The Wonderful 101: Remastered Review

The Wonderful 101 is a colorful, exciting character action game developed by PlatinumGames. However, its initial release on the Wii U in 2013 didn’t exactly make a huge splash. This may have been due to the lukewarm reception to the Wii U, or perhaps it had something to do with the game, itself.

Fortunately, though, this interesting little superhero game has gotten a second life on newer consoles with a recent remaster. But does The Wonderful 101: Remastered do enough to make this update worth your time?

The Wonderful Ones

Playing as a team of superheroes, the player will race around various levels while collecting more and more supers to join the group. Naturally, players will also be taking on a variety of bad guys and bosses, while helping save citizens and cleaning the setting up a bit. Of course, the Wonderful Ones manage to cause plenty of property damage all on their own, too. (It’s fun, though, so don’t worry about it.)

Unfortunately, the story in The Wonderful 101: Remastered is simply competent. It’s certainly entertaining and fun, but it mostly feels like an afterthought. It grants plenty of excuses to do insane and goofy things within the game, though.

More than an action game

Based on first impressions, it’s easy to assume that The Wonderful 101 plays similarly to the Nintendo series Pikmin. You control lots of characters at once and solve puzzles with them, right? While that isn’t wrong, The Wonderful 101 is far more than that. This makes the game insanely deceptive, as it looks much simpler than it is.

A fair comparison would be something akin to Devil May Cry or Bayonetta. The Wonderful 101: Remastered is a fast-paced action game with a really neat twist to it. While you are frantically raising your combat rating with style, you also have to analyze the situation. By doing this, you identify which action to take next, which typically involves using a certain move.

The gameplay hook is what accompanies these special moves. By using the crew of wonderful supers, the player will be able to draw specific shapes in order to gain access to move sets. These moves employ swords, whips, giant fists, and more. However, drawing these shapes on the fly can be challenging in the middle of battles. Fortunately, the drawing mechanic is pretty good about recognizing what you’re attempting to draw.

Of course, this system was created for the Wii U gamepad which allowed players to use a stylus to draw on the screen. New consoles and PC do not have this feature, so the thumb sticks and mouse will have to do. In my experience, the gamepads worked far better for this game than mouse and keyboard did. Using the mouse to craft the shapes felt pretty janky and clumsy, whereas a controller’s sticks felt much more responsive.