Balan Wonderworld Deserves More Credit

Balan Wonderworld has been the punching bag of the gaming community ever since its launch earlier this year. The game’s been mocked, berated, and reviewed so poorly that some have even begun calling it one of the worst AAA games of all time. And all of it is absolutely warranted. Balan Wonderworld is not a good game, but what if I told you that it was really close to not only being good, but being one of the best 3D platformers released in recent years? Well, that’s what I intend to convince you of today while also suggesting changes that would truly bring out Wonderworld’s full potential.

Directed by Yuji Naka, lead programmer of the original Sonic games and creator of Nights into Dreams, Phantasy Star Online, and Sonic Adventure, the game began its life with the creation of a brand new game studio, Balan Company, owned by Square Enix. The idea behind the studio was to create games in genres not normally tackled by Square, starting with a fun little 3D platformer. 

At its core, Balan Wonderworld is a game about the player entering Balan’s world and going through various levels, reaching the end and collecting statues in order to progress and save the day. Each level is centered around a particular character going through a personal struggle and contains various costumes with their own powers used for combat, traversal, and puzzle solving, all used with only one button to keep things simple enough for even the youngest of kids to enjoy.

While Square was initially hesitant, Naka’s prestige and promise of 80 different costumes convinced the publisher to green light the project and development began. Unfortunately the project took too long to develop and was eventually released in an unfinished state, with at least half of the costumes being rushed into the game towards the end of development. It was a critical and commercial failure, leading to Naka leaving Square Enix and currently considering retirement.

This is a travesty in my eyes. Balan Wonderworld was Naka’s pet project and has a lot of love and care poured into it, but is an obviously rushed and unfinished game. It didn’t just gain notoriety and infamy for being mediocre, but because there’s enough charm and originality left behind to garner public interest. There’s something about the concept and visual design that draws people in. So let’s start with the positives.

The Good

While the graphical fidelity of the assets is pretty bland, Wonderworld does have a distinct art style that stands out among other AAA games. Not only are the pre-rendered cutscenes absolutely gorgeous, but that visual style carries over into the actual game with many of the costumes brimming with creativity and fun; and levels like the MC Escher-esque art world and the trippy world of the invisible man making for fascinating places to explore. In short, while the textures and asset complexity aren’t up to snuff, the art direction itself is inspired and original.

And on the topic of presentation, the music in this game is one of the best soundtracks this year, no joke. Composer Ryo Yamazaki has worked at Square Enix for years composing and arranging tracks for games like Final Fantasy XIII and the Trials of Mana remake and this is yet another stellar piece of work. From the main theme to the level-specific tracks everything feels right at home and a delight to the ears. Hell, even in what felt like my millionth Balan Bout, I still couldn’t hate them outright because of the energetic score.

When it comes to the gameplay, the costumes are easily overlooked for both their creativity and their fun factor. While there are plenty of abilities that are limited in use or made irrelevant by costumes unlocked elsewhere, the wide variety in ways to attack, traverse the environment, and unlock new secrets is commendable and each new costume has the potential for a lot of fun, like unwrapping a birthday present.

Even costumes that become irrelevant serve an important purpose. When first going through the introductory stages, the player only has access to abilities that will get them to some of the trophies and enable them to reach the end of the level. However, upon returning with new abilities players are able to explore the levels to their fullest extent, offering a greater sense of freedom in exploration and practically giving the level a brand new life.

Speaking of breathing new life into a tired formula, Balan Wonderworld actually manages to successfully design its gameplay around a concept that even the Mario franchise hasn’t gotten right- a balance between collect-a-thon and course-clear platforming stages. To elaborate, 3D platformers often come in two varieties. Collect-a-thons are games in which the player is expected to travel through an open world to find hidden objects and figure out how to reach them. Think Banjo Kazooie or Super Mario Odyssey. Course clear platformers are all about getting from the start of a level to the end. There may be occasional side objectives, but the general goal is to reach the finish line like in Crash Bandicoot or Super Mario Galaxy.

The closest Nintendo has come to combining the two styles has been Super Mario 3D World, in which players must complete stages in order to progress on a map, but need to collect hidden green stars in order to unlock certain levels. However, despite the functional components of the game being a good mix on paper, in practice the levels push the player towards the end, providing enough green stars to finish the game without requiring too much exploration, so while it’s still a fun game, it feels more like a course clear game with an identity crisis than a true fusion.

