Balan Wonderworld: The Problem With Simplicity

batland wonder world is nowhere near as bad as people are making it out to be and it's still a huge pile of crap but it's just mostly crap i'm sure many of you have been having your subscription and recommended feeds be completely overrun with balan wonder world videos going over how much of a mess this game is but i started to notice that a lot of the people complaining about it hadn't really gotten very far in the game and were only covering it on the surface level and that's when i thought wait a second i've beaten this whole thing over on my twitch page a couple weeks ago i might as well throw my hot in the ring as someone who's experienced all this game has to offer with a total play time of 16 hours jesus christ i need a hobby so that is why it's my job to name my duty to my obligation to go over each and every single thing wrong with balan wonder world in excruciating detail but also i'll point out some of the stuff i like along the way as there are genuinely good things about this game that i'll go into when we get there what really intrigued me by balan wonder world at first much like everyone else is that it was being directed by yuji naka who was the original creator and programmer of sonic the hedgehog now as many of you probably know from my various videos on the character that i'm what you may call uh obsessed with sonic so this immediately piqued my interest but what further got me excited was that nyada oshima was also involved in the project as the character designer and if you're unaware of who he is he was actually the guy who designed sonic back in 1991 along with other popular sega characters such as knights who balon is clearly inspired by i thought this was genius i thought this could only go well sonic has been in such an awful position over the past few years due to the general incompetence by its current director so now the old team is going to get back together and release a hit game right off the bat that's hilarious but then something happened that started to make me worry we saw the game play i don't know how anybody didn't see this coming because even from the initial reveal trailers this looked like the most bare bones basic 3d platformer ever so much of the initial trailer was either cg cutscenes or compilations showing the costumes during their epic emotion captured poses and it made me worry a lot it seriously looked like a kickstarted indie platformer but there's no way that could be true right i i mean this game is being made by square enix they're a reputable studio who've made plenty of great games in the past there's no way they'd let a game like that release it it must just be like a pre-alpha build or something it'll all be fine when it comes out right oh no this is just pathetic i feel so bad for you jinaka this man was super open and honest during interviews of the game it's like he forgot he was even promoting it at a certain point he said stuff like how square told him the game needed to have a story which he's not used to doing so he warned people that the story might not be very good or when he said the game featured 80 costumes but he might just get worn out by the 40 mark or when he and this is really sad in retrospect when he said that this was his one and only chance score gave him to make a 3d platformer sheesh yujinaka he's he's getting up there guys after this dumpster fire i genuinely think this is going to be the last game he ever directs sadly so the demo for the game released back in january and people immediately started noticing issues stuff like the movement speed the controls the general structure of the game and started pushing for it to be delayed my condolences to the poor soul who has to manage the balan wonder world twitter account for having to deal with these idiots who genuinely thought square enix would look at the replies and go oh oh wait guys anime fan124 wants us to delay the game stop production everyone go back to the drawing board instead what happened was they had to send out a statement like hey uh we're sorry guys we can like make your characters a little faster but the game is pretty much finished so uh you know we hope you buy it it came off as so defeated i felt so bad for yujinaka at this point you could tell square had completely dropped off trying to promote it it's like they knew what they were sitting on and wanted to just throw it right there i keep seeing people bring up the fact that a delay would have for some reason made this game better but no the thing is this game is flawed from the core no amount of time would have fixed that especially not as much time as square were willing to give the developers but i'll go way more into that later then the game finally came out and there were reports that the final boss was giving people seizures due to the bright strobe light effects nothing was going right just throw in the tall at this point and call it quits you're not winning this knockout and after all that build up the game came out all over the world and i finally got my chance to play it and after going through the whole thing what have i got to say about it yeah it's bad obviously by the length of this video you can see i have a lot more to say about this game so with that long-winded intro out of the way let's finally get into balan wonder world and the problem with simplicity like i mentioned before story has never really been yuginaka's forte and that's okay none of the games he directed ever really seem to try to have complex stories or anything i mean the og sonic games blue hedgehog tries to save animals from fat doctor knights two kids have to restore peace to a magical dreamland these are very yujinaka's stories and in balan wonder world you can see exactly where he wanted to go and what he was then pushed into by square enix in interviews again naka said how square like to focus a lot on storytelling in its games and they're not really used to making simple 3d platformers instead and i know this is a long quote but it's just too amazing not to read when i joined the company and heard that i was like stories huh to be honest i'm not really the type of developer who focuses on a game script i always emphasize how the game feels in the action while the story may be a bit weak i wasn't very good with stories yujinaki poor poor soul so just what did he and his team come up with well apparently to prepare he did a read-through of the hero with the thousand faces by joseph campbell so we could learn how to write a story and what we ended up with was i picked the girl story by the way this girl is walking around her orphanage or school or something and is afraid that people are talking behind behind her back so she goes to this seemingly abandoned theater where she meets balan this magical performer guy who does some stuff and censor to a magical land where she can learn to find herself i think and get out of her depressive state okay a little weird but i actually kind of like it this opening cutscene is full of that classic early sega charm and the cg here is so goddamn nice when balan is giving his performance and a kid's game that actually tries to take on a serious and realistic portrayal of a teenager's mental health issues sign me up i always love stuff like that i can't win and then this is the part where for comedic effect i tell you that we never once revisit this aspect for the rest of the game and it's just full of cutscenes where your character doesn't even so much as appear which i can only assume is because they didn't have to re-render every scene eight times for all the hair colors oh wait that's not funny that's infuriating each world in this game has you going to a different person in the world who is also going through some inner turmoil and helping them out with their problem help is in quotation marks by the way anyways this can be something as serious as a girl dealing with the death of her parents and continuing to shut everyone out of her life until her heart turns into ice or a girl being left with severe trauma after the sudden death of her cat or some smug guy losing a cheshium one