Balan Wonderworld Wondrous Platform Game by Square Enix

When it was announced, Balan Wonderworld certainly raised my eyebrow with its dream-like visuals and unique-looking platforming, along with it being directed by one of the Sonic creators, and Nights producer, Yuji Naka.

Balan Wonderworld

Unfortunately, that eyebrow soon lowered upon playing an underwhelming demo, but I was still hopeful the final game might turn out alright in the end. But did it? Well, Let’s find out. Balan Wonderworld is a Mario-style collectathon platformer focused on making use of a huge amount of swappable costume powers to work your way across a variety of levels. The levels each take place inside the mind of one of 12 troubled characters, such as a diver who’s scared of dolphins or a chess player dealing with the anxiety of losing to a newcomer, and you’ll have to help them out by battling their inner demons.

Balan Wonderworld gameplay

It’s a neat idea that often results in unique looking environments to match, like a mix between Cirque du Soleil and Disneyland. I especially liked this Inception-like wrapping effect, which even becomes a challenge when trying to judge floating distance. Unfortunately, the cool set pieces are outnumbered by environments that are simple and box-like at times, looking more artificial than I’d expect in a dream-like setting.

There’s generally a clear primary route through to each level’s endpoint, with the collectible statues being hidden off the beaten path. Sometimes quite a ways off the path, which reminded me of some early N64 platformers, in which you almost had to test the limits of the world’s boundaries and collision detection. I appreciated that it was possible, though it could be annoying at times too, such as with the coral layout, which was tough making my way around with the costumes available.

While some of the statues are hidden out in the open, others are locked behind platforming or areas requiring a particular costume, while others feature minigames, such as baseball or bowling, which weren’t particularly fun and didn’t really match the theme. One of the signs of a great platformer is having fun just getting around. But that often isn’t the case in Balan. This is partially due to the running animations being stiff and not quite matching up with your movement speed, but also due to the costume’s limited or restricted mobility.

This is a bit of a problem since costumes in this case play a major role I mean, there are 80 of them with each granting a different power, along with an extra hit point, to better explore these worlds. You can carry up to three at a time and swap between them freely. They include costumes such as Pumpkin Puncher that…punches, or ladder man who swiftly springs from ladders it creates to Seal Skater who can skate down halfpipes. While some can be fun, such as Tornado Wolf and his spin jump, others are slow and painful to use. Box Fox and Iron Apollo, I’m looking at you.

While there were a handful of decent ones, a smaller selection of better playing ones would have been preferred. Part of the issue is that Balan Wonderworld only has a single action button, meaning that some costumes sacrifice essential abilities, like jumping, for its special ability–which can be frustrating when you encounter, say, a 1-foot ledge you can’t climb without swapping to another costume first–assuming you have one. Sometimes I had to take damage on purpose just to ditch the costume and regain my ability to jump to clear that 1-foot gap.

Control options

Some costumes work around the one-button issue by tying their power to a timer or only when stationary, but I’m not a fan of that, such as with Invisible Man where it was difficult to even see where I was when the Invisible power would activate during thinner platforming sections. I know control schemes sometimes get a little crazy at times, but I think two buttons would have been an acceptable compromise! Especially since the lack of control options might be why there are simply too many costumes! With each chapter having at least 6 of them, they’re often introduced too quickly in succession without providing enough time to fully explore their idea.

Sometimes just 10 seconds or so before thrusting me into another costume. Adding to this, swapping between the three selected costumes takes annoyingly long, especially after experiencing how snappy a similar feature was in Bowser’s Fury. And to top it off, collecting Power-ups in and of itself is annoying, as it requires that you find a key to unlock them first–every single time, which quickly becomes tedious.

Even though they’re usually hidden nearby, it’s still an annoying extra step that just feels like needless padding! I would often stock up on keys and costumes when I could to avoid having to do it later since you can bank extra costumes to access at the start of each level or at checkpoints. As a result of all this, the initial part of the Balan Wonderworld game in which I had to find 25 Balan Statues to unlock more levels felt like a slog–especially since some statues require costumes from later worlds that can’t yet be accessed, which isn’t always clear.

One of the recurring statues is “Balan’s Bout,” which features sequences reminiscent of Yuji Naka’s Nights into Dreams…except it’s been relegated to an interactive cutscene. The missed potential here throughout the bulk of the game is disappointing, considering how great flying felt in that other game. Between levels, you’ll be in the game’s hub, the Isle of Tims, which is a somewhat relaxing place where I could take a break and feed Tims the crystal drops that I collected.

There’s not a whole lot else to do in this small hub aside from building up a Tim “playground” in the middle but I’d take it over a simple 2D menu to select levels any day. Plus, feeding Tims can be worth your time, as they tag along during gameplay, fight enemies or find collectables and bring them right to you. Unfortunately, the game doesn’t do a great job explaining how they work, making it easy to miss out on their potential.

Of course, there are Bosses too, which can be a highlight, relatively speaking. Most of which was fairly easy, but they each offered a twist in that they award more statues if you can figure out how to counter more of their attacks, which was kind of neat. The victory cutscene afterward might be the best part, where an animated cutscene shows how the level’s character overcomes the issue that was plaguing them, like someone who’s shy finally asking someone out, which was emotionally satisfying, though I could live without the handshake and dancing part.

The music can be grandiose and very fitting to each level’s theme, just sometimes there are smaller segments such as celebratory dancing tunes after a checkpoint that feel a bit out of place and almost gave me a jump scare at times. Graphically, the Switch version definitely isn’t among the platform’s better ports, as it has frequent frame pacing issues, such as slowdown whenever enemies spawned into the world, causing the system to chug for a half-second, messing up the flow of the game.

It was pretty painful at times, where I would clear out a room of enemies, then immediately respawn dragging the framerate down again. The frequent slowdown, combined with characters fading in and out, and collect athon gameplay, certainly reminded me of the 64 eras of 3D platformers…but not in a good way. And that might be the biggest problem with the game. It feels dated as it belongs to an era long since forgotten.

Now there are some positives: the pre-rendered shorts before bosses and at the end of a level are wonderfully done and fun to watch. And one costume is essentially a panda version of BB-8..which is kind of amazing. I should have stocked up on that one. And Balan Wonderworld actually does improve and become more tolerable towards the end, when I was able to choose whatever suit I wanted from various chapters, providing more freedom of movement.

But every time I started to enjoy something, it promptly smacked me right back with some new downside. It was hard to push myself through an experience that clearly needs more polish. Perhaps with a little more time in the oven, and a slender more focused experience, with fewer costumes and levels, it might have been a fun time. Maybe future patches will alleviate some of my issues, but in its current state, I simply didn’t like Balan Wonderworld, although I feel for the developers as developing during a pandemic couldn’t have been easy.