Wonderworld has no such problem. Much like 3D World, it requires the player to complete each level in order to progress, but also tasks them with finding a certain number of Balan statues in order to reach the next act after completing each level’s boss. So, why does the amalgamation of these two subgenres work better here? The level design.

Where 3D World’s levels are largely linear affairs with green stars hidden in plain sight, often just off camera, It also has a timer pressuring players to reach the end quickly instead of searching for collectibles. Balan’s worlds tend to be sprawling open areas with various challenges and hidden nooks and crannies everywhere to explore. However, the levels also push the player forward down a very obvious path while allowing the player to determine their own pace. Because of this, Balan Wonderworld pulls off some masterful game design tricks that are only held back by other aspects of its design.

This balancing act is extremely difficult to pull off and the majority of the reason for the title of this video. Even the bosses have a similarly open-ended design, each granting the player up to 3 Balan statues for dealing damage in unique ways. This means that players who want to progress with the game can do so by utilizing whichever damage method they deem the easiest while those looking to collect everything can find even more depth and challenge in figuring out each and every boss.

Everything I just mentioned is included in the game, but rarely talked about in discussions in favor of mocking the attempt. It’s amazing how inspired many of these design choices turned out to be, clearly being made by someone with a love and passion for the platforming genre. Unfortunately, there is one thing getting in the way of these amazing ideas… The rest of the game.

The Bad

Yeah, I don’t want anything I just said to get misconstrued. Balan Wonderworld is still a complete mess, with many of the positives I mentioned only being notable in the ending chapters of the game when things really open up. From start to finish the game can be broken, tedious, repetitive, and downright annoying to play. If I were to cover everything this video would be hours long, so let’s just go over the most prominent issues dragging the game down.

First up is the execution of the core concept. While the idea of collecting 80 costumes and using their unique powers to find collectibles sounds fun, it can be a real chore. First, costumes are consumable since they’re used as hit points. Getting hit just once removes the costume and the only way to get it back is to return to the level where you found it and collect it again, with the best costumes being worth the boring process of grinding by waiting for the costume to respawn over and over before sending it to the changing room.

And that changing room will be used a lot over the course of your playthrough. The player can only hang onto three costumes at any given time, meaning that any time you find a statue requiring a different costume to reach, you have to trek back to a checkpoint, swap out costumes, pray you don’t take any damage on the way back, and then use the costume once to proceed. 

Even when you do have all the right costumes, Wonderworld has this weird dedication to its single-button control scheme. Every single button on the controller performs the same action, meaning that if you’re wearing a costume whose ability doesn’t involve jumping, your character can no longer jump. The only exception to this is the L and R buttons swapping costumes, but rather than making the transition instantaneous the player is forced to wait for this animation to play out, which isn’t too bad at first, but gets really annoying in levels that require constant costume changes. Costumes also can’t be changed in the air, probably so players don’t switch to something they’re okay with losing after taking a fall. Though that only leads to more grinding.

And as mentioned before, the sheer number of costumes leads to many feeling irrelevant or duplicating others. Air Cat and Frost Fairy are practically identical with their multi-jump ability. Floaty Flower allows the player to slowly hover over a long distance, but Soaring Sheep from three levels earlier does the same thing while also having the ability to float upwards on wind drafts. Happy Horn, Amadeus, and Metal Bad Boy all play music on special stages, but the only difference is the song being played and the reward is just a few gems!

Speaking of gems, they’re completely useless. The only purpose behind all of these things littering the environment is to feed the Tims back in the Isle of Tims hub world. Feeding Tims leads to them growing big and spitting out a Tim egg, creating even more Tims to power the Tower of Tims. And what does all that Tim stuff do? Absolutely nothing. These cute little bastards don’t even have fun mini games like the Chaos in Sonic Adventure 2. They’re good for one thing and one thing only: dropping off the edge of the island like a penguin in Mario 64.

The levels themselves are also full of bugs and glitches from minor graphical issues like pop-in and models freaking out to major problems like me getting stuck and unable to jump away from some debris, some objects in the environment looking solid, but lacking collision, and even needing to repeat the entire final boss fight when the game glitched out after I dealt the final blow.

And while on the subject of repetition, the Balan Bouts are a nightmare. When finding a top hat in a level, it begins a simple CGI cutscene that tasks the player with timing a button press to Balan’s model as he reaches a silhouette on screen. The problem is that these bouts occur two to three times in nearly every stage and require absolute perfection to get a statue despite being boring as hell. And if you fail you can’t just try again, but instead have to exit the level (sometimes restart the game), remember which bout you failed, get back to the hat, and then give it another shot. It’s mind-numbing.