of these things is not like the other like i said i love this idea i really do helping someone out with their problems is the perfect excuse to travel to such different locations every world and some of the motifs here are really clever like for the girl whose cat got hit by a car we see random traffic lights scattered throughout the level it's stuff like that i can appreciate where her trauma isn't exactly spelled out to you but it's creatively shown through the gameplay but when it comes to show don't tell valen wonder world decided it would do neither either probably devote time to each of these stories or don't have a story at all each world in bala and wonder world is split up into two acts in a boss fight much like the classic sonic games that's already severely limiting yourself and how much time can be spent developing these basically only room for a cutscene before and after every level is what i would be saying if they even bothered doing the bare minimum instead each world only has two cutscenes one before the boss and one after the boss yes this means for the first two stages in every world you have no idea why you're going through these levels or what the person's problem is you only find out after completing the second level where you get some silent minute long cutscene that explains to you what's going on and explain is in quotes by the way because oh boy does this game love its symbolism so you better hope you understand what's going on in that minute but then you see this evil real-looking guy who's the main antagonist of the game despite literally only seeing him twice and that is not an exaggeration you see him in level one and at the final boss that's it i'm not counting the balance bytes there because those are completely optional and for the player's sake that's a good thing wait where was i oh yeah the story i'm getting way too ahead of myself you have no idea how much i have to talk about here but yeah before the boss you find out why the person is having these negative thoughts then you fight the boss that's completely unrelated to their issue and then they're all better what is the point in any of this i want to take you through an average world in balan wonder world let's use world 2 as an example jesus that's a lot of worlds okay so we play through act 1 and it's the standard enough water stage that's fine then you go through act 2 still no clue why i'm doing this then after you beat it you're sent up into the sky where we watch a cutscene of a little girl swimming with a dolphin who out of nowhere gets sonic.exe eyes and kicks her in we then see her in the hospital we then fight an octopus i'm not making that up that's literally the progression cutscene showing the girl crying in the hospital after having a near-death experience then we cut back to being teleported up and we're attacked by a big octo lady we then fight her for a bit and what do you know things are all better now i have time for a dance party these are the only fun i had playing this game i just don't understand the thought process here why bother at all if you're not gonna do anything with these stories and during the marketing of the game it's all i ever saw the twitter captions they gave explaining their stories were more in-depth than in the game and i wouldn't even mind so much if it weren't such an easy fix here you go naka here's how it should have been done let's have me someone who isn't a video game developer or a writer tell you how to write your video game i wrote this as a this one myself but i realize it's more embarrassing on his part that i genuinely think i've thought of something better than him in two minutes so start with fact one and before you play the stage setup what's going on like have a cutscene establishing what their problem is then you play through the act one that's themed around this maybe have some enemies that reflect that too then you have act 2 come along but before starting that we have another cutscene that further establishes that reality guy is a threat by perpetuating their worries or grief like to go back to water girl maybe have the dolphin hurt her or knock her off by accident but now we see him toying with her which is starting to enhance that fear of dolphins twisting them into some creepy demonic things that intentionally hurt her because they're so evil then you'd play through the second stage which is like the first one except turned up to 11. the visuals would be way more disturbing and creepy showing the characters deteriorating mental state maybe they could implement that through gameplay by showing the levels falling apart around them and having some platforming challenges revolved around that then after the second level have the stage completely collapse in on itself where not real then manifests their fear or insecurity as a giant monster that you then have to fight like how about you battle a demonic dolphin creature instead of a octopus lady it's it's almost like get ready for this one it's almost like you're fighting your inner demons square enix i'm open for a job by the way i feel like you're gonna be having a director's position free there pretty soon so after you defeat them you see that not really's influence is now gone and the water girl can i more rationally think about the situation and realize maybe dolphins aren't so bad i don't know this world sucks it's not shakespeare but at least has the illusion of good pacing then and here's the biggest change i would make personally get the rid of these two annoying big-handed kids i mean it's not like dropping the two kids would affect the story in any way they do nothing they're blank slates which is kind of an issue when the game is about them and their mental health this is a big problem with the game's story i think the plot would have been way better and would have been way more unique as a platformer if the game didn't have a main protagonist and instead had you playing as a different character in every world like in the farm world you're the farmer or in the bug world you're the girl who's gaga for bugs like i can't believe i said that that's what the game calls her but honestly i'm not exaggerating when i said the kids stories are not developed a single bit after the opening cut scene the next time something happens involving them is after the final boss where the girl has a surprise party thrown for her at her orphanage or school or foster house or church again i have no clue what's going on here but what does this show that they do care about her that they're not talking behind her back if there's one thing i know about girls it's that no matter how nice they are to your face it doesn't mean they aren't still making fun of you behind your back believe me i should know there's no progression here no build up to this sure the cg looks nice but there's no substance to speak of then when the kids in balan have to say goodbye to each other they hug and balan finally show some sort of emotion for once and it's like i wanna like this game so bad i really do i genuinely think if this game's plot were more focused and developed but i would have been tearing up too but like you make it so hard to like you balan wonder world so so hard unless the titular character balan is simple he's just a guy who likes to help people with their negative feelings all over the world and after playing this game he's got a lot of people to help out but um i absolutely adore balance design it's amazing it looks like knights a magician and michael jackson all rolled into one it's great but like balan doesn't do anything he just sort of lurks around during the game for a game called balan wonder world there sure isn't a lot of balance or wonder there are worlds though so good job you got one out of three the only times you ever see him mandatorially or during the cutscenes during the first one it's always cool to see him lurking around in the backgrounds watching over what's happening you know it shows that he's gonna come in and help but when you complete the world and the person is celebrating what's happening he's always doing some pose like welp my work here is