So I've been playing through The Wonderful 101 this past week and the whole time I've wanted to make a thread about it, because I rarely feel this conflicted about a game.
I mean, I absolutely love it. The visual design; the smoothness of the action; the silly saturday morning cartoon capers; the pervasive attention to minute detail; the constant and astonishing set-pieces - this is a dream game. The amount of sweat and love that went into this game is incredible, and it's a pleasure to play an old school game that feels like it was crafted out of nothing but love for videogames. I'm so happy Gaf and elsewhere turned me onto this game, because it really is right down my alley.
There's only one problem: The game is fucking terrible.
I realise I might have just lost a lot of you there, but that's my unavoidable conclusion at this stage. Okay, maybe not terrible. But mediocre. Medicore at best. I have a boss battle paused right now for the 3rd time, and the first two I quit because I was just too bored and frustrated to continue. I've never found myself browsing Gaf during a game as much as this one, and eventually you have to admit to yourself that you just aren't enjoying playing the game at all, and are actively trying to avoid playing it. If you really desperately don't want to keep playing a game, isn't that a sign of a terrible game?
So, what are the game's problems? It has tons, but let's try to go through them in a logical way so that this doesn't seem like a clickbait post:
1. The core gameplay / action
There are tons of problems here, tons, but the main one (and 90% of my problem with the game) is blindingly obvious from the off: It's impossible to see exactly where your group leader is and what he's doing. He's far too small on a screen filled with action to be sure of where he is in 3D space at any time, and the problem is doubled when he's in the air / jumping. The fact that he is surrounded by a group of 30-100 other tiny characters, a group that is of variable size and shape makes it impossible to pin down where your particular guy is half the time. When you get hit, you're never quite sure you'll be hit until you see your guy go flying.
This is the core thing that makes the game a drag to play. I'm no expert at character action games, in fact I probably suck. But I made it through Bayonetta and MGS Rising without any problems or many deaths, and even tried a couple of levels on hard in those games and had tons of fun. Here, I get hit constantly. I don't feel like I can function correctly, I don't feel like I'm properly controlling the game. I initially thought that after a few levels the game would start to make sense. The mechanics themselves did, but my sense of my avatar's position never got better - in fact, as the levels became crazier and the camera angles shifted and more enemies filled the screen, it actually became harder and harder to tell where I was. Countless deaths and even ledge falls have been caused by this.
This is a different problem to other character action games. There, you feel overwhelmed by enemies' attacks: their patterns might be hard to read, they might be too fast, you might not be sure what move is the right one to use against them. This is the point of the genre. That is the challenge you're looking for. Here, the problem is that I can't read what's going on at least 50% of the time. I can figure out the enemy patterns and what I need to do, I'm just not sure exactly where I am relative to an enemy so I can 't do it. That's not the point of the genre, and it's not fun.
Not only that, but there are far too many game systems layered on top of each other here. The worst is the battery system. This means that if you want to draw a new weapon, block or dodge, you need battery. In practice, this means that you will often find yourself running around an arena, unable to attack or defend until your battery recharges a sufficient amount. In a game with this much going on already, this isn't really acceptable, or necessary. How does this restriction on your core abilities make the game better?
The item system is tucked away on the gamepad and never explained. Good luck figuring out which of those un-named icons does what in the heat of battle! Good luck surviving for a single second if you take your eyes off the main screen! Good luck steering a missile (if you can figure out how to get them or what they're for) into one of your nimble opponents!
Another huge mistake is making you have to collect your men every time you get hit. This leads to a constant loop of getting hit, collecting your men, getting hit, collecting your men, and so on. It's not fun. Surely the game designers expected players to get hit at least some of the time, right? Then why make such a frustrating ordeal out of it? Why make it so that you are so hamstrung when you only have half your team with you?
What really bothers me about all of this is that in the non-campaign trial missions, where you tend to be in a simple, open, purple room, the core combat systems absolutely shine. Each weapon is distinct and feels fantastic, as tactile and fun as you'd expect from Platinum. Drawing them out is great. Getting an enemy stunned and tossing it in the air for a combo is just an awesome feeling. It's just a shame that in practice in real levels it seems impossible to use these systems consistently. An editor would have been great to just pare back the idea into only the best and more important ones. To strip out the ridiculous amount of different overlying systems you have to struggle with and leave just the best part of the game (the combat) intact.
2. The encounter design
This game is best when it's at its simplest. When there's just an open, visually clean street filled with big and small enemies to move through and kill. The action is readable, containable and perfectly fun at these moments, yet still challenging. Drawing your weapons works perfectly, the action is smooth, combos feel good - all of that stuff works when the game is operating at a simple level. The problem is that this lasts for all of 5 minutes before the game decides that throwing hordes of enemies at you in rapidly destructing levels would be the best way to proceed.
