Balan wonderworld controls12/25/2022 But by holding their whole story to the end, Balan Wonderworld becomes little more than a jumble of endearing but incoherent ideas. If the first cutscene had played at the start of the world, then maybe I would have connected with those characters as I played through their reference-filled levels, like a chess player’s world being littered with chess pieces. That pacing not only makes each character’s story feel disjointed from everything else, including your protagonist, it means the levels you play before meeting them are devoid of context. Cutscenes primarily play right before a boss to quickly introduce the person for that world and a problem they are facing – be it a boy trying to build a flying machine or a scuba diving girl whose dolphin friend maimed her and left her to die – but a second cutscene right after the boss then immediately resolves it (don’t worry, she and the dolphin are cool now). They’re full of life and energy, and can even tell a few genuinely entertaining bite-sized stories about each world’s subject. I’ve enjoyed plenty of games with incomprehensible stories, but Balan Wonderworld’s inanity is particularly disappointing when its animated cutscenes are so well made. Your choice means very little, though, because either way you are quickly abducted by a magical tophat man named Balan and dropped into a dream land full of weird birds and crystals or something? It’s unclear, but that’s all the setup you’ll get before it starts parading you through 12 different worlds (each with just two levels, a boss, and an extra level once you beat the story) that are each structured around another sad person, all of whom seem completely unrelated to anything that’s going on. You play as either a boy who goes from happily breakdancing to being super bummed out in record time, or a girl whose housemaids whisper about her behind her back for no apparent reason. This is usually the part where I’d break down Balan Wonderworld’s story for you, but there’s not much to tell about the unexplained nonsense it calls a plot. From its misguided one-button control scheme, to its haphazard transforming costume mechanic and the levels that use them, to the half-hearted Chao Garden-like hub world between them, it gets a lot wrong – and very little of what it gets right helps to balance the scales. But when you take Balan Wonderworld as a whole, it sinks lower than the rudimentary platforming that barely props it up. Some of its barebones obstacle courses can occasionally produce hints of what I might call fun, and it’s not much more than a total bore the rest of the time. When you’re hopping around Balan Wonderworld’s simultaneously imaginative yet bland stages, it doesn’t necessarily feel like a total trainwreck. Its character designs, cutscenes, and music are certainly charming, but charm alone isn’t enough to make this half-baked platformer any less boring to actually play. So, I’m disappointed but not surprised to see that Balan Wonderworld, the latest 3D platformer from Sonic the Hedgehog co-creators Yuji Naka and Naoto Ohshima, is a fundamentally flawed shadow of its predecessors. For every return as impressive as Bloodstained, there seems to be a far less successful attempt like Mighty No. It’s sad to say, but I’ve gotten used to disappointment when it comes to spiritual successors of iconic games made by their original creators.
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