done but you didn't do anything as far as i know you just went for some mcdonald's or some while i beat the boss and it sucks so hard because like i said before i can see this being cool i can see myself liking this exact thing after the bug girl one where the girl finally feels accepted he's in the background and sort of walks off screen then comes into the foreground and transitions the screen like stuff like that is really cool i love it or shall i say i would love it if balan made a bigger impression on me during the game like after you beat every three worlds you sort of see this train that comes out of nowhere and when i first saw this i was like why the doesn't this game take place on a train this setting looks so cool like this this species voyager and looks like polar express but no you just take it back to the regular hub world three times did we get here on a trillion i have no idea we just got teleported here at the start of the game it's such a mess if you want even more indication on how worried naka was that the story in this game was and didn't make any sense they actually went and released an entire novelization of the game that apparently goes more into balan not really who through this book i know i know is called lance the two kids and everyone else's issues boy i sure would have liked to see the story of my video game presented in oh i don't know my video game okay so i was about to release this video and then there's had like the most genius thought ever there's this old british cartoon nobody ever watched called grizzly teals for gruesome kids and it was basically this like children's animated horror anthology but the opening had this creepy guy getting all the theater stuff set up as this little kid walks in and sits down to watch the movie and i thought this would have been perfect for balan wonder world have the theater pop up like it does in the final game where balan shows up but instead of taking the kid to some random world have the kids sit down and watch 12 different stage plays that plays out into actual levels focusing on these people and their mental issues then there's at least the implication there that the kid is watching these different things happen before them and they properly take in and apply it to themselves and their own mental issues then it becomes more of an anthology game and i think that would have just been a way better approach i know all this leads to my conclusion of the story it's too simple yes all of this was just a big ol exhaustive way to say this story is too simple for its own good this was clearly just yujinaka being too out of his element and when he tried to get into it he got too big for his britches and went all out on a story that's really not that deep bro it could have been this is something i would have really loved to see in a kid's platformer but this just it chief i'm sorry and with all that out of the way let's move on to something infinitely more important than the story the gameplay i could forgive a lackluster story i am a sonic fan after all if a game doesn't have a good story but is fun anyway i could care less i love 3d platformers they're my favorite genre there's no way you do not could possibly screw one up oh wait yes he could this is by far the biggest complaint i see when people talking about this game so i figured i'd talk about it right off the bat and explain what it means because i'm going to be referencing it a lot with the gameplay this is something i like to call yuji naka and the one button conundrum i was very worried about this before the game came out and it's safe to say all my worst fears came true because jesus christ dude you still treat game development like a controller only has three buttons so something yuji naka wanted to accomplish with the original sonic games was the ability to play through them using only one button and that button would make you jump even when they added more moves to sonic such as the insta shield and spin dash all you really had to do was push the one button it worked for those games since they were so reactionary and you gotta make a decision quickly all you really can do is press the one button that does do something sadly though he never really broke out of this concept and while something like that may have been possible for a simple 2d platformer it gets a little harder to smoothly pull off in 3d with sonic adventure 1 and 2 these issues became immediately apparent okay yujinaka so in this game we've got sonic and he's got the ability to spin dash roll light dash bounce attack pet throw and turn the enemies into goddamn action figures for some reason what buttons doing my polis too hmm the b button and and what about the others obviously this thing creates the issue where you then press the b button to do a light speed dash and instead of doing that sonic rolls causing you to die unfairly not good of course the game didn't only feature one button it used like three or four but the mindset was still there to use as little as possible and i guess yujinaka finally wanted to learn from his mistakes and fix this glaring oversight in his game design is he going to finally start mapping each move to its own button nope instead he's only going to have one move and map it to every button seems like you're seems like you're missing the force for the trees here naka so instead of creating a diverse moveset for your character spread across an entire controller you can do one and only one thing at a time sometimes it's jump sometimes it's attack but never both at the same time this presents a problem i can appreciate the attempt to make the game as simple for newcomers as possible but that also shouldn't have been featured in a game where there are 80 power-ups it's not like it's impossible to make a 3d platformer with minimal button presses mario 64 you can run and jump and also punch and stuff but you barely do that let me make my point what i'm getting at here is that you generally only ever have to use that one button in the game but it's how you maneuver mario that ends up influencing your controls you move backwards and jump you to a side jump crouch and jump you do a backwards jump you do a run in a crutch jump at the same time and you get to do a long jump it's so simple and basic and easy for a kid to understand but you still feel like you're controlling a character that can do a lot of cool stuff open for experimentation it's simple yet complex but in balan wonder world the way they try to make each move different is by limiting them through only giving it one purpose and of course this was done for the sake of balancing which was done for the sake of making each costume feel special which was done for the sake of getting to slap a grip big edie costumes feature in the trailer but of course that's all jumping ahead a little bit let's go back to the start let's go back to the first thing you're presented with in terms of gameplay in balan this is the hub world in battle and wonder world you can run around it and do nothing so far that is it looks really barren boring which is a huge issue since it's your first impression of the game i've seen plenty of people who've judged the demo based off the first couple seconds where they see this hub world so already there you've lost a potential seal almost immediately and we all know this game could have done with a couple more of those and it's really a shame because i understand what they were going for here i do they want you to collect stuff in the levels and do stuff in this hub that expands it and makes it look more alive and colorful don't get me wrong when you've beaten the game in this hub world has all the stages present it actually looks really nice and vibrant it's great but man first impressions are everything in this game feels hard at that and even then my compliment has to be retracted because they can't even do that without messing something up that pisses me off so in like every single game ever the levels are like like world one two three four so on you know like our numbers work but no in balan wonder world they gotta be completely unique they gotta lay it out