1458: Wonderful!

I was fortunate enough to catch a pricing error on Nintendo’s Web store yesterday — I didn’t even know they had a Web store until yesterday, incidentally — that enabled me to score copies of The Wonderful 101 and Pikmin 3 for Wii U for just £8.95 each. It was touch-and-go as to whether Nintendo would honour these low prices, as it is any time a pricing error such as this comes up, but fortunately they honoured my purchase and I’m now the proud owner of digital copies of both of the aforementioned games. (I’d normally prefer physical, but my Wii U isn’t exactly heaving with other downloads, so I can live with these two being boxless.)

You may ask why I didn’t already own these two games, given that many Wii U owners regard one, the other or both as among the best games on the console. Well, the simple answer is that I wasn’t sure if I’d like either of them — and certainly not enough to drop £50 on them. £8.95, while a relatively high price compared to what you can pick up in a Steam sale, is well within “impulse purchase” territory, however, and I was happy to give them both a go for that price.

I tried The Wonderful 101 tonight. I have enjoyed the Platinum games I’ve played to date — particularly Bayonetta, which in retrospect is probably one of my favourite games of the console generation just gone — but had heard that this was somewhat challenging and tough to get to grips with. As such, I approached it with a certain degree of trepidation.

It is somewhat challenging and tough to get to grips with, but much like Bayonetta rewarded you spending some time with it and getting to know how everything worked, so too does this game — and it doesn’t take all that long to get your head around what’s going on enough to improve your end-level ranking by a considerable degree.

For the uninitiated, The Wonderful 101 is a bizarre game in which you play a small army of superheroes as they attempt to fend off an alien invasion. The entire band moves as a group following whichever character is currently marked as the “leader”, and various button presses can cause their formation to expand or contract.

The key mechanic in combat is making use of the “Wonder Line”, which allows you to do various things with your small army of minions. By drawing shapes on the touchscreen of the Wii U GamePad or twiddling the right stick in various ways, you can perform “Unite” attacks — drawing a circle causes a number of the party to form a giant fist, for example, while drawing a straight line allows them to form a sword. You can also stretch your line of heroes over gaps and up walls to make bridges and ladders, too, and in order to snag some of the levels’ secrets it’s entirely necessary to do this.

The game is obviously very different to Bayonetta, which focused on a single character with a diverse variety of skills, but it also has a number of things in common with its spiritual precursor. For starters, all the enemies have distinctive “tells” to show when they’re about to attack, and by learning these you’ll know when to dodge and when to make use of the hilarious “Unite Guts” move, in which the entire party morphs into a giant pudding and shields against an attack. In Bayonetta, dodging attacks was key to the experience as it allowed you to trigger “Witch Time” in which time slowed down and you could send your score into orbit; in The Wonderful 101 it’s a much more practical affair — it simply prevents you from taking damage, though in some cases, successfully blocking can rebound projectiles back at enemies or flip armoured vehicles onto their rooves.

I’ve only played two levels so far — both of them twice — but having got a handle on how everything works relatively quickly I now feel I “get” what the game is doing and look forward to trying more. I don’t know if I’ll end up obsessing over it quite as much as I did with Bayonetta when that first came out, but it’s certainly got a lot of the same ingredients — and if you’re a Wii U owner who has enjoyed Platinum’s other work, I’d say you probably can’t go all that far wrong with this.