Your goal in Balan Wonderworld is to complete all 12 chapters, each of which is divided into two acts, a boss fight, and a third act that unlocks upon rolling the credits.
If one seeks to really delve into the lore, a novel is also available that expands upon the ideas and characters presented in the game. Still, the themes represented are wholesome and relatable, covering topics like coping with loss or finding the courage to follow your heart. These stories don’t entirely land, since they’re organized in a strange way – you won’t learn the story of the character in question until you’re about to fight the chapter’s boss and you’re given a resolution immediately afterwards, making the whole thing feel done and dusted too quickly to have any real impact. Each of the 12 chapters covers the backstory of a character, how they fell into the depths of negativity, and how they learn to improve or move on with their lives. Gorgeous CGI cutscenes accentuate the adventure, bringing Naoto Ohshima’s character designs to life, and they do a great job of establishing Wonderworld as a place where anything can happen. Fate brings them to a theater called Wonderworld, run by the enigmatic Balan, who whisks them inside and tasks them with aiding 12 different people by cleansing the negativity from their hearts. The game begins with two kids, Leo Craig and Emma Cole, appearing listless and lost in their daily lives. It’s also worth noting that this was only Yuji Naka’s second project as a director (the first being Chu Chu Rocket!) and that he earned his reputation specifically through his programming skills on games like Phantasy Star. The game was developed by the teams at Arzest and the newly founded Square Enix subsidiary Balan Company, and with these teams come a vastly different design ethos compared to the glory days of Sonic Team, focusing on slower-paced exploratory adventuring seen in their divisive games such as Yoshi’s New Island and Hey! Pikmin. It’s important to emphasize that Balan Wonderworld being marketed as from “the creators of Sonic the Hedgehog” was rather misleading, since such a claim made people expect a successor to Sonic Adventure or NiGHTS into Dreams. Some complaints were addressed via the day one patch, but the damage was already done and the game was seemingly destined for failure – releasing on the same day as Monster Hunter Rise certainly didn’t help either!
Players were befuddled by the aesthetic, displeased with the game’s pace, and unable to see the appeal of the costume system combined with the single-button controls. What initially appeared to be a promising collaboration between the renowned Yuji Naka and Naoto Ohshima during its debut at the Xbox Games Showcase in 2020 ended up becoming the internet’s punching bag once people got their hands on the demo. If you’ve ever wondered why there aren’t demos for every game, look no further than Balan Wonderworld.
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