a farmer who is unmotivated after his crops are destroyed by a storm or a girl who is attacked by a dolphin she swims with, and each of the levels involves solving or helping that character regain what they lost. The reason for this is each level has a new character suffering from an issue, e.g. That's all there really is until the very end in terms of the protagonists' journeys. He informs the main characters that they are missing a piece of their hearts, then whisks them up into a musical number before they land in the hub world: The Island of Tims." Inside they find an unusual figure with standout green hair, a suit covered in sparkles and eyes that peer out from his top hat. Captivated by a hidden storefront, 'Balan Wonderworld,' they enter, Leo at night, Emma in the daytime, like two sides of the same coin. I've played cheap indie games more engaging than this.Emma and Leo are suffering, down and dejected they both wander the streets. It seems like we constantly hear about some deified director (not just in video games) try something without their original team, only for their stuff to flop because there were less people to shoot down their bad ideas (makes me wonder when we'll finally acknowledge as a society that these big media projects are a team effort and not solely the work of some lone genius auteur).Īs for Balan Wonderworld itself, the demo gives me little reason why I should be playing this instead of the myriad other 3D collect-a-thon platformers out there. Kind of a cheap shot to compare anything to Metroid: Other M, but this reminds me of how Sakamoto insisted on a Wiimote only control scheme just because that's the way the old Metroid games used to play, ignoring all the advancements and increased complexity in action games that have happened since then. It wasn't until Unleashed, the first 3D Sonic game that Naka was not a part of, that we finally got separate buttons for all of Sonic's actions. The whole lightdash VS bounce attack or rail switching potluck was down to him insisting upon a one- or two-button control scheme. Dude was obsessed with giving Sonic as few buttons as possible, which is why none of the Classic games used an action button and why all actions other than jumping were mapped to a single button in SA1 to '06. Right? Although you can fathom it was Naka. (And then imagine doing that again, but for the sequels and everything they brought to the table!) It's like if you took the first Sonic game's gameplay, but then split everything up piecemeal, and then segregated things even further by deciding you can't use abilities at the same time or use them for other purposes. Imagine if Sonic could only jump/roll to hit enemies and nothing else, and all of the other perks that came with those mechanics (building speed/playing with momentum, bouncing on/chaining enemies, destroying walls, etc.) were each split up into different shields. It's the high-tech equivalent of putting colored pegs in the correct holes. I'm very much in agreement with Blood in how he summarizes the gameplay as heavily directed controlling to the point of refusing players to do anything beyond the most obvious and most direct tasks. Which looks especially bad when you're designing a 3D game like this with today's controllers where with the industry standard of having four face buttons, four shoulder buttons, a D-Pad, and two control sticks you've got plenty of buttons to work with for your control scheme. Sonic 1 (and the rest of the Mega Drive Sonics) also deserve credit for having controls and mechanics that were fleshed out enough to have some underlying depth within the base gameplay for players to work with despite the one-button philosophy (and being a 2D game).īalan Wonderworld however feels like a literal-to-a-fault interpretation of the "less is more" design philosophy, where the director and designers went out of their way to make the core gameplay as simple as possible but without any quirks or characteristics to truly allow people to experiment and play around with what they have. I mentioned this over at another forum, but the thing with the one-button philosophy in regards to the MD Sonics is that at least with those games (or at least S1 and S2), they were being made for a controller that -at the time- only had a D-Pad and three face buttons, so you had some leeway for taking that design philosophy.
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