Balan wonderworld inhabitants full#

Why in Wonderworld is that the better option? If a costume uses its button to attack then odds are you can’t jump at all while wearing it, while others might still let you jump but at the cost of making their ability activate only when you’re standing still – or worse, entirely at random. Things like a clown that can only jump by slowly charging up an annoyingly small explosion, or a flower that can stretch up a uselessly short distance. Some suits work fine with one button, particularly the jumping-focused ones (who would have guessed?), but others range from perplexing to downright awful as a result. What it does do, however, is provide innumerable examples for why it shouldn’t have – most critically, it prevents certain costumes from performing that most basic of platforming tasks: jump. The idea of a one-button control scheme isn’t an inherently bad one, but Balan Wonderworld doesn’t provide a single good reason for why it restricts itself this way. A jack-o-lantern costume makes your sole action a punch attack, while a sheep suit lets you hover jump, and there are a needlessly large number of other options to stumble across. When you’re not wearing a costume (which is extremely rare), your lone button is a simple and underwhelming jump, but each of Balan Wonderworld’s more than 80 different outfits change that function to something else. That concept is taken laughably too far by making them the same in the menus too, forcing you to scroll to specific “back” buttons rather than just being able to hit B/Circle, which would be hilarious if it weren’t so stupid. Apart from using the joystick to move and the shoulder buttons to swap between ability-altering costumes, nearly every other button on the controller does the same thing. Regardless of its story, the festering rot at the heart of Balan Wonderworld is the inexplicable decision to make it a one-button game.

But by holding their whole story to the end, Balan Wonderworld becomes little more than a jumble of endearing but incoherent ideas. If the first cutscene had played at the start of the world, then maybe I would have connected with those characters as I played through their reference-filled levels, like a chess player’s world being littered with chess pieces.

That pacing not only makes each character’s story feel disjointed from everything else, including your protagonist, it means the levels you play before meeting them are devoid of context. Cutscenes primarily play right before a boss to quickly introduce the person for that world and a problem they are facing – be it a boy trying to build a flying machine or a scuba diving girl whose dolphin friend maimed her and left her to die – but a second cutscene right after the boss then immediately resolves it (don’t worry, she and the dolphin are cool now).

Balan wonderworld inhabitants full#

They’re full of life and energy, and can even tell a few genuinely entertaining bite-sized stories about each world’s subject.

I’ve enjoyed plenty of games with incomprehensible stories, but Balan Wonderworld’s inanity is particularly disappointing when its animated cutscenes are so well made. Your choice means very little, though, because either way you are quickly abducted by a magical tophat man named Balan and dropped into a dream land full of weird birds and crystals or something? It’s unclear, but that’s all the setup you’ll get before it starts parading you through 12 different worlds (each with just two levels, a boss, and an extra level once you beat the story) that are each structured around another sad person, all of whom seem completely unrelated to anything that’s going on. You play as either a boy who goes from happily breakdancing to being super bummed out in record time, or a girl whose housemaids whisper about her behind her back for no apparent reason. This is usually the part where I’d break down Balan Wonderworld’s story for you, but there’s not much to tell about the unexplained nonsense it calls a plot.