one four ten five nine three eight twelve six eleven two sun seven why what is the point so already i can't even easily navigate myself to each level because of this game's desire to be different so whatever you hop into the first level and right off the bat you're bombarded with a plethora of issues and all these issues can be summed up by saying the game is too weird for its own good and this isn't inherently a problem i'm all for more creative and weird games but again this game is too weird for its own good and is missing a straight man to explain this too it's already wed to into its own world building that the player can't just accept what's going on they have to question it first until they eventually just get used to it and grow numb like why are all the npcs in this game just in an endless motion captured dance loop what is the purpose of this furthermore why when i walk up to said npc to their feet away into nothingness did you not want to program in the collision the issue here is after the first cutscene which really explains nothing you're just dropped into this fantasy world where nothing is ever explained to you and hey maybe that was the intention maybe the intention was to create a universe that was completely bizarre and weird and where nothing makes sense but news flash just because something is intentional doesn't mean it was a good idea things just happen in this game and you're expected to roll with it oh look there's the main antagonist they just spawned in some weird enemies okay no introduction no explanation as to who you are or what your plan is okay all right moving on i guess we can't focus on that stuff guys we gotta focus on the costumes the costumes guys they're costumes did you know balan wonder world has 80 unique costumes guys oh my god the possibilities are truly limitless in this game i wonder what all these costumes are gonna be i'd like to read an excerpt from an ign interview from the man himself yuji naka during the proposal stage i wrote down that it would have 80 different types of action but i thought that once i actually started making the game i would run out of steam at around 40. it's like he doesn't even realize he was meant to be promoting this thing all right so in the first level you walk up to a short hill and the first thing you start to realize is that your default kit is extremely basic and simple all you can do is run and jump there is no momentum to speak of you just constantly run at the same speed and nothing you do will ever cause you to jump any differently that's when you walk up and see a little item in a crystal but oh no it needs a key wherever will i find oh there it is then you get the costume the tornado wolf wow that sounds so cool and powerful what i'm able to do with it jump you can do your normal jump and it creates a spin that hurts enemies and that's all yep it doesn't add a bunch of powerful moves to your arsenal or makes you infinitely more powerful each and every costume in the game just replaces your jump with one move you can do whether it be a jump an attack or turning into a box sometimes like i showed you before yujinaka said he felt like he'd get burnt out at around 40 but managed to scrape together 80 costumes in the end it's the prime example of quantity over quality he went too far with the balancing here he didn't want to make one costume more important than another so instead of having some good costumes on some bad costumes all of them just feel so weak and powerless except for like two the only costumes that i ever got even the littlest of enjoyment from were the ones that allowed you to slowly ascend in the air like the cat or ice one these are cool and allow a player to experiment with their surroundings to try and get balance statues but even then the costumes that are cool i can't even see her unique because it's more than likely that in the next stage i'm going to find the exact same costume just with a different code of pen you can really feel them struggling to make each costume different here like the pounding pig who can float for a little while and then ground pound or the robot you get later on that can float for a little while and then grind point despite them trying their best not to do this the issue is still present where 80 percent of the costumes in the game feel pointless and unneeded let me use an example in the first world of the game you can find a dragon that should side fire projectiles in an extremely short range like like extremely short it might as well be a punch but because of the trademark yujinaka one button conundrum i have now lost my ability to jump and must now desperately try to find another costume while hoping that i don't come across a place where i need to jump to progress why would i ever want this costume its only purpose here is to break these blocks but as i went into previously the very first costume in the game the tornado wolf not only destroys these platforms but also allows me to jump so already this one costume is null and void or as i like to call it a waste of development time and much like the other issues in this game it would have been such an easy fix such an easy easy fix just allow the player to switch back to the regular kid with no costume no i can jump again hooray but no the only way to get back to being your regular kid is to get hit and lose all your costumes the costumes are the main selling point of the game and they all suck there's no indication of what a costume is going to be like before you get it so there's just a 99 chance that it's gonna suck and you're never gonna use it why is that meant to be fun like how about when you're walking across the game and you see these like music pads for for the longest time i just assumed oh okay later on i'm gonna get like a musical power-up that lets me stand on that and it's gonna lift me up into the air and take me to somewhere cool but then i finally got the dying power opened [Music] it was just for the goddamn gems why would i ever want to come back to this level to get something that the game practically throws at you at every given turn or what about the amazing lovely lantern powerup you get in world three red is a light that flickers on and off at random that i used a grand total of one time there was this part in world three where you have to use a spider to get up to this mirror and then you use the lantern light to make your way through a dark hallway where on the other end is nothing what a useful power-up or or or how about the wonderful bird ability in world 5 that lets you jump and in midair you can send out a world when attacked the weed what you're telling me there's a power up in balon wonder world that does two things what the i know i should be happy about this but all this shows me is that they were capable of doing this all along but decided not to because they were stretched so thin between 80 costumes and so many are just repeats of the other at that point just make each world set of costumes limited to that location so you never get to the point in your playthrough where you have three costume slots filled up and all you can do is punch there's only a very small handful of costumes here that truly feel unique without some later imitator but that doesn't even guarantee them to be good like a mouse with a key on its teal that makes it so you never need to find a key to unlock a costume oh yeah i completely forgot to talk about the keys they add nothing so you need a key to unlock the crystal that contains the costume seems simple enough yeah you're right and that's kind of the problem so i want you to take a look at this here's the crystal and here's the key i need to walk to the key then take two steps over to get the crystal so now this begs the question what's the point in getting the key to begin with at first i just assumed this was some tutorial thing like later on i'll really be grasping for keys but no nine times out of ten when they want you to get a costume the key is just sitting right there beside it there's no challenge here there's also no fun to be had by taking a two second detour to grab the key so just remove the