considered a success. The fact that it does little to touch up some of the more glaring annoyances of the original game, and arguably adds more with the slightly more restrictive control scheme, is a bit disappointing though. The wild action and flashy combat will definitely appeal to a certain type of fan, but anyone unfamiliar with the typical foibles of a Platinum Games' work may find it tedious, at least on any difficulty level higher than easy. For any of the millions of Switch owners that never played this on the Wii U though, The Wonderful 101: Remastered is definitely worth checking out—just be prepared for steep learning curves and slightly clunky cameras.
 
Rating: 7 out of 10 Wonderful Ones
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I still have to beat the original on Wii U, haha!  Too many games to play and too little time in those days for me. (still is to an extent)  A shame they couldn't figure out a better system with the drawing mechanic from the original as a means to compensate.  Unless I'm misremembering how quick the transitions were I feel like I remember being able to quickly switch from one power to the next by drawing it out and in that sense I can see why being limited to the control stick in an attempt to emulate that makes it clunky.

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5 hours ago, Kezay said:

I still have to beat the original on Wii U, haha!  Too many games to play and too little time in those days for me. (still is to an extent)  A shame they couldn't figure out a better system with the drawing mechanic from the original as a means to compensate.  Unless I'm misremembering how quick the transitions were I feel like I remember being able to quickly switch from one power to the next by drawing it out and in that sense I can see why being limited to the control stick in an attempt to emulate that makes it clunky.

 

In the end it's just a very tricky game to break away from the controller that it was built around. It's not as fully integrated into the core experience as, say, Nintendo Land, but it was built with a specific control scheme in mind, and that's really evident when playing the game on a different type of controller.

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