3/5 ★ – cosmichumor's review of The Wonderful 101: Remastered.

The Wonderful 101 is a frustrating game, not because of annoying game designs -though it has those- but because it keeps reminding you of the game it could be. While games like Bayonetta and Nier: Automata represent the imaginative and technical heights of Platinum, this game plays like an itemized list of what makes them such a beloved developer as well as their limitation. The premise of Wonderful 101 is a clever sendoff to superhero fiction. While it's mostly inspired by Japanese tokusatsu heroes, there's a whole bunch of other inspirations as well. The chibi/bobblehead design in particular seems inspired by Thunderbirds and the ending goes full on into an affectionate parody of space opera super robot shows. Other than some unfortunate bits of racism the aesthetics are great. They're unique and colorful and bring forth the feeling of a really fun and cheesy superhero show. Of course, you're not just playing as one superhero or even five. This is the Wonderful 101 of course, with the hundred and first being you. As you go through the game, you can find 100 new members. I imagine the idea at a point was to give each member a unique power, but more reasonably they're all variations on the main cast's powers: a huge hand, a huge sword, a huge gun, a huge whip, huge claws, or a huge bomb. There are some others later, but for most of the game those are the main powers you use to fight the monsters and solve numerous puzzles. In the meantime you can temporarily recruit fleeing citizens on each level, the more of which you have the more powerful you powers are. This format works really well. Until it doesn't. The combat is on its own fun and colorful. There's some good visual language of pretty much every enemy being bigger than you, and it's satisfying to get your team of superheroes on top of a monster and start beating it into submission like an army of very anime fire ants. Unfortunately, the large amount of characters means that the game's camera has to zoom out, meaning it's easy to lose track of yourself and the enemy at times, making the more demanding moments in gameplay more frustrating. As hurtful as it may be to your gamer ego, start on easy, because it's this game's normal whereas normal is this game's hard. I don't know why they decided to do that but here we are. In addition, the game is very fussy about which squiggly line you draw gets you a whip or a gun and when there are QTEs where failure means death, that fussiness leads to having to choose between starting the level over or continuing and getting the game insult you at the end of the level for sucking. It's too bad the Switch doesn't have a microphone because giving the player the option to shout the powers to activate them would have felt far more in the spirit of the game. The chaotic nature of the gameplay goes at odds with the twitch-based precision gameplay of Platinum's other games. It would have behooved this game to go for more of a Musou feel, but it takes almost all of its format from Bayonetta even when it shouldn't. Especially including minigames. There are a -lot- of minigames, some intuitive and fun and some controller-crushingly frustrating. Some even require two screens, a holdover from the WiiU version that they couldn't quite translate to the switch. One particularly frustrating minigame at the end involves controlling two spaceships at once with both analog sticks which just had me spinning them around until my eyes felt like they were in a Looney Tunes short from following them. Some of these can't be blamed on ambition, but simply on being a bad idea. How much you enjoy Wonderful 101 depends on how much you enjoy the Platinum style of gameplay and presentation or on how much you can forgive for a unique gameplay experience and aesthetic. For the 101 Wonders, there's another 101 blunders. Still, it's an ambitious game with very few like it so I'm inclined to be nice to it. Not every attempt at alchemy gets the philosopher's stone, but I'm still grateful to have been able to partake in the experiment.