The sports minigames also require perfection and have some of the sloppiest controls I’ve ever seen, which is shared among some of the other costumes, but when your punishment for failure is needing to replay an entire Balan Wonderworld level the sporting outfits are far more trouble than they’re worth.

Not only that, but the controls during these sections don’t allow for pausing, so the only way to stop them is to hit L and R… Returning the player to the title screen and losing all level progress made thus far!

Of course, none of this really matters much without motivation, but the player doesn’t get that either since Balan’s story hardly exists in-game. In the entire game you get a short intro cutscene showing your character entering the world, each level’s boss is preceded by a short clip explaining who the character is and why they’re sad, the boss fights end with a dance sequence and another clip showing the level’s character getting back on their feet, and the end of the game has Balan saying goodbye to everyone.

I won’t go too in-depth on this since Austin Eruption already covered the story of Balan Wonderworld perfectly in his video, but the gist is that the majority of the story can only be found in a book outside of the game. It has backstories for all of the characters, an explanation of Wonderworld, and a bunch of plot details that are completely missing from the main game. I highly recommend checking out his video to learn more because it’s a fascinating misstep in game development the likes of which are rarely seen.

One particularly interesting problem is that of the co-op. That’s right- there’s co-op in this 3D platformer and it’s mind-bogglingly terrible. When a second player joins, they’re able to roam around freely and get their own life bar and set of costumes, but the experience is dreadful. For one, the costumes don’t double up so players are either forced to wait for a respawn or have someone continue without any powers.

On top of that, the game isn’t split screen and only player one controls the camera, meaning that unless the two players are perfectly in sync, player two will constantly be running off screen, unable to see where they’re going. To remedy this the game implements its weirdest feature- when the two players get close enough to one another they link together and both players’ inputs affect the character, only separating when the players run in opposite directions. It’s an absolute nightmare and baffling in its incompetence.

Some other issues that don’t require any kind of explanation include the player’s slow walking speed and weirdly slippery running animation, a third of the levels being locked behind the end credits despite being some of the best levels in the game, enemies infinitely respawning to annoy the player instead of presenting a challenge, and levels sometimes having all of their doors and pathways unlocked on repeat visits and other times requiring a full playthrough to complete again. 

There are also weird quirks that aren’t awful, but do make me question what the designers were thinking. For example, to unlock a costume players first need to collect a key, but nearly every level places the costume keys right next to the costume box if not somewhere nearby. Just an odd choice.

Clearly Balan Wonderworld has a lot of issues, but that doesn’t mean the game is rotten to the core. In fact, I’m convinced that with 6 to 12 more months of development time, many of these problems would have been ironed out to fix the game entirely with a few simple design choices. So let’s go through one more time. Let’s fix Balan Wonderworld.

Reaching Wonderworld

In order to fix the game we need a quick checklist of everything that’s broken, which I’ve made here:

We need to go through each of these issues and try to improve or alleviate them without significantly impacting the rest of the game.

Now obviously certain issues just require more development time and testing to fix rather than design changes. So the glitches, graphical bugs, framerate, and such will all be lumped together under that vague blanket. It’s also a good idea to give the animators more time to make the movement animations for each costume feel more natural. Wonderworld was clearly rushed, so taking their time would allow the team to fix these problems.

There are also some problems that can be fixed with little to no effort. Color grading on the textures would go a long way to making everything feel more cohesive and look less amateurish, more like the CGI cutscenes. Walking speed just needs a small bump to make these large worlds more navigable. Duplicate and pointless powers need to be removed such as Air Cat and Key Mouse. And when returning to a level, doors and other gateways should always remain open, enemies stay defeated instead of respawning, and checkpoints can be used as teleportation pads between one another to speed up backtracking, giving the player more freedom and limiting repetition when going back to collect more statues.

Balan Bouts and sports mini games need to respawn any time the player re-enters a level and they should be able to be paused and restarted immediately, while also limiting each of the 12 worlds to one bout each. Plus each bout should be themed around the level itself instead of taking place in a void. Such as rescuing a kid from a burning building in the fire world or completing a massive self-portrait in the art world, just to add a bit of variety. Lastly, co-op can stay in the game, but needs split screen and doubled-up costumes. Maybe add in online multiplayer to make things even better.

