Balan Wonderworld is a SCAM!

[Music] [Applause] when ballin wonder world was first announced i was honestly very excited you had two legends yuji naka and naoto oshimo working on it while most famous for their work on sonic this was actually pitched to be more of a successor to knights into dreams a classic saturn game while the sega saturn wasn't the most popular system if you did own one if you knew someone who had one back in the day chances are you played this game on it i personally have a ton of nostalgia for knights i remember being blown away by it when it first came out so i was eager to see what was gonna come from this project and this past weekend i finally played the game for myself on nintendo switch when i booted it up and was watching the opening cut scene i was digging it i like the bright cartoony wondrous atmosphere that all lasted about two minutes or however long that cinematic is because then the actual game starts and when it does you get that typical intro deal where the camera just kind of pans around to show you the area and as soon as i saw that i was just like oh oh no this looks like a ps2 game an early ps2 game at that and it's a double whammy as not only does this game look like but it runs like ass as well dropping frames pretty much every second that there is when big moments happen like a single enemy spawning the game frequently locks up for like a full second or two because that's just too much for it to handle it just makes absolutely no sense when you consider how low quality these visuals are that the game performs this bad if these devs spent two days optimizing this turd well then that'd be two more days than it feels like they spent on optimization and the controls just really top off this whole nightmare of an experience while the game may look like a ps2 game it does not control like a ps2 game because it controls like a ps1 game yeah back when 3d platformers were new and no one really knew how to make them that's what this game feels like just completely stiff and clunky which again yeah this game is a 3d platformer you're going through these levels designed after interests of different characters it's sort of like a budget psychonauts type deal where the levels are like you know themed around these people all of which have lost their hearts or something like that i don't really care and whatever caused them to fall in this depression or whatever ties into the theme of the world like one dude wishes he could fly which makes him sad so his world is high up in the sky and you've got like you know fan puzzles where you gotta float on the fans pushing you up of course a lot of your power ups are flying themed this other girl gets in a fight with her dolphin and they break up which you know that happens to all of us so her levels are underwater themed and i could kind of see how some of these level designs could have been good like i wouldn't be surprised if there's some decent concept art for them laying around somewhere but in execution they're incredibly basic and generic so you venture around these bland levels collecting trophies by using all the game's various power-ups that come in the form of costumes these power-ups boys we gotta talk about them so many issues they clearly went for a quantity over a quality approach there's like 80 of them in the game every level has several new power-ups in it that are exclusively found like in that level many of course are just iterations of the others like oh this one makes you jump and float this one makes you jump and glide one sort of like a luigi flutter jump where you're kicking your legs to get that little extra distance out of it but it's like you've got some that are attack ones right like they allow your character to throw projectiles at enemies well while those costumes let you attack you're not able to jump with them like when you get a power up it does that one action and that's like the only action you can perform a lot of the time so you're in a platformer and while you're in some of these attack costumes you can't jump so much fun and if you're in one of those costumes and you need to jump even over like a small little gap or even just you know the platform in front of you is elevated just a little bit you've got to switch into a costume that does let you jump suffer through the stuttering transformation sequence of course so you can do your jump and then switch back after and so there's also ones i remember in particular there was this one where you were like a robot that shoots lasers in that costume you can jump but since jump is your action you can't actively shoot your lasers they shoot automatically when you stop moving so you just stop moving to shoot if you want to shoot if you're standing still you got to like take a quick step forward and stop just to shoot all of it just feels like such convoluted trash and we've got to talk about my favorite costume box fox this one turns you into a fox wizard that randomly transforms himself into a box and when i say randomly i mean randomly you do not have control over when he turns himself into a box it happens at random and you also can't control yourself while in box form you just keep sliding in the direction you were moving so you have a power up again in a platformer where you just randomly lose control over your character how is this fun in any way and of course with so many of these costumes power-ups in the game you'll have instances where these trophies