feature i mean it's not like they're there to prevent you from stacking up on costumes because they have this dumbass 3 costume limit where oh yeah the three costume limit i i feel like i have eddie d while playing this game every second my attention is brought on to another dumbass feature so in this game you can't be carrying more than three costumes at any given time meaning you really have to pick and choose which ones you want in your arsenal but this creates a bunch of other issues in and of itself like issue number one when you already have three power-ups and grab another crystal it automatically switches it in for the costume at the bottom of your list meaning every time you're about to hit a crystal you have to stop and scroll through your costumes until you know the one you don't want to start on the list meaning that if you're just moving along quickly and just so happen to bump into a crystal because you almost never don't have a key on hand a costume you really like might have just been switched out and you can't use it anymore you better hope that isn't the one costume that gives you the ability to jump because oh boy you're sure gonna be having some issues in a bid and even then sometimes i end up getting rid of a good one because i honestly could not burst sitting through the extremely long wait time that comes when you switch your outfits you spin into this tornado for like five seconds before you're free again which makes it a when you're in a tight spot and need to make a quick costume change because oh no i gotta sit here and wait for the game to load in a new outfit i guess but just where do the switch costumes go did they just disappear into the ether well no the game actually has a storage place for all the costumes you never lost where you can go and equip them again and just how do you get there you walk up to a checkpoint and hold in the action button yes the game never informs you you can do this here you can see all the costumes you had stored away by world now we have an empty space here so let's just wait what it just just replaced my first costume yeah the game doesn't just automatically go to the empty slot for you you have to manually do that yourself fun simple so let's just say i'm running around a normal stage and realize i need the sheet power up in order to get a balance statue well all right now i have to run all the way back to a checkpoint and equip it oh wait i don't even have a sheep costume saved perfect so now i have to exit the level and go back to the one where i find the sheep outfit get it and i run all the way back to the stage i needed it at and used the power up to get up there realized oh wait it wasn't the sheep costume i needed to get up here it was actually the ice block no i gotta run all i just gave up at a certain point if i ran across a statue i didn't have a costume for on hand i'd just move on didn't even bother checking if i had one saved i mean it's not like you're ever really gonna be short on statues anyway i don't know how this was for other people but i did a pretty casual run of this game only really collecting statues if they were in my reach and there was only one point where i had to backtrack to collect more and even then it was just to go back and collect one so it was sort of a non-issue but of course that's just me i am the ultimate epic gamer here obviously the work grind here would just be to give the players the option to combine their costumes once they get them let's say i have an ice fairy a pumpkin puncher and a i don't know a box fox in my arsenal how about at this point you let me be able to use all of these abilities at once using the different buttons on the controller so now i am playing is this weird amalgamation of these three powers where i can float for a few seconds punch enemies on my descent and then turn into a box i guess see like doesn't that just sound the slightest bit funner it would involve some kind of strategy and allows the player to still feel like they have the freedom to do whatever they want while also making them strong making them feel like they truly have an input in how they're playing and to end this off i know i mentioned it before but it burst repeating whose bright idea was it that having a costume can remove your ability to jump this already presents such a massive issue in terms of the level design because there are so many moments in this game where i've just become stuck in a section but i've only got costumes that can attack and none that can jump basically forcing myself to die and start over i would somewhat forgive this if it only happened once or twice but it was a good few times in every world and it's so infuriating because all they needed to do was make a dedicated jump button i don't understand why he thinks the less buttons means the better a game is this was obviously done for the sake of simplicity but it's so simple that it actually turns back on itself and causes the game to be 10 times more complicated as you know i have to do this dumb ass micromanaging where you know i have to decide whether or not you want to even pick up a certain costume over fear of it up later and because you take any costume you want into any level you want it means they have to make each level beatable with most of the costumes in the game i understand the intent here they want you to be able to experiment they want you to be able to go into a level and decide what costume you want to use not what the game wants you to use that's neat and genuinely a cool idea but because of the lack of foresight and the sheer versatility of the costumes in the game to the point where they couldn't possibly predict what costume you're gonna have at any given time the level design now has to be so incredibly broad and spacious that you're never gonna get stuck for not having a costume but as a direct result of this the levels become too open and boring and not challenging and basic and just like more annoying so let's talk about sad levels each level in bala and wonder world sucks equally there i kept seeing people say like oh but the ice level marked the ice level is good the game gets better as it goes on no each and every level in bala and wonder world suffers from the exact same problem and it's the problem i've been referring to this whole video say it with me now simplicity okay maybe i should have made it a bit clearer anyways like i got into a little bit before each level in this game is designed under the assumption that you could be playing as any given character there are only a small handful of segments where they give you a costume paired alongside a little platforming challenge to do with it in a game where there are only 24 levels in 80 costumes then there's not going to be much room to create challenging level design around that simple isn't bad a simple game can be good simple games have been good but simple gameplay is very hard to pull off in an open world exploration game the main collectible you have to get in the game are the balon statues the power stars of the game basically but these levels are not at all built around the statues it feels like they were an afterthought like they built up the levels and then afterwards decided where the statues would go you know what it feels like it feels like super mario odyssey's level design paired with mario 64's collectibles in super mario 64 each world has like six stars which means the designers could cleverly design six places to drop them and to a flash of them to play cement they could create unique platforming challenges to get him however in super mario odyssey they choose the opposite approach instead the levels are vast and open but to compensate for this each world has like 30 power moons to collect they're everywhere there is an argument to be made for which of these approaches is better mario 64s but i'm not going to sit here and say that odyssey is poorly designed because it's clear that the designers intended for you to just run around exploring and happening upon random power moons to help you progress but in bala and wonder world we get these big open stages that don't usually have