It’s an Action Game From Kamiya
It’s safe to assume that you know The Wonderful 101’s director, Hideki Kamiya, is famous for making the most ridiculous and entertaining action games out there. He has directed the production of fantastic games like Bayonetta, Devil May Cry, and Viewtiful Joe.
This man has a wonderful track record of putting out stellar stylish action games. They’re not always multi-million sellers, but his titles typically receive favorable scores and awards from numerous publications.
Nobody is perfect, but Kamiya’s games have delivered incredibly fun experiences more times than they have faltered. If you’ve ever played one of his games or you’re just familiar with them, then The Wonderful 101 will blow you away.
A Wonderful Soundtrack
The orchestrated music in The Wonderful 101 is downright unforgettable. It’s a perfect mix of upbeat and triumphant that you would expect from a game that’s all about superheroes.
The pieces are well-written and have memorable themes and melodies that carry throughout the soundtrack. This gives the whole soundtrack a feeling of cohesion that lets you know in the first phrase or two of any song that you’re playing The Wonderful 101.
The triumphant tone in the soundtrack is great and the song that lays that foundation is The Won-Stoppable Wonderful 101. It’s gloriously cheesy and will be stuck in your head for eternity. This one track encapsulates the camp of the game in a single song.
Memorable Characters
I’m not gonna act like the writing for The Wonderful 101 is worthy of a Nobel Prize in writing or anything, but it helps build an entertaining cast of characters.
Each of the wonderful ones can be set into a defined trope like the fearless leader, strong but silent, the loose cannon or femme fatale just to name a few. Even though they’re so easy to put into a box, each character is unabashedly themself all the time.
It makes sense to do this in a game like The Wonderful 101 since there are so many characters that join your team. This helps to make each wonderful one feel special and memorable in their own ways.
Hilariously Campy
I touched on this earlier, but this game is just superhero camp bottled up and put into video game form. Think about how annoyingly optimistic Captain America can be, then turn that up a few notches and you get Wonder-Red.
While that may sound unbearable, everything in this game is just so over-the-top that it comes back around the other side of obnoxious and ends up being quite hilarious.
The characters, the music and the story all contain tropes of the superhero genre. These qualities meld together into something that’s a campy game about heroes while also being a legitimately great superhero action game.
Great Battle System
If we had you at Kamiya, then you probably expected that The Wonderful 101 would have a great battle system. Think isometric Okami, but instead of a controlling a wolf god you’re playing as a mob of 101 superheroes.
I compare it to Okami because you draw out shapes to create your attacks, but in this game the shapes you draw become your weapons instead. The Wonderful Ones link their bodies together and form massive swords, guns, fists and much more.
This makes for some of the most technical and impressive combos you’ll see in an action game. You can use the fist to knock them into the air, slash them with the sword or use the gun to keep them up there, then slam them back down to the ground with a hammer.
If you’re interested in this game, then you can check out The Wonderful 101 Remastered Kickstarter. PlatinumGames is targeting April 2020 for the Switch release and has not yet announced a target date for the PC and PS4 versions.
Updated: Feb 4, 2020 02:18 pm