you collect in a level may require a power up that isn't in that level so you have to go to another level to get it and bring it back in this is something we see in a lot of metroidvania type games right where you get a new skill or something that allows you to access a different area you backtrack and it's like oh now you can double jump or something like that which that's fun but these are power ups that you lose if you die you can like farm them and store them but still it's not like once you get it you always have it so when you're playing in a level you have to identify first like which of the 80 costumes will help you get past an obstacle or allow you to get that trophy then go to the level with that costume in it get the costume exit the level then go back to the original level to get that trophy so tedious oh and i almost forgot about the marquee character balan's zone sections which i figured going in was going to be an homage to nights you know with the look of this character the fact that he flies around i assumed his sections would be you know you flying around a 3d space like in the knights games but no his sections are quick time events where he does like a motion and then pauses and a shadow of him comes across the screen and you have to press a button when his shadow lines up perfectly with his character yeah gameplay and of course the whole time i'm playing it i'm thinking yeah the game is awful it's low quality but not only that it's a full priced 60 game and not only is it 60 but this game got a full blown retail release when i bought this game i just walked into my local best buy and grabbed it off a rack it's sitting there in retail stores alongside the likes of mario zelda etc and that to me is why it feels like such a scam this is clearly being done to trick people you know parents or grandparents that don't know any better to be like oh here's the big new nintendo game timmy would like that because that's literally the only way you're going to be able to sell any copies of this game and while they're the ones getting swindled by it who really suffers from practices like this the kids who end up getting this as a gift some kid is gonna get this game instead of a super mario 3d world perhaps because oh you know they're the same price probably around the same quality we'll just get this one you know that happened to some kid somewhere and i i just feel so bad for them and you know i did a video a while back about how the switch eshop is pretty much a cesspool and allowing games like this on your platform at all to charge this much money for them just amplifies all that at some point you know these games go through an approval process someone should have been like no no no no you aren't getting this piece of on our platform if this was the alpha of the game that i was playing i'd be telling the developers uh you still got a long way to go before this game is ready for beta but no they released it charged a full 60 dollars for it and didn't bat an eye this is not okay as i stated you're taking advantage of people and that's clearly the intention no one who spent five seconds researching this game is gonna buy it definitely not at sixty bucks probably i wouldn't recommend this game for five bucks so you're not gonna get sales from anyone who knows what this game actually is unless they hate themselves yeah you're probably gonna get a few masochist sales but the majority of people who buy this game i've heard it's been selling awful which is great so that doesn't mean it's been too many people swindled by this but yeah most people who do end up buying it are going to be parents and grandparents who just don't know any better and end up once more only hurting their kids in the process i'm serious when i say everyone involved in allowing this game to be released should be ashamed of themselves if my name was anywhere on a project like this i'd be begging for them to take it off i wouldn't want anyone to know i'm partially responsible for this mess and i'm sure some people oh come on shy guy a lot of people probably worked hard on this well they didn't work nearly hard enough because every aspect of it sucks actually you know what i'm gonna take that back the game actually has some good bops in it that's literally the only good thing i'm gonna say about it and i do feel like this is an instance where there's more of a story here with how terrible this final product is i wouldn't be surprised if we heard something you know later on like development had to be restarted when they were deep into the process and didn't have much time to complete the game something like that but still that's not an excuse to sell people this piss poor product it'll get some people to defend like oh well didn't you know there was all these issues i don't care if you have development problems delay it cancel the game you don't take sixty dollars from people and then give them this in return once more it's not okay anyway with that this video is a wrap let me know your thoughts on balan wonder world in the comments have you played the game yourself and did you hate it as much as i did as always i'm the shy guy johnny zakari and thanks for watching

Channel: ChiGuy

Views: 519,444

Rating: 4.8768439 out of 5

Keywords: Balan Wonderworld, Square Enix, Nintendo, Nintendo Switch, Scam. review, gameplay, impressions, stutter, visual, quality

Id: BYyX6NN9uS0

Length: 11min 12sec (672 seconds)

Published: Wed Apr 07 2021