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amazon Balan Wonderworld reviews
Balan Wamazon Balan Wonderworld reviewsonderworld – The big guy Square Enix currently has quite a few paper titles: Final Fantasy XVI, Final Fantasy XIV expansion: Endwalker, Final Fantasy VII Remake Part II, Forspoken, etc. but the latest is a brand new game, Balan Wonderworld.
Co-produced by Square Enix and veteran couple Yuji Naka (Sonic the Hedgehog) and Naoto Oshima (Nights into Dreams), along with the recent trailers, everyone thought Balan Wonderworld would be the “heir” of Sonic with high-speed gameplay.
However, the demo didn’t show us much of the game’s potential, but it did present some worrisome issues, and fans spoke out for Square Enix to fix them in the official release.
Balan Wonderworld is a game in the 3D scene genre (3D platformer), and usually, the scene games do not need to put too much emphasis on the plot.
Balan Wonderworld has tried to “stuff” something of what seems to be a story, albeit in a way that has neither a beginning nor an end.
At the beginning of the game, you will be given a choice between two characters Leo and Emma, and you will be shown a scene depicting the two boys and girls magically getting lost in the theater of the Polish conductor, and they are tasked with finding the lost piece of his heart, by helping a handful of other people find their heart piece.
And then they were transported to the magical world of Poland!
There are 12 chapters in total, each chapter corresponds to a character and shows that person’s difficulty, and the player’s task is to pass the first two levels to “unlock” the third level in each chapter and defeat the final boss – which is the character representing the alienated chapter, to fulfill the dream (or maybe solve the problem) of that character (with an epic dance).
The writer just calls it speculation about the story, because the game doesn’t explain anything, making the player feel extremely confused and confused do not know “Who am I? Where is this” for most of the plot.
Playing Balan Wonderworld, players will always feel that every element of the plot seems to have sprouted from… nothing: the evil “entities” named Negati, the Tims companions, even the bad guy Lance, everything is as if the scriptwriter can think of something and throw it in. The game is like that, there is no need for any structure or storyline.
As mentioned above, each chapter consists of 3 levels (4 levels, a secret screen that will open when the player completes the story) that will represent a character and the problem they are facing, however, The player only knows who the character is when he reaches… level 3.
The player will have to go through the first two levels (even optional, the player prefers to play level 2 before level 1) without knowing why he is here, what the surrounding things mean, and why the world has this shape.
Then, when entering the boss battle, the game begins to stuff it all in who is the representative of the chapter, what are the difficulties they face, how is the process of being corrupted by the Negati into the boss monster, and as a result, going through the first two levels makes the writer feel extremely meaningless, does not reflect anything, sometimes jumping into the final boss always creates more emotions!
In short, the plot of Balan Wonderworld, although it seems flashy, is a fragmented skeleton, with a disorganized composition.
Basically, in each level, the player will have to overcome a few puzzles by collecting different costumes with different powers, such as the “Moth” costume that will help the character fly (only when it’s dark) or the “Spider” helps the player crawl across.
The player can keep a maximum of three skins, if picked up more, the rightmost skin will be put in the inventory and can only be retrieved if the player picks it up again, or goes to the save points above Map to go to the store to change clothes.
Balan Wonderworld tries to create traction by advertising that there are 80 skins with different powers, but in reality, many of the costumes have similar powers, some of which are even quite… useless.
There is an “unlocked” skin in chapter 4 called “Box Fox”, which transforms the player into a block of metal, capable of sliding down cliffs, breaking obstacles, and becoming inviolable!
Sounds “strong invincible” right?
The problem is that you can’t control when you turn into a metal block.
It must also be said that many skins have pretty cool powers, and players can use their creativity to apply these powers in many ways.
This is exactly what Balan Wonderworld wants players to do: find costumes from this world to “unlock” a new path in another world.