me in set pieces or specific platforming challenges but there are only around to eat or so ball on statues within the level this means that i can run around come across something where my intuition goes oh okay there's gotta be a statue here but no there's nothing because they can only afford to spread out into these things in the level but sometimes they don't even bother in the art level especially i noticed how lazy they got when placing these i got almost all of them on my first try because there's never usually a challenge in getting these things oh it's over this pit good thing i have my ice fairy costume to just waltz right over there and get it perfect sure i experimented but i'm not having fun it just feels like i cheated but then there are times when they get super stingy with these things like in world three again this is the one where you had to go into that dark room for no reward but there's a part near the end of the stage where you can run past the goal post and you find this little hidden crevice i thought oh gm you sly dog you didn't think i'd go here only to be me at the fool because there's nothing here except for gems this game hands our gems like they're going out of style you only use the gems for the tim stuff which is completely optional so if you don't care about beating bala and wonder world 100 then the rewards you're getting 99 of the time means nothing to you i think the reason so many people liked the ice world so much here is because it feels like an actual game for a little bit so many worlds in here can feel so small and condensed but that one has these little stretches of ice you can skate down that actually makes you feel like you're traveling through a real world it's got the same problem as a ton of early 3d sonic games where you don't feel like you're running around a real location you feel as if you're just traveling through a video game level ascend in midair magically it breaks the immersion and that's incredibly important in a game where immersion in this world takes up most of the enjoyment for people it's just embarrassing honestly the worst world definitely has to be the fire one the gimmick of this stage is that a ton of the level is covered in lava and you must use this fire hydrant guy to shoot water on the floor so you can walk over it sounds simple enough right yeah except when you remember that the fire hydrant guy can't jump making it extremely easy to accidentally walk into the lava or when you travel to a place you can't jump back from and can only use the water gun for you can very easily lose the water guy so now you're you just gotta die there is so much like this here but it's the most important in that stage i actually think this game could have been quite fun if it were just some more condensed into a linear platformer have each power-up aid that because instead we have this game where i'm just aimlessly wandering around half the time hoping and praying that i have the right power up to proceed it just screams laziness but when you're not playing through the game's godly level design you're playing one of this game's many fun fun mini games so during a level you can come across a golden balan hat that takes you to what is known as a balan bite in this you get to watch a two-minute cutscene where balan flies around doing that i can't make out because i don't know what any of these things are or why he's doing it but at certain points in these cutscenes you see a png of balance slide across the screen and you have to press the a button when the png lines up with what balan is doing these would be fine if they were not completely dog i can never tell when i'm supposed to press the air button sometimes i do it right when he hits it and it's fine sometimes i press at a split second after he hits it and it's still fine giving me a little bit of leeway i appreciate it but if you press the button even so much as a split second before he hits it you're not getting an amusing you're getting agreed well you know grit's still fine like i can still get the balance statue as a reward you see where this is going if you do not hit this thing amazing every single time in this two minute cutscene you are not getting that statue and with no option to replay it you need to quit the stage and re-enter it to try again hello this is editing mark right here this actually isn't true i was giving balon wonder world too much credit if you lose your chance at the bala and bite and leave the stage and re-enter it the battle and bite still won't be there to reset everything in the level including those you have to fight the boss again you fight you fight the boss and it resets everything in the world so if you try one balan bite and you it up you have to go and fight so let's say you start this balance and in the first quicktime event you get a grit oh dear you know i need to sit through this entire two-minute cutscene so you can go back to the regular game how did they not realize that issue and you have to do this thing so many times with little to no variation on it and there only becomes more to do as the game goes on it's so boring i thought this game was meant for little babies why does it expect pixel perfect precision from a player but that's not even the worst of it this game has way worse mini up its sleeve and these come in the form of sports games i don't get it like the levels are a part of a stage play i get that the costumes also fit in with that theme and balan as a character blends nicely too so why the sports so yeah first we have the soccer one where you have three chances to knock out all the cards on this board that's like whatever fine then there's the bowling one where you just need to position yourself right to knock out all the pins okay then there's the mini golf one where you need to try get the ball in the hole and finally there's the baseball one where you need to whack the balls of these targets simple enough right well the only problem here is that just like the balan bites they expect you to play these things flawlessly i've only ever gotten a statue out of the soccer one that was while playing the demo i'm just going to assume that this applies to the other ones too but let's just say you're playing the mini golf one and you hit the ball in the hole in two hits do you get a statue for getting it nope instead you just have to use your third ball to try and hit it in again i haven't double checked this but do i seriously have to get three hole in ones in order to gain a statue because if so then off game seriously off that is near impossible and not fun in the slightest why not like have the minigames be a stage player that would have fit way better have them be short little ddr mini games or like parappa the rapper where you have to hit the arrows and buttons at the right time i don't know i just don't understand this it's mind-boggling and why in these sports mini games do i have the option to go back to the title screen by pressing the triggers i don't understand why anyone would ever want to do that all right i feel like i'm getting a bit too mean am i being too mean in this video oh i'm sorry it's just that i spent 100 pounds on this game i paid for it and played it myself then when i told my friend and editor simply had to record footage for the video he refused to and i had to buy the game for him too i gotta be as mean as i want i earned it but out of fear of appearing as a negative nancy i'm gonna take a short detour to talk about an aspect of the game i actually really like the boss fights despite how unfitting each of their designs are i actually think the way they handled the bosses here are really clever so basically each boss has multiple ways of attacking them for example in the first one you can either walk up and whack the boss using the tornado wolf while he's dizzed or use the pounding pig to shoot him off his high platform where you can then attack him already that's something i really enjoy having a bunch of different ways to kill a boss it allows the player to think for themselves and try to figure out how they're supposed to defeat it but on top of that for each