I love the fact that the game wants to show you something new every five minutes. I love that, and my jaw has dropped multiple times as the street I was on caved away or I slingshotted onto the back of a jet plane or what have you. But it's not conducive to the implementation of the action at hand in the slightest. It doesn't go well with their core mechanics.
Secondly, the way enemies are thrown at you is terrible. Single large enemies are difficult but can be fun. They have an extremely annoying habit of attacking right as you're finished drawing a weapon but you can manage them, because you only need to read them and you at the same time. But the game constantly throws more than you can handle at you, seemingly intentionally.
A perfect example is the turtles. This is an enemy you've never seen before. You've just gotten a new weapon you will obviously need to use to destroy it. Drawing said weapon is tricky at first, trickier than the old ones, but manageable. Add all of this together and good game design would be one turtle on its own, so you get used to drawing the new weapon while you learn the attacks and weaknesses of the turtle.
But no. The game throws two turtles at you. So whenever you get close to one, the other one clips its neck through its friend, knocking you away and scattering your men. You then need to drawn the sickle again, draining your battery. Soon your battery is gone. On top of this, the general difficulties in judging depth due to the camera angles make for one of the most frustrating experiences I've ever had. It's obvious you need to block a turtle's 'stomp', flip the turtle over and kill it. But because of the difficulties in telling where you are, the fact that there are two large enemies in a small-ish space with long range attacks that can clip through one another means you simply spend 30 minutes being hit, being shocked that you just got hit considering where you were, gathering men, getting one or two small shots in and dying until you prevail. This describes one half of my experience with the Wonderful 101 perfectly. It just hasn't been a fun time at all. It's a slog, a tired zerg rush of getting hit and doing chip damage while wishing you could read the action better.
All of this is without mentioning the utterly terrible platforming parts. Guys, your game isn't Mario Galaxy. Stop with the platforming. Please. Stop.
3. The non-core gameplay systems / unlockables etc
So I've established that the game throws more at you than you can reasonably decipher, read or handle. But what's really frustrating is that it holds back a whole bunch of tools as unlockables that would make things easier on you. In other games this is acceptable - as the difficulty ramps up you gain access to new powers to keep things fair. Here, much of what is locked feels like essential stuff that should be part of the base gameplay.
In particular, things like the faster draw speed or ability to hold A to increase weapon size would have massively increased my enjoyment of the game so far. Putting the block and dodge behind the in-game paywall rather than in a tutorial as the base mechanics is just bizarre as well.
I'll add the total lack of a functional tutorial in here as well. You've made a hardcore action game with a visual exterior that will obviously attract kids and other not-so-hardcore players. Would it actually kill you to teach these people how to play the game? The opening level is a nightmare of invisible walls, loose controls, bad explanations and horrible audio mix. The opening 30 minutes of a game are the most important. In their rush to impress people, Platinum absolutely butchered the opening of this game, and the repercussions are felt throughout the rest of the adventure.
4. The mini-games / genre switches
The game has a solid action system at its core. It's let down by the camera and other issues I've mentioned, but it's solid. Why then is the game so insistent on taking you way from the base action Platinum have worked so hard to craft only to put you into poorly designed, terribly explained out-of-genre sections? (What I mean by that is turret shooting sections, rail jumping sections, flying sections, basically broken hang-gliding sections etc).
This stuff feels like it comprises about a third of the game, and it's sadly uniformly garbage. Again, an editor would have been great here. "I love your passion, guys, but this does not make the game better and needs to be cut." They desperately needed someone to say this to them.
5. The tone / story
I won't go into this too much because this stuff is far more subjective than the rest and less interesting to debate but what starts as a fun, whimsical adventure becomes one-note and dull a couple of hours in. The female characters were what swayed me, their portrayal is borderline sexist at best, and more importantly just tiresome and cringeworthy. The jokes start to fall flat. I can only watch Blue punch Green after an off hand comment so many times before it loses its charm. I can only watch Pink act like a moronic valley girl so many times, you know?
Conclusion
I could go on, and I guess maybe I should leave some points for the replies. All I know is that I'm looking at the pause screen here as my guy has fallen off the edge of this platform while fighting a boss for the third time in a row, and I'm really thinking I'm done with this game. Maybe someone could tell me how far Operation 005 is from the end? Feels like I'm only halfway there.
Roll on Bayonetta 2, and mark this one down as a beautiful failed experiment. God bless you Platinum, it was an incredible idea, and you went for it with everything you had. It just didn't come off properly. I won't hold it against you.
