Wonderful 101

 

I got Mario Kart 8 when it got out and as a bonus you could get a free game so I went with this one, the Wonderful 101, by some considered the best non-Nintendo game on Wii U, which truth be told isn't saying much with the abysmal 3rd party support. Still, they are probably right since this game is freaking awesome. It's a superhero game where you control one of the Wonderful 100 as you fight back the space invaders GEATHJERK Federation in the Earth Defence war III. The gimmick is that you can gather 100 people (either drafted citizens or the actual W-100) and with them perform unite morphs to attack or interact with the environment.

Its story is parts serious, but more often a parody or homage to superheroes, mecha-series, transformers, sentai or power ranger shows or just other video games. It's freaking awesome. For example and SPOILERS!!! the final boss is both part Mother Brain from Metroid and Unicron from the 1986 Transformers movie. The design of the characters also reminds me of Thunderbird, the classic puppet sci-fi series from Britain and the story itself references the Terminator as the aliens come from the future, back in time to destroy humanity. One mission references this sci-fi trope to enter a body to destroy a virus or something. Also you have the Pokemon syndrome to gather all W-100 from all over the world... and for some reason Japan seems to have the highest per capita ratio of wonderfuls. Maybe it's Godzilla or something. The thing about the different W100 is that they come from all over the world, I even found one from Sweden... the Grim Reaper himself. Apparently he's from Umeå. My guess would be an homage to Ingmar Bergmans Seventh Seal or whatever it's called in English.

The most awesome thing, except feeling as a superhero team a la Justice League, is the music. They even have a theme song and I freakin love it... if you crank up the vocals a bit since the music drowns out the cheesy lyrics.

Nitpick is that changing weapons isn't 100% as you either use the gamepad touchscreen or the right analogue stick (stick is preferred) and the camera can be tricky in certain sections when you enter a building and the gamepad shows the view and you must solve a puzzle and the only way I found to look around was using gyro-controls. A bit irritating at times when you want to look 180. Other than that it might be on the shorter side, the story that is since the replay ability is huge in finding all 100, all data files, get the best score on more than 3 different difficulties and the characters are likable and the main character Wonder-red is perfect as total serious superhero which crashes with all others. Then on the other hand of the 7 main Wonders only 4 are given enough screen time to fully flesh out their quirks. Really, maybe a couple more story missions, but as tightly knitted the story is, it might make it worse. Really recommended so power up and save the day.