different method you use against the boss you're rewarded with a balance trophy with a total possibility of 3 to be earned it's weird it's like the game is encouraging me to try out multiple different costumes and is giving me a meaningful award for experimenting huh funny if only the whole game were like that they aren't perfect however balan wonder world it isn't perfect there there's my review of this game but in each fight to restock on costumes there's two keys and two power-ups to collect each with two different outfits however like i said there's three ways to defeat a boss so going in you're at least guaranteed to get the chance of two balance statues but you can only get the third one if you just so happen to have went in there with the right extra costume and that just seems like a dumb excuse for replayability like you know i have to play the boss once and pay attention to see what sort of costume you might have needed to use to defeat him then go to the level where you think that power up is get it then go back to the boss and fight him again only to find out that that power up you thought would work actually doesn't work and now you need to leave to find and try another one that might work then fight the boss again realize this one doesn't work you get what i mean it's annoying but still the bosses are the only times when you can really feel the scheme's creative juices flowing okay that's the positives out of the way back to bitching i've seen quite a few people say their biggest complaint about balan wonder world is the fact that you can't even play as balan you know other than the little qtes but actually as someone who's played the entire game i can tell you that you actually can't play as in here sorta but i do not blame people at all for not getting to him because what they expect you to do is i haven't mentioned them much in this video so i finally think it's time to talk about the tims it appears even yuji naka is aware of the fan demand for the choy garden to make reappearances so we figured he'd take matters into his own hands and create his own so during the levels the main thing you're going to be collecting are these crystal things like i've mentioned before they might also be called tims but i forget so you feed each of these gems to the thames to increase them in size the yellow one makes them bigger and the blue or red and purple one give them a badge with that color on it if you feed them enough and when they do that you can then throw a smaller tim at a bigger tim and an egg will pop out creating a new tim i'm gonna be saying tim a lot aren't i you're supposed to then put these tims to work in the center of the hub we have the tower of tim's and the more the tim spin this wheel the larger and larger the tar of thames becomes the taller it becomes the more times can work the more the tims can work the faster it takes to unlock the next tower simple this is for nothing as far as i'm aware yeah the real thing you want to be doing here is getting the rainbow gems you can either get these by replaying a level again or finding a stone tim statue in a level i didn't know you could find these stone tim statues in levels so i replayed every single level in this game over again god help me the things i do for videos so in the hub world there's also this huge stone tim statue and the more you feed it the rainbow gems the more its wings expand and once they go out fully it will then ask you for a king tim you get the king tim by feeding the gems to the regular tims the more you feed the regular tim's the gems though again get this little badge for each color you feed it and you need to grow a team that has all three badges and then let it have a baby tim with a bigger tim that also has those three badges on it and then the baby tim that comes out will have a crown on its head and then you feed this to the stone tim statue and it takes you to where you can get the balan costume if you want any piece of advice for this game it is just leave it running in the background for a couple hours to grow the tower of tim's then make sure you only focus on one and only feed it the gems to give it the badges as quickly as possible get the balan costume asap but of course that advice would just go after not buying the game at all okay so i've been sitting here trying to do this for the past five hours i everything i said about the king tim's in the game were true but what i didn't know was it is completely random whether or not you're going to get a king one for doing the badge thing so i've been sitting here grinding for hours getting enough badges through the gems and the levels hitting it against the other big one getting the egg realizing the egg does not give you a king tim and then having to redo that entire process over and over again i've done it maybe 15 times now and i just know i got it as i was about to quit i can't even choose who gets the please go for one go for one yes okay did you let's get bigger no no i have to go into a level get more of those [Music] i wouldn't mind if it weren't so long and tedious to go between worlds if you want if you want to encourage people to switch between worlds just get outfits and stuff don't make it so long what i have to look at the introduction every single time [Music] do he's big he's big okay come over to me wait did i even need him to be big did it i genuinely can't move i'm stuck okay you smug is he not supposed to be big let me try make him smaller okay he didn't need to be bigger okay perfect wonderful i wasted that took 40 minutes that took me 40 minutes to do it [Music] here we go it's like that's cool but what's the point now it's still not fun what is this your fault this is all your fault i eat you but yeah the balance costume is broken it allows you to get really high and fly around for a long time basically making almost every statue accessible from the get-go just get it again i do not blame people at all for not knowing they can play as balon in the game because you are never ever given any advice on how or why you should be doing this in the game itself i mean hey at least they got good designs they capture that chai vibe perfectly i like him a lot you know what speaking of nyarushima i probably feel bad for you the most you spend so much time designing 80 unique characters for this game only for it to end up like this you poor soul i love just about every design in this game the 2d artwork is amusing especially i know we're not getting one because of how pearly the game did but i would have loved to have seen an art book for balon the kids look like they've been ripped right out of billy hatcher oversized hans spikey hair and all balance design is amazing as i've mentioned before and all the costumes look super cool in 2d yes even the box fox manages to look even the slice bit cooler sadly the same cannot be said for this character animation i'll say it again because of burr's repeating but this feels like an early 3d sonic game with this damn over reliance on motion capture they probably couldn't afford to spend money on animating unique movements for 80 different costumes so they had to create one run cycle that would fit them all and as a result it just looks stiff and lifeless i mean everything in this game does to be fair each boss fight ends with a character being rescued and you have a radical dance party with them the a literal minute and i love these scenes so much because the motion capture is super apparent it's laughable wanna know what it reminds me of the npc's in sonico6 i always loved how when they'd do their victory dances it would be in complete unison because they just copy and pasted the motion capture animation but at least those humans were realistic it's just too fluid for these little cartoon characters they look like puppets lifeless beings being controlled against their will i want to say they just shouldn't have bothered with these moments but again even if ironically they're my favorite parts of the game sadly however the world design doesn't also get that same prize everything just looks so bare i can see where they're going with a lot of this the ruins