I mean, I absolutely love it. The visual design; the smoothness of the action; the silly saturday morning cartoon capers; the pervasive attention to minute detail; the constant and astonishing set-pieces - this is a dream game. The amount of sweat and love that went into this game is incredible, and it's a pleasure to play an old school game that feels like it was crafted out of nothing but love for videogames. I'm so happy Gaf and elsewhere turned me onto this game, because it really is right down my alley.
There's only one problem: The game is fucking terrible.
I realise I might have just lost a lot of you there, but that's my unavoidable conclusion at this stage. Okay, maybe not terrible. But mediocre. Medicore at best. I have a boss battle paused right now for the 3rd time, and the first two I quit because I was just too bored and frustrated to continue. I've never found myself browsing Gaf during a game as much as this one, and eventually you have to admit to yourself that you just aren't enjoying playing the game at all, and are actively trying to avoid playing it. If you really desperately don't want to keep playing a game, isn't that a sign of a terrible game?
So, what are the game's problems? It has tons, but let's try to go through them in a logical way so that this doesn't seem like a clickbait post:
1. The core gameplay / action
There are tons of problems here, tons, but the main one (and 90% of my problem with the game) is blindingly obvious from the off: It's impossible to see exactly where your group leader is and what he's doing. He's far too small on a screen filled with action to be sure of where he is in 3D space at any time, and the problem is doubled when he's in the air / jumping. The fact that he is surrounded by a group of 30-100 other tiny characters, a group that is of variable size and shape makes it impossible to pin down where your particular guy is half the time. When you get hit, you're never quite sure you'll be hit until you see your guy go flying.
This is the core thing that makes the game a drag to play. I'm no expert at character action games, in fact I probably suck. But I made it through Bayonetta and MGS Rising without any problems or many deaths, and even tried a couple of levels on hard in those games and had tons of fun. Here, I get hit constantly. I don't feel like I can function correctly, I don't feel like I'm properly controlling the game. I initially thought that after a few levels the game would start to make sense. The mechanics themselves did, but my sense of my avatar's position never got better - in fact, as the levels became crazier and the camera angles shifted and more enemies filled the screen, it actually became harder and harder to tell where I was. Countless deaths and even ledge falls have been caused by this.
This is a different problem to other character action games. There, you feel overwhelmed by enemies' attacks: their patterns might be hard to read, they might be too fast, you might not be sure what move is the right one to use against them. This is the point of the genre. That is the challenge you're looking for. Here, the problem is that I can't read what's going on at least 50% of the time. I can figure out the enemy patterns and what I need to do, I'm just not sure exactly where I am relative to an enemy so I can 't do it. That's not the point of the genre, and it's not fun.
Not only that, but there are far too many game systems layered on top of each other here. The worst is the battery system. This means that if you want to draw a new weapon, block or dodge, you need battery. In practice, this means that you will often find yourself running around an arena, unable to attack or defend until your battery recharges a sufficient amount. In a game with this much going on already, this isn't really acceptable, or necessary. How does this restriction on your core abilities make the game better?
The item system is tucked away on the gamepad and never explained. Good luck figuring out which of those un-named icons does what in the heat of battle! Good luck surviving for a single second if you take your eyes off the main screen! Good luck steering a missile (if you can figure out how to get them or what they're for) into one of your nimble opponents!
Another huge mistake is making you have to collect your men every time you get hit. This leads to a constant loop of getting hit, collecting your men, getting hit, collecting your men, and so on. It's not fun. Surely the game designers expected players to get hit at least some of the time, right? Then why make such a frustrating ordeal out of it? Why make it so that you are so hamstrung when you only have half your team with you?
What really bothers me about all of this is that in the non-campaign trial missions, where you tend to be in a simple, open, purple room, the core combat systems absolutely shine. Each weapon is distinct and feels fantastic, as tactile and fun as you'd expect from Platinum. Drawing them out is great. Getting an enemy stunned and tossing it in the air for a combo is just an awesome feeling. It's just a shame that in practice in real levels it seems impossible to use these systems consistently. An editor would have been great to just pare back the idea into only the best and more important ones. To strip out the ridiculous amount of different overlying systems you have to struggle with and leave just the best part of the game (the combat) intact.
2. The encounter design
This game is best when it's at its simplest. When there's just an open, visually clean street filled with big and small enemies to move through and kill. The action is readable, containable and perfectly fun at these moments, yet still challenging. Drawing your weapons works perfectly, the action is smooth, combos feel good - all of that stuff works when the game is operating at a simple level. The problem is that this lasts for all of 5 minutes before the game decides that throwing hordes of enemies at you in rapidly destructing levels would be the best way to proceed.
