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. For every return as impressive as Bloodstained, there seems to be a far less successful attempt like Mighty No. 9. 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. 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.
When you’re hopping around Balan Wonderworld’s simultaneously imaginative yet bland stages, it doesn’t necessarily feel like a total trainwreck. 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. But when you take Balan Wonderworld as a whole, it sinks lower than the rudimentary platforming that barely props it up. 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.
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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. 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. 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.
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. They’re full of life and energy, and can even tell a few genuinely entertaining bite-sized stories about each world’s subject. 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). 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. 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. But by holding their whole story to the end, Balan Wonderworld becomes little more than a jumble of endearing but incoherent ideas.
Control Chaos
Regardless of its story, the festering rot at the heart of Balan Wonderworld is the inexplicable decision to make it a one-button game. Apart from using the joystick to move and the shoulder buttons to swap between ability-altering costumes, nearly every other button on the controller does the same thing. That concept is taken laughably too far by making them the same in the menus too, forcing you to scroll to specific “back” buttons rather than just being able to hit B/Circle, which would be hilarious if it weren’t so stupid. When you’re not wearing a costume (which is extremely rare), your lone button is a simple and underwhelming jump, but each of Balan Wonderworld’s more than 80 different outfits change that function to something else. A jack-o-lantern costume makes your sole action a punch attack, while a sheep suit lets you hover jump, and there are a needlessly large number of other options to stumble across.
The idea of a one-button control scheme isn’t an inherently bad one, but Balan Wonderworld doesn’t provide a single good reason for why it restricts itself this way. What it does do, however, is provide innumerable examples for why it shouldn’t have – most critically, it prevents certain costumes from performing that most basic of platforming tasks: jump. Some suits work fine with one button, particularly the jumping-focused ones (who would have guessed?), but others range from perplexing to downright awful as a result. Things like a clown that can only jump by slowly charging up an annoyingly small explosion, or a flower that can stretch up a uselessly short distance. If a costume uses its button to attack then odds are you can’t jump at all while wearing it, while others might still let you jump but at the cost of making their ability activate only when you’re standing still – or worse, entirely at random. Why in Wonderworld is that the better option?
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Player control is sacrificed for unnecessary simplicity again and again: a robot costume can shoot lasers only if you don’t move at all while a mantis suit can throw blades but not make it up a one-foot ledge, and neither of them make the frequently ignorable enemies any less dull to fight. And then there’s the truly baffling Box Fox, which Balan Wonderworld’s own tooltip explains will turn you into a plain cube “when it feels like it.” That’s genuinely unbelievable when the alternative would have just been to enable even a single extra button, and can make already bland costume abilities annoying or flatout unusable. And while you can carry three costumes at once and simply run around in a more maneuverable one most of the time, swapping between them is accompanied by an aggravatingly slow animation that makes doing so in a pinch a frantic affair.
Because getting hit means you lose that costume entirely, I even found myself in a few situations where taking damage sometimes meant not having the one ability I needed to progress, or potentially not being able to jump at all. That leaves you with no option but to tediously backtrack and grab another copy of the outfit you need. Costumes are contained in purple gems that require a key to unlock, but that’s yet another mechanic that’s so pointless it’s silly. Keys are almost always just a few steps away from the gems themselves, occasionally tucked around a nearby corner or behind a box to provide all the challenge and excitement of playing hide and seek with a four-year-old. Collecting them is always just added friction in a game full of it.
The visual variety of costumes is, at least, decently impressive, with a particular favorite of mine being a giant rolling BB-8 style panda. But mechanically, there’s an immense amount of overlap that can cause new obstacles to be monotonously similar to old ones – there are a half dozen different ways to hover in the air, multiple fighters that fill the same role, and countless options to destroy breakable blocks. While “over 80 different costumes!” might be a catchy bullet point for the back of its $60 box, the reality is Balan Wonderworld would have been a significantly better platformer if it only had 10 that it actually took proper advantage of.
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As is, each world has about five costumes it introduces, makes use of for some extremely basic platforming, and then throws away just as fast. Balan Wonderworld’s levels are mostly linear, but they ignore all the platforming fundamentals of introducing the basics of a mechanic and then building more interesting or challenging sections on top of it as you progress. Each stage seems like a mock-up of how a costume could be used in some better thought-out game we don’t get to play. Maybe the most glaring example of this is a costume that lets you summon a ladder on specific ladder spots (exciting, right?). It’s used to very simply get over some walls right after you get it and then basically never again, so why does it exist at all? Not all of them are quite that dry, with mildly more entertaining suits sending you bouncing between balloons or floating along air currents. But they never evolve past the lack of complexity found in the first few levels, leaving me bored and unengaged for the roughly nine hours it took to reach the credits.