in the water level look cool and the art level is weird and trippy with its rotating level design and checkerboard everything but a majority of these stages are just empty like the farm level where is everything where's the life the carnival level has to be the worst in terms of this just because of how much potential something like this has at times battle on wonder world is a really colorful game so explain to me why the hub world's rendition of this world looks more bright and entertaining than the actual stage it's just filled with dull purples and blues with the occasional light sprinkled in and beyond that nothing feels natural it's also blocky again this builds upon what i was saying earlier when none of the levels feel like they're actually lived in locations it looks like the most gamey schemed ever game and they have the balls the nerve to try and act like this decision was intentional by having the level start out normal but in the introductory look through the floor falls apart and turns into nothingness they sometimes get really obsessed with this dumb warping effect that sure it looks cool to watch but when you're playing it it makes things really disorienting especially in the chess world where my depth of field goes all out of whack and i start to lose track of where i am i can't even see where i have and haven't been because the level is taking place warped over a sphere it's like he was so desperate to go back and see how well sonic xtreme would have looked if they ever finished that doesn't look so good did it i wouldn't even mind so much but like everything else in the scheme they just pick and choose when this happens only in some levels does it do the warping effect a majority of them are just normal ass levels pick one and stick to it but i know why all this was done naca don't think you're fooling me limiting the look of your game was clearly just done as an attempt to make sure it could be ported easier to weaker consoles like the nintendo switch but not only that seems to have worked out well because this game looks so god damn dreadful on there the colors become so much duller and the textures look awful i know everybody makes this joke but it really does just look like a bad ps2 game i don't know why you'd even consider buying this game but if you are i beg of you do not get the switch version alright what's left to cover oh yeah the music that's good yeah surprisingly i find myself enjoying quite a few themes in this game i think for as annoying as the ball on bytes are the music itself almost makes it worth sitting through almost i also love the costume changing music the carnival theme there's a lot of great stuff here mixed in with a lot of tracks that are just sort of underwhelming like for example every time enemies come on screen it plays some awful sounding battle music with the bagpipes why also this game has like no enemies to speak of but there's like two moments where you have to defeat all of them to progress but they don't tell you you have to do this so i spent like 10 minutes wandering around looking for what i needed to do okay no i already talked about the gameplay i just i i just gotta move on i'm sorry this game is just so annoying sorry i'm so sorry so here we are the final boss does this game go out in a bang well it goes out in a seizure apparently don't worry that patch liked the strobe lights for the most part so you don't need to shield your eyes at the side of this boss but really i honestly enjoyed this boss quite a bit you absorb the powers of the friends you've made along the way and go through all 12 of them in four intervals where you're able to use whichever one you want and try and defeat lance's eyeballs where we then save his heart and get the chance to take a look at his face but i can't focus on that i'm too busy celebrating the fact that i'm finally done with balan wonder world say what now what what what do you mean a third act oh no no no so yes after beating the game you unlock an extra level in every single world each with their own set of new power-ups and lance statues at this point i kept getting told the same thing oh yeah mark the minion game sucks but the post content is what's good no they're not no they're not they're just the same levels with slightly different layouts they're no better or no worse i don't care what you say i played through each and every one of these extra levels and it did not make me feel like my purchase was any more any less justified therefore i don't care i don't suddenly like the game because of them like the ice one for example is the idea of it just being one big slide cool yeah little but it's filled with those problems where i find myself getting off the beaten path and all i'm rewarded with are the gems it doesn't feel like i earned anything for exploring not to mention it's filled with sections where they expect you to have a certain costume to get by and these levels are super stingy with those so if you don't have it you just gotta quit no i'm not giving these levels a pass they're all awful in conclusion what the happened here well i can answer that actually yuji naka is a very talented man with plenty of cool and creative ideas but sometimes it seems like he can get a little too into his own stuff without thinking about how this stuff would actually unfold and translate into a full game like he said he just kind of said there'd be 80 costumes on a whim with no intention of actually doing it like it's kind of a bold claim look yujinaka you're clearly talented and car a lot about game design man that's more than i can say about your counterpart over at sonic team but at a certain point you got to know your limits and your limits were clearly trying to make a new company revolving around a 3d platformer that you wanted developed by folks who primarily program jrpgs reviews have shown that people really do not like this game unsurprisingly i think it's like the fourth worst ranking switch game of all time and seals figures showed that the game only managed to push around 2 000 copies in japan and didn't even break into the top 40 charts in the uk during its first week like come on even team sonic racing got number one for a little while and that game so like this whole project was just seriously mismanaged i like sonic a lot if you're new here it's my favorite franchise but when i saw so many people getting excited and confident that this game would be good because it was held by the guy who worked on sonic my first reaction was really guys this is supposed to make us excited we're talking about the same sonic right it sucks to say because clearly this guy had a ton of fun with this this was absolutely not a result of laziness this dude carted a lot about making good product here the cutscenes just ooze charm but he just never stopped to slow down and think that maybe he was severely limiting himself in terms of gameplay through the self-mandate to be as simple as possible because in his aims to make a game that was as simple as it could be he instead created a game that most people are confused and utterly baffled by and i really hope he gets another chance to work on a game soon maybe just not as the main director at best balan wonder world is an extremely harmless mediocre platformer that a baby might get some modicum of enjoyment from and at worst it's an unpolished mess with an influx of poor design choices that comes off like the guy behind it never actually had a hand in creating one of the most famous gaming mascots of all time and after all this i'm only left to say balan is white [Applause] you

Channel: LS Mark

Views: 558,333

Rating: 4.9183121 out of 5

Keywords: LS Mark, Balan, Wonderworld, Balan Wonderworld, Balan Wonderworld Review, Balan Wonderworld Bad, The Problem with Simplicity, Balan Wonderworld The Problem with Simplicity, Yuji, Naka, Yuji Naka, Sonic The Hedgehog, Sonic, Balan Wonderworld Sonic, Balan Review, Is Balan Wonderworld Bad, Is Balan Wonderworld Good, Balan Wonderworld Demo, Balan Wonderworld Demo Bad, LS Mark Balan Wonderworld

Id: d0epNUJgGyE

Length: 58min 28sec (3508 seconds)

Published: Fri Apr 23 2021