Simply Wonderful



When The Wonderful 101 was showed off for the first time, I thought it looked good, but wasn’t sure on a purchase. The mediocre reviews by some websites made me delay getting it. So when it went on sale for $30 I decided to buy it. After about an hour I was thinking why didn’t I get this game earlier?

How can I describe The Wonderful 101? Geathjerk forces are trying to destroy Earth, and it’s up to you and The Wonderful 100 to defend it. Cliché? Yes, but TW101 is set up like a superhero movie, so the superhero storyline comes with it.  Although the story has a few twists to keep it interesting.

At the beginning you save a busload of children that went out of control. You are introduced to Wonder-Red, the leader of The Wonderful 100. You will be introduced to new Wonderful people, all with a different power, unite-hand, unite-gun, Unite-sword, and more.  There are so many different ways to attack, sword has a wide range, gun shoots projectiles, and hand is strong but has little range. Learning what these powers do is important, not only for attack strategy, but there are puzzles you will solve too.



The controls are very easy to learn, except for one part, drawing the unite powers. Either draw the pattern with the touchscreen or use the right control stick. The touchscreen might be easier at first, but I would suggest giving the right control stick a good chance, once I got used to it I didn’t want to go back to the touchscreen. It depends on which way you think feels right.

Make sure you recruit people in distress! Do this by drawing a circle around them, some are a wonderful, but not all 100 of them have a unique power that you will use in the game, most will just add to your team after recruiting them

Fighting the giant enemies shows off how much fun TW101 can be. Taking down giant monsters with your unite powers is very satisfying. The enemies can be so different too, sometimes you have to use a unite form to damage them, sometimes it doesn’t matter what form you use.

The creativity in TW101 is astounding. The enemies, the bosses, and the puzzles are all unique. One thing that I liked was the QuickTime events. Along with a simple button press, you will also need to draw unite forms in certain QTE, something that made the QTE fun and not annoying.


Covering the graphics, it may not be perfect, but it looks really good for the cartoony style it was going for. The music is quality as well, however sometimes the music is louder than the voice acting, which is not really a problem but more of an annoyance.

I played it the first time on easy, as I heard TW101 can be hard and I just wanted to be able to beat it. I can say it can get hard. Luckily you have multiple continues if you die. I really appreciated that if you fell into lava or something, that instead of dying you lose a small amount of health and appear close to where you were.

Of course there are items in TW101, there are some that replenish health, some replenish unite gauge (sort of a stamina for unite powers), also you can buy new unite powers, that include reflecting attacks (unite guts) or an evade jump (unite spring) that each take up a small bit of unite gauge. Then there are the custom blocks, add them to your suit to activate certain abilities, that also take up some of your unite gauge.



Finally, we get to the bad parts of the game. Honestly, besides the controls, there is only one major thing that is wrong. Sometimes it’s hard to see where you are, even though the game tries to help by having a circle appear around you. The problem gets serious in the Vorkenn battles. I can’t tell you how frustrated I got when I couldn’t find myself and then got blasted by an enemy. So unless you have a 100” TV you will experience this problem.

The Wonderful 101 deserves its title, because it is certainly wonderful. Once you get the hang of the controls and you can deal with the confusing Vorkenn battles, this is one of the best games on Wii U. You simple can’t experience this game on any other console. So unite up your money and buy this game!

Main Pros: Fantastic gameplay and bosses, very unique and creative

Main Cons: very frustrating not seeing your character in some parts of the game

Final Score: 9/10