There, with about one to two months' worth of fixes we’ve already knocked half of the issues off the list. So now let’s move on to the more time consuming changes- those that fix the game’s fundamental issues. Starting with the most important change: giving the player a health bar with three hearts and letting them permanently keep the costumes. This removes all of the grinding, allows the player to enjoy the costumes they like, and makes them more likely to try fun and innovative strategies since they won’t fear losing a valuable ability. To regain health, the costume boxes should just be replaced with extra hearts and the keys can be removed entirely.

The next change is also a big one- ditching the single button mechanic. Instead of having all of the face buttons perform the ability of the current costume being worn, the player now has 5 costume slots with 4 being used for the face buttons and the fifth being used for a passive ability such as Lovely Lantern or Happy Horn. This not only allows the player to use different powers in combination with one another, but opens up the possibility of designing the world to be more challenging as a result. Plus the costume changing animations and constant trips to the changing room are now things of the past.

However, giving the player access to all of this from the start could be overwhelming and make the game too easy. To help with this, players would start the game with only two costume slots, gaining one more for every three bosses they defeat until they hit the maximum. Presentation-wise the game could go two ways- either stripping the costumes down to their functional components depending on what the player’s wearing or my personal preference- letting the player choose a slot to assign as their worn costume.

One question that you may be asking is how players acquire costumes now. The answer is simple- Balan statues. While each level would still have plenty of statues to find, some are now replaced with new costumes. And since players no longer have to grid to collect them, getting a new costume will feel like a reward. Every level would also start by providing the player with a simple costume to use that allows them to reach the end, but only by acquiring new costumes are they able to get all of the statues.

Speaking of the statues, they now perform a dual purpose. Not only do they allow the player to progress between chapters, but they’re now how the player gets more Tims in the hub world. Each statue now gives the player 3 new Tims. So this leaves two gaps in the game- first, the teardrops. If they’re not used to feed Tims, what are they for? Well now they’ll be like coins in Mario 64, with players needing to collect a certain amount in each level to get an additional statue, forcing them to explore every nook and cranny.

So then if the Tims aren’t there to be mindlessly fed after completing a level, what are they for? The story. The missing story bits from the Balan Wonderworld book would now be added in, with a new one unlocked every time the Tower O’ Tims gets an upgrade. This gives the Tims a purpose and grants the player some insight into what the hell is going on.

Speaking of the story, the cutscenes need to be reformatted and expanded upon. The first stage a player enters should begin showing the character in question and their passion, but when they finish the stage they get another scene of something going wrong. The second stage shows the problem worsening as the character struggles and fights to fix the situation, but ends with the character at their lowest point. Finally the boss levels begin with a transformation as usual. They’re not going to be high art or anything, but it’ll spread the story over the course of the level and give the player some motivation to help the character in question.

And that covers pretty much the entire base game. With these changes the game has a faster pace, less tedium, and a better utilization of its core mechanics to bring out its best elements. However this is a collect-a-thon, so we can’t leave out the completionists.

For one, defeating the final boss still unlocks a new remixed stage in each level with each stage still giving the player a rainbow gem upon completion. However, when all 12 rainbow gems are acquired and given to the Tim statue in the hub world, the player unlocks a new compass costume, with the passive ability to point the player in the direction of the nearest uncollected statue or note the weak spots during different phases of a boss fight.

Lastly, collecting every statue in a stage grants the player a chunky Tim in the hub world, collecting every statue in an entire level gives the player one of the more powerful costumes (keeping the difficulty curve intact by holding off on the more powerful abilities until the player has earned them), and collecting every single statue in the game still awards the player the Balan costume, but also two additional costume slots for the L2 and R2 triggers.

These changes may seem like a lot, but for a team the size of Balan Company, it’d be about 6 months to a year of work. And while I can’t guarantee that the game would be perfect even after all of these fixes, I feel like it would’ve been worth a shot rather than releasing the game in its current, unfinished state. 

While I know Balan Wonderworld isn’t going to get a sequel, I think that’s what makes the game sting the most and the reason so many people find it so fascinating. It has some really great ideas, the best soundtrack of 2021 so far, and clear passion behind its development, but it’ll never reach the heights that its best elements deserve. 

All we can hope is that publishers take this game as a lesson in patience and proceed with caution on future projects instead of rushing them out the door before they’re finished… Which, of course, isn’t going to happen, but it’s a nice sentiment. Kind of like the thought of fixing the issues in Balan Wonderworld. Anyway everything sucks, have a mighty nifty day today!