I tried Balan Wonderworld, because I love Sonic, and I love NiGHTS, and I even love Rodea: The Sky Soldier, so I thought surely Balan couldn't be as bad as everyone says. Well, I guess it's not that bad, but it is terribly boring. I feel like I must be playing it wrong, because surely I'm missing something.
The game is by the creators of Sonic and NiGHTS (and one of the creators of Rodea) and you can see ideas that Yuji Naka has always been obsessed with.
>1) Simple controls. Like Sonic and NiGHTS, your character is controlled with only the joystick for movement and a single action button that does everything else. And well you do you other buttons to switch between costumes (which function as movesets), but that's effectively menu control and doesn't count.
>2) Jesters who help people, namely a playable male and female with different cutscenes but the same gameplay, in their dreams by allowing them to transform into him so they can achieve their dreams in real life. This game has pretty much the same story and protagonists as NiGHTS.
>3) Michael Jackson. From Moonwalker to Sonic 3, to a noted inspiration (among many) for Sonic's character design, these guys love Michael Jackson, and Balan is basically just a cross between MJ and NiGHTS. Also he dances.
So it's basically a 3D platformer, but the gimmick is that you can only do one move at a time, based on what costume you're wearing. Or rather, you only have one action button. Sometimes holding the button or rapidly tapping it or things like that will get you additional effects. Unlike Sonic Adventure, which had a single action button but also a jump button, jumping counts as an action here. Some costumes can't jump. Some can't attack, and only have some sort of traversal skill. So basically you're going to always want to carry a costume that can jump and attack, and then you need to switch to it every time you need to do either. Luckily many also have more passive abilities, like sticking to certain walls, or swimming, and those don't really use up your button.
The problem with all this is that you can only carry three costumes at a time, and switching between them isn't quite instant. That little pause gets annoying after a while. Every time you get hit, you lose the costume you're wearing. You can collect more costumes, including duplicates, and they respawn, so you can farm for them if you want. When you collect a fourth, the third on your list gets sent to a bank. If you get hit, you don't automatically get a new costume from the bank, you're just left with two. You can swap which ones you're carrying with ones from your bank (and fill any empty slots) at any checkpoint. This results in times when you reach a point in a level where you clearly need a certain costume which you have in the bank, and then need to backtrack just to get to a checkpoint so you can swap out the costume you actually need. I would have preferred greatly if you could just pick any costume you had banked without needing to go to a checkpoint, but I suppose the problem there is that costumes are also effectively hitpoints, and this would let you collect way too many hitpoints.
Also, to use the bank, you need to stand still on a checkpoint for a few seconds, which isn't explained, so it's easy to just walk over them and not notice anything will happen if you stand still. I only tried standing still on them because I wanted to fast travel between checkpoints and it looked like something you could maybe do. You can't, but that's when you discover the whole bank system, which is really essential due to the backtracking requiring you to bank costumes in later levels and bring them back to earlier levels.
I'm unsure if I'm just playing wrong, because it sure seems like the game intends you to backtrack and return to previous levels with costumes you don't get until later levels. But to be fair, the game lists how many collectables are in each level, and while there are some that seem just out of reach and beg for a new costume, there are many I just haven't even spotted yet, despite thinking I explored the levels well, which makes me think and hope that maybe it's my own fault. Sometimes there is actual tricky exploration and platforming, but not often. The game seems trivially easy, unless it's actually so tricky that I can't even see the challenges that I'm missing. But I'm usually pretty good at exploration and platforming in games, so I must really be missing a lot.
The game also includes creatures called Tims, which are blatantly this game's version of Chao, or more accurately, Nightopians. Despite clearly being Chao, they're much simpler, basically as simple as Nightopians from the original NiGHTS game. You collect these different colored jewels around the levels, they're your coins or rings, and then in the hub world you feed them to your Tims. They change color based on which color jewels they eat. When a Tim eats enough it grows bigger, and when it's at its biggest size, you can throw a smaller one at it and they'll have an egg, which hatches into a new one. You can also find new Tims and eggs in levels. When you enter a level, I think you bring a max of five Tims with you, and they behave differently based on color. Like one color might attack enemies for you, another might grab jewels, another might be more likely to find eggs. Really they're so weak and useless that even though they're supposed to do these things, they don't matter. All that happens is they can die if they get attacked by enemies, and you don't get to choose which Tims go into a level with you, so if you have one you don't want to die, and he follows you in, I guess you gotta quit and keep going back until he doesn't follow you in. You don't want to waste a big Tim that is almost ready to breed. Also, if a Tim eats enough jewels of a certain color, he'll get a medal in that color, and if he gets all medals, he can apparently become a Rainbow Tim, which I haven't done yet.
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