Game #1161: Balan Wonderworld

 Welcome to a land full of wonder and disappointment.

 As per usual with these cases, I knew Balan Wonderworld was bad and I knew the Switch version was the worst, however, I love the Switch and the game seemed as if it could appeal to me. I mean, I know I can enjoy bad games, and this one looked so charming, so Dreamcast-y and so 90s.... But nope, Balan's Wornderworld is as bad as they say.

 This is a 3-D platformer built around using costumes. There are only two actions in the game: Movement and Action. The Action depends on what costume you are wearing. Yes, this means that you could potentially get stuck with no ways to jump. In a platforming game. You can carry up to three costumes with you at any time, if you get hit you lose the costume, and if you grab a fourth costume the one on the third slot at the moment you pick up the fourth will go into your stocks. Yes, stocking costumes is a thing. And of course it's needlessly complicated. You need to find a costume crystal which you can only open with a key, keys that are lying next to the crystal itself most of the time, making you wonder why even add the extra step of requiring a key. And you'll probably want to stock up on spare costumes, as you might need them in another world. So starts the bore of having to wait for both key and crystals to respawn so that you can stock up on a few of them. And be careful! If by mistake you end up with two of the same costume in your three-slot inventory the costume crystal for that costume won't respawn again. Wonderful.

 And it is an interesting idea, having different costumes with different abilities, the game having a grand total of 80... except that there are very few functions all in all. There's this guy that after a jump can create a bubble you can float for a short while on... but then you get the kitty costume that is basically the same, allowing you to step a few times on the air. But then you get the frost fairy that lets you step on the air WHILE gaining air. This is also the best non-secret costume in the game. There are a few  "stop moving to shoot" costumes, others that you can just shoot by pressing a button. There's the Medusa costume that lets you swim on water currents... but then the eel one lets you swim on them BUT also jump from them. So plenty of costumes make other costumes obsolete, which is just ridiculous. Don't even let me get started on the idiotic costumes that trigger their abilities 'when they feel like it'. Yes, that is a thing.

 Fixing this entire thing would've been really easy. First of all, every costume would be able to jump at the bare minimum, and then, maybe, unlock new abilities for these smaller set of costumes. Also, you get a proper health bar, you don't lose costumes so you don't have to grind for spares. Voila! The game is now much more enjoyable. 

 The game is made up of 12 worlds with 2 stages and a boss each. Each stage has a certain number of Golden Balan Statues that you need to collect, and you unlock more worlds as you get more statues, but you only need about 100 of them to unlock the final boss. I do appreciate that there's a certain freedom in getting these statues, as sometimes you can use other costumes than the ones the game expects you to use in order to collect them. On the other hand, the game goes overboard with 'Balan Encounter' statues that are sets of up to SEVEN QTES, and you need to get the BEST timing on every QTE in order to get the statue. Miss one and not only do you have to sit through the entire needlessly lengthy sequence, but you can't retry it unless you exit the stage. And the latter worlds are downright mean, as stages can have up to three of these. If you get the timing wrong early on? Now you have to sit through the boring sequence. get it wrong on the final input? Now you wasted you time. These are so, sooooo bad.

 Unlike most people... I actually appreciated the voiceless, textless story and cutscenes. While there's this Novel that explains everything, I enjoy having a certain leeway in how the player can interpret these scenes. And having some mystery to what it is happening certainly helps. Every boss fight is super creative, and if you fight them using costumes you found in their world you can get a few bonus golden statues. But the best part about them is that every fight ends with a dance number between your character and the NPC's world you just visited. It comes out of nowhere, it's super cheesy and I LOVED IT.

 That said, the final boss is quite lengthy and annoying, and for whatever reason it killed me even though I had costumes to spare on my last attempt so I just gave up. Nah, the game isn't much fun, I wasn't gonna waste any more time on it.

 Lastly, let's go over the Switch-exclusive features. Horrible graphics, terrible performance and quite a few graphical bugs that overlay weird red/blue colors over the screen. The latter usually went away after moving the camera a bit, but still..

 I won't say that I hated it, because I didn't. I'll admit, I had some semblance of fun when it came to finding and collecting Balam Statues... But, man, the frankly idiotic design choices far outweigh every positive the game has. This game is a disaster, and it's so disappointing because I can feel the same charm in it as I found in the much superior Billy Hatcher. I don't know what happened or how Yuji Naka could err this badly. That said, I'm sure it would've been more fun on the other consoles.

 3.0