I love the fact that the game wants to show you something new every five minutes. I love that, and my jaw has dropped multiple times as the street I was on caved away or I slingshotted onto the back of a jet plane or what have you. But it's not conducive to the implementation of the action at hand in the slightest. It doesn't go well with their core mechanics.
Secondly, the way enemies are thrown at you is terrible. Single large enemies are difficult but can be fun. They have an extremely annoying habit of attacking right as you're finished drawing a weapon but you can manage them, because you only need to read them and you at the same time. But the game constantly throws more than you can handle at you, seemingly intentionally.
A perfect example is the turtles. This is an enemy you've never seen before. You've just gotten a new weapon you will obviously need to use to destroy it. Drawing said weapon is tricky at first, trickier than the old ones, but manageable. Add all of this together and good game design would be one turtle on its own, so you get used to drawing the new weapon while you learn the attacks and weaknesses of the turtle.
But no. The game throws two turtles at you. So whenever you get close to one, the other one clips its neck through its friend, knocking you away and scattering your men. You then need to drawn the sickle again, draining your battery. Soon your battery is gone. On top of this, the general difficulties in judging depth due to the camera angles make for one of the most frustrating experiences I've ever had. It's obvious you need to block a turtle's 'stomp', flip the turtle over and kill it. But because of the difficulties in telling where you are, the fact that there are two large enemies in a small-ish space with long range attacks that can clip through one another means you simply spend 30 minutes being hit, being shocked that you just got hit considering where you were, gathering men, getting one or two small shots in and dying until you prevail. This describes one half of my experience with the Wonderful 101 perfectly. It just hasn't been a fun time at all. It's a slog, a tired zerg rush of getting hit and doing chip damage while wishing you could read the action better.
All of this is without mentioning the utterly terrible platforming parts. Guys, your game isn't Mario Galaxy. Stop with the platforming. Please. Stop.
3. The non-core gameplay systems / unlockables etc
So I've established that the game throws more at you than you can reasonably decipher, read or handle. But what's really frustrating is that it holds back a whole bunch of tools as unlockables that would make things easier on you. In other games this is acceptable - as the difficulty ramps up you gain access to new powers to keep things fair. Here, much of what is locked feels like essential stuff that should be part of the base gameplay.
In particular, things like the faster draw speed or ability to hold A to increase weapon size would have massively increased my enjoyment of the game so far. Putting the block and dodge behind the in-game paywall rather than in a tutorial as the base mechanics is just bizarre as well.
I'll add the total lack of a functional tutorial in here as well. You've made a hardcore action game with a visual exterior that will obviously attract kids and other not-so-hardcore players. Would it actually kill you to teach these people how to play the game? The opening level is a nightmare of invisible walls, loose controls, bad explanations and horrible audio mix. The opening 30 minutes of a game are the most important. In their rush to impress people, Platinum absolutely butchered the opening of this game, and the repercussions are felt throughout the rest of the adventure.
4. The mini-games / genre switches
The game has a solid action system at its core. It's let down by the camera and other issues I've mentioned, but it's solid. Why then is the game so insistent on taking you way from the base action Platinum have worked so hard to craft only to put you into poorly designed, terribly explained out-of-genre sections? (What I mean by that is turret shooting sections, rail jumping sections, flying sections, basically broken hang-gliding sections etc).
This stuff feels like it comprises about a third of the game, and it's sadly uniformly garbage. Again, an editor would have been great here. "I love your passion, guys, but this does not make the game better and needs to be cut." They desperately needed someone to say this to them.
5. The tone / story
I won't go into this too much because this stuff is far more subjective than the rest and less interesting to debate but what starts as a fun, whimsical adventure becomes one-note and dull a couple of hours in. The female characters were what swayed me, their portrayal is borderline sexist at best, and more importantly just tiresome and cringeworthy. The jokes start to fall flat. I can only watch Blue punch Green after an off hand comment so many times before it loses its charm. I can only watch Pink act like a moronic valley girl so many times, you know?
Conclusion
I could go on, and I guess maybe I should leave some points for the replies. All I know is that I'm looking at the pause screen here as my guy has fallen off the edge of this platform while fighting a boss for the third time in a row, and I'm really thinking I'm done with this game. Maybe someone could tell me how far Operation 005 is from the end? Feels like I'm only halfway there.
Roll on Bayonetta 2, and mark this one down as a beautiful failed experiment. God bless you Platinum, it was an incredible idea, and you went for it with everything you had. It just didn't come off properly. I won't hold it against you.
inb4 "tldr: it was too hard" lol