It's sad to say, but I Have gotten used to disappointment When it has to do with spiritual successors of legendary games made by their original founders. For every return as striking as Bloodstained, there seems to be a far less powerful effort including Mighty No. 9. Its character designs, cutscenes, and music are certainly charming, but allure alone isn't sufficient to make this half-baked platformer any less dull to really play.
When you are leaping around Balan Wonderworld's Simultaneously creative yet bland stages, it does not always feel like a whole trainwreck. Some of its barebones barrier classes can occasionally produce signs of what I could call pleasure, and it is not more than a complete bore the rest of the moment. But while you choose Balan Wonderworld as a whole, it sinks lower than the rudimentary platforming that barely props it up. From its misguided one-button control strategy, to its random transforming costume mechanic and the amounts that utilize them, to the half-hearted Chao Garden-like hub globe between these, it will get a great deal wrong -- and hardly any of what it becomes right will help to balance the scales.
This is usually the area where I would break down Balan Wonderworld's narrative for you, but there's not much to tell about the disgusting crap it requires for a plot. You play as either a boy who goes from happily breakdancing to being super bummed out in record time, or some girl whose housemaids whisper about her behind her back for no clear reason. Your choice means very little, though, because either way you are quickly abducted by a magical tophat guy called Balan and fell into a dream land full of weird birds and crystals or something? It's unclear, however that's all of the setup you'll get before it starts you via 12 distinct worlds (each with two levels, a boss, and an additional level once you overcome the narrative ) that are ordered around another gloomy individual, all of whom seem completely unrelated to anything that's going on.
I've enjoyed plenty of games with incomprehensible Stories, however, Balan Wonderworld's inanity is very disappointing when its animated cutscenes are so nicely made. They are full of life and energy, and can even tell some genuinely entertaining bite-sized stories about each planet's subject. Cutscenes chiefly play right before a boss to swiftly present the individual for this world and also a difficulty they're facing -- make it a boy attempting to construct a flying machine or a scuba diving woman whose dolphin friend maimed her and left her to perish -- but another cutscene right after the boss then immediately resolves it (don't worry, she and the dolphin are cool now). That pacing not just makes each character's narrative feel disjointed from everything else, such as your protagonist, so it means that the amounts you play before meeting them are devoid of context. In the event the very first cutscene had played at the beginning of earth, then perhaps I'd have connected with those characters as I played their reference-filled amounts, like a chess player's world being cluttered with chess pieces. However, by holding their entire story to the conclusion, Balan Wonderworld becomes little more than a mess of heterosexual but incoherent ideas.
Regardless of its narrative, the festering rot at the heart of Balan Wonderworld is your most bizarre decision to ensure it is a one-button match. Apart from using the joystick to maneuver along with the shoulder buttons to swap between ability-altering costumes, almost every other button on the control does the same thing. This concept is shot laughably too far by making them exactly the same from the menus too, forcing you to scroll to specific"back" buttons rather than just being able to hit on B/Circle, which could be amusing if it weren't so dumb. When you are not wearing a costume (which is extremely rare), the lone button is a straightforward and underwhelming jump, but each of Balan Wonderworld's more than 80 distinct outfits change that serve to something else. A jack-o-lantern costume makes the only action a hit attack, even though a sheep match lets you hover jump, and you will find a needlessly large quantity of different choices to encounter.
The idea of a one-button control scheme isn't an inherently Bad one, but Balan Wonderworld does not supply a single good reason behind why it restricts itself this manner. What it will do, however, is provide countless illustrations for why it should not have -- most critically, it prevents certain costumes from doing that most basic of platforming activities: jump. Some suits operate good with a single button, especially the jumping-focused ones (who would have guessed?) , but others range from perplexing to downright awful consequently. Matters like a clown which can just jump by slowly charging up an annoyingly little explosion, or even a flower that can extend up a uselessly short distance. If a costume uses its own button to strike then chances are you can not leap at all while wearing it, while some may still let you leap but at the cost of making their ability activate just when you are standing still -- or worse, entirely at random. Why in Wonderworld is the better option?
Balan Wonderworld is not necessarily an awful platformer, but it is a consistently Dull one. It's full of charming character designs along with the occasional Hint of a smart concept, but its insistence on being a one-button game With dozens of needlessly overlapping abilities that are thrown aside As fast as they are introduced rots it into the core. It is a wreck of Undercooked concepts and clunky mechanics which slow it to a crawl, and It seems to take inspiration from greater matches without correctly Recapturing what really makes them fun. Its platforming never evolves Beyond the most fundamental potential hurdles it can throw at you, but it is The basically flawed decisions behind that mediocrity that take Balan Wonderworld from unamusing to bad.