However, be careful, because just being touched by the enemy is enough for you to lose the outfit you are wearing, if you want to use this power again you have to go and pick up the outfit!
But life is ironic, sometimes the clothes you need do not exist in the world you are discovering, and only water… get out, go to the other world to find clothes, get out and come back to this world.
where can you get a Balan Wonderworld online
Balan Wonderworld – Nintendo Switch: Buy it now
Balan Wonderworld (Nintendo Switch): Buy it now
There are hidden skins that require another hidden skin to “unlock”, meaning more worlds to jump over.
Finding new routes is also crucial to “unlocking” the plot when the next part of the story can only continue when the player finds enough Balan gold statues hidden in the levels (the reason why Why do we need to collect these golden statues and what they mean, the game doesn’t say – NV).
Perhaps exploring the level and finding gold statues would have been much more interesting, if some “genius” at Square Enix hadn’t come up with an idea: each skin had only one active button, corresponding to its unique function.
Sometimes you can’t even… can’t dance, basically because the three skins you hold all have the function “does not include dancing”.
So you have to go look around in this boring world to see if there’s anything to jump on, otherwise, it’s just water… jump into the cliff to respawn at the save point of the process to exchange!
Square Enix could have developed a system where skins could be combined, or simply danced regardless of the skin, but they didn’t, and The result is a system of extreme annoyance.
Monsters don’t offer much of a challenge, normal monsters mostly die after one hit, and boss monsters die after three hits, especially the final boss seems “a little bit more”.
Even, though the possibility of losing is zero when the costumes are provided continuously in the boss battle, losing one set will grow a new one, and losing everything is also… no big deal.
The only “challenge” here might be finding a suitable outfit to fly to the golden statue, but in reality, it usually doesn’t take more than 5 seconds to figure out what you need, as long as you can see it. Where is the golden statue?
In stages, the player can pick up golden hats, then participate in a mini-game called Balan’s Bout (also not sure what the meaning of the story – NV), and the player will perform some instructions such as pressing the B button when the images match or “spamming” the B button.
Unfortunately, Balan’s Bout also barely changes throughout the game, the same scene, the same challenge, maybe just getting longer, enough to make the player bored.
More annoying, is that Balan’s Bout will give you a Balan gold statue if you get a perfect score (all are Excellent), but if you fail to get a perfect score, you only have to… exit the game, try again!.
Balan’s Bout is not difficult, but sometimes the speed of Balan’s shadow changes unevenly, just need to slide a few millimeters to consider how much effort is “meaningless”.
A rare plus in the gameplay of Balan Wonderworld, perhaps, is that the player has to think about how to attack the boss monster with three different options, with the suits in his inventory, to be able to collect enough three Polish gold statues for each boss monster.
The plot is disjointed, the gameplay is boring, and players will still have to suffer “torture” with an extremely bad optimized Switch version, with frames per second around 15-20, sometimes even drops below 10, making the game like a real PowerPoint slide!
Players can only “enjoy” 30 FPS while they are… watching the scene!
Not only that, it seems that Square Enix didn’t bother to include anti-aliasing in this version, making the game look like it was ripped from paper and glued on at times. The scenes also did not escape fate, and the result was a “blind” experience for gamers who love this portable console.
Square Enix has always been strong in terms of scene execution, and Balan Wonderworld is no exception.
Right from the first scene, although it does not show anything in terms of the plot, at least the player can admire the colorful lines and very detailed character expressions.
The world in the game is also quite colorful and colorful, somewhat retaining players and inviting them to discover hidden nooks and crannies in different levels, provided of course that you… ignore The jagged lines are clear and the speed is under 20 frames per second!
Music is also a plus point of the game, with soft and relaxing music on the game screen (sometimes it will… cause drowsiness, such gameplay also adds melodious music – NV), but again quite thrilling in boss battles.
Unfortunately, the duration of each song seems a bit short, so it’s easy to get bored when you move through the game scene and listen to the same piece of music over and over again.