regmcfly wrote:

Thankfully September has no games of any note out on any console no sir not one game of any import.

Dogfingers wrote:

Also: this sold 13K copies worldwide which is a disaster. Though it's not out in America yet.

Saur: I knew I was missing something and I fear many of the people reviewing this also missed it, this game requires a certain structure during battles in order to make it make sense. You remember how in Viewtiful Joe people who didn't understand the game used to slag it off as being repetitive and simple? This was simply because they didn't understand the structure required in order to fight properly. In Viewtiful Joe you could only damage enemies properly once a certain condition is met, the most basic condition is that you dodge an attack. Once you meet that condition, you must then damage that enemy as much as possible (but don't kill it) before repeating the process on all other enemies on-screen. Once you have damaged all enemies, you hit SLOW and bash each enemy with a SLOW attack. Each enemy you strike during SLOW adds +1 to the multiplier applied to the total points you gained before you went into SLOW.

The Wonderful 101 functions under the same premise, but this time you're moving in 3D space so they've jiggled the mechanics around. The most basic structure of The Wonderful 101's fights are: Team Attack > Climb Attack > Combo for damage. Many enemies have armour which must first be broken, so the structure there will be: Break Armour > Team Attack > Climb Attack > Combo for damage. The key to this system is the "Team Attack" on [X] button which causes your units to lunge ahead of your position and hit the target. Repeatedly hitting the enemy with Team Attack will eventually activate the "Climb Attack" which stops the enemy from moving momentarily (signified with a "clash" sound effect). This is the equivalent to the SLOW mechanic of Viewtiful Joe. In the Climb Attack state the enemy will be susceptible to all hit reactions, this means you can launch the enemy into the air and deal damage out of the reach of other enemies on the ground.

The Team Attack cannot be performed on enemies with armour, this fact is the equivalent of the many conditions you had to fulfil in order to properly combo and damage enemies in Viewtiful Joe. The Combo multiplier in this game operates on a timer, each time you hit an enemy you have 5 or so seconds to land another hit or else the combo drops. So in many cases where you need to break an enemy's armour, you will have many smaller enemies on screen which exist for the sole purpose of keeping the Combo Timer active. So suppose you have one big armoured tank and lots of small troops, you will need to break the large tank's armour while keeping the Combo Timer active against the smaller enemies. So your primary focus is reflecting the large tank's projectile attacks in order to break its armour (done by pressing the L trigger just before a projectile hits you), all the while using Team Attack and other light hits against the smaller troops to keep the Combo Timer active. Then once you've reflected enough projectiles to break the large tank's armour you then repeatedly hit it with Team Attack until it enters Climb Attack state. As soon as you score a Climb Attack you go in with full power; launching the enemy into the air and performing the biggest combo you can.

This is the basic structure of each fight, and the enemy waves are very deviously designed with the intention of getting you to multi-task and prioritise targeting based on threat.

It is also important to note that Climb Attack will not activate on an enemy in a "downed" state. You can only Climb Attack enemies which are "standing", as soon as the enemy falls to the ground you should switch over to Team Unite attacks to deal damage.

You only get a brief opportunity to deal damage in safety so it's important that you are able to string together big damaging combos. Many of the reviews I have read state that this is where the game falls apart, but I would beg to differ. Reviewers seem to be under the impression that you have to manually draw perfect replicas of the on-screen glyphs in order to select weapons, you don't. You use the right analogue stick to quickly enter commands as you would in a fighting game, think of the weapon glyphs as directional commands and not shapes to draw. Once you get used to this idea you can select weapons really quickly, even the trickier glyphs like the Unite Bomb only requires you to spin the stick once then hold a direction. This leads me to the next mechanic; you can draw the glyph for the next weapon to be used in your combo sequence during the attack animation of your current weapon. After you draw a glyph you must press [A] to equip the weapon to your Leader, the cool thing here is that all Special Attack commands end with [A] button. So you can draw a glyph during any attack animation then activate that glyph with a Special Attack command. This is the key to the big combos and the way to really up your game; you select the weapon and perform a Special Attack at the same time!

Also of note is a brilliant little mechanic which stops smaller enemies from attacking your group while you busy yourself with a more threatening enemy. If you hold [Y] your group bunches together close to the Leader, this is useful for keeping your units out of harm's way. If you don't hold [Y] however, your units will spread out and automatically attack any nearby enemies and actually stop the smallest enemies from entering an attack animation. This is absolutely vital when things get hectic, reviewers often complain that they cannot see everything that's going on - but with this mechanic you don't need to.

Once you get the basics down, you notice a ton of extra little mechanics which all fit into the main "premise". You won't even notice 90% of them until you start really learning the system.

If you like games which don't play themselves, games which require skill and learning from the player - you'll have an absolute blast with this. Don't listen to people who go on about "control issues" or the game being "repetitive", they haven't taken the time to bother learning the controls and the game is only "repetitive" when THEY play it because they aren't doing anything with the system. Nailing a difficult fight and scoring a Pure Platinum is legit, it's the sort of real satisfaction which has been removed from games lately and replaced by artificial carrot and stick Achