The Wonderful 101

When the Wonderful 101 manages to restrain its own chaos and make room for its myriad of ideas, it’s a joyous experience. Unfortunately it trips itself and stumbles over obvious issues that should have been handled more elegantly. A nice superhero adventure that could have been much better.

Often too frantic and awfully repetitive, but the Platinum in its veins shines through. [Nov 2013, p.75]

The Wonderful 101 is a game that requires patience, skill, a willingness to learn and an almost Zen-like ability to overlook its shortcomings. But if you can get there - if you can make peace with this game, and enjoy it for what it does right instead of the things it does wrong - it really can be something wonderful.

Between unlocking all the characters, getting every collectible and missions to complete, The Wonderful 101 gives more than enough reason for you a reason to dust off your Wii U or simply pick one up a little early to experience it.

The Wonderful 101 is my newest love/hate game. It does so much new and, well wonderful that I could never stay mad at it. Sadly it wasn’t the system-seller I had hoped it would be when it was announced.

It's brilliantly wacky and unique, with awesome basic gameplay, but The Wonderful 101 doesn't quite live up to its potential.

The controls may be cumbersome, and the pacing may be faulty, but it's a romp worth sticking with. With its superpowered premise, memorable characters, and fascinating gameplay gimmick, The Wonderful 101 is a theatrical blockbuster that's perfect for Wii U.

A horrendous learning curve, poor story flow, and shoddy controls take away from what could have been a superstar new IP for Nintendo. Instead, only the players who can look past the bugs and pacing problems will be satisfied in the end.

Not the best moment for Platinum Games, but still a unique "brawler" experience that you won't find anywhere else.

The Wonderful 101 is a good game, marred by insisting on repeating both enemies, inside jokes and half-baked variations. The combat system works excellent, and is enough to make sure the game thrives.

The beautiful and highly original The Wonderful 101 is severely handicapped by questionable control choices. Which is very unfortunate, because this could have been an instant classic. Everything else is just pure gold.

Insurmountable problems with the controls stop this from being another Platinum classic but it’s still a fun game, overflowing with charm and wonderfully silly action.

The Wonderful 101 is a good game … at times. Once I got the hang of its combo system, the battles were nearly always exciting and challenging, but Platinum’s Wii U debut has too much filler and a busted camera.

Despite being the prettiest game on the Wii U that has plenty of charm, poor gameplay design and frequently unnecessary spikes in difficulty make this a game that will only appeal to the most die hard of Platinum fans. Not so wonderful, after all.

The Wonderful 101 isn't a good surprise. Doomed buy very repetitive gameplay, the good ideas the game carries are drown into the mass, and can't make you forget about the faults. It's quite sad because Platinum Games's title is one of the few to take the risk of actually using the console's gamepad in another way than displaying a loadout or a map (at least sometimes). The design is quite close to Viewtiful Joe and is one of the strong points of the games, but here too, the limited power of Nintendo's console and the light work done to graphics from the Japanese studio are seriously holding back the potential of the artistic lead. In brief, we're far away from a System-seller game.

The Wonderful 101 bursts with charm, humour and style. It is very easy to care for the characters and their universe. But frequent trouble with the controls breaks the tempo far too often. Something that also racks up the challenge unnecessarily high in an already hard game. But at the same time the battle system is a joy, if hard to master. It’s a very good game with some rough edges that feels very well needed on the Nintendo Wii U.

I wanted to like this game more. It’s charming, technically competent but ultimately I could not get past it’s shortcomings to consider it much more than an average game.

How do you not love a game that wants so desperately to delight? Well, you fight the camera through the whole scene. You summon the wrong weapon at a climactic moment. You hear the umpteenth joke fall flat. And so on.

So much of it is so immensely charming, loveable and inventive that it’s hard to stay mad for too long. You just always feel hamstrung in your ability to extract the full potential out of a conceivably phenomenal game. You want to love it, you do love it, but not its whole, and that’s incredibly disheartening.

The Wonderful 101 draws on ideas from Kamiya’s previous games – Viewtiful Joe’s cartoonish charm, Okami’s brushstroke mechanic, Bayonetta’s setpieces – but in concert they’re messy, hamstrung by cluttered visual design and a clumsy central mechanic. Stretched over a large frame, they wear thin quickly. There’s a good game in here, but it’s smothered by the need to conform to its host platform’s feature set, and a distorted concept of value for money.

With Nintendo's Pikmin 3 having just demonstrated such mastery of both game design and the Wii U hardware, it’s disappointing to see such a superficially similar yet confused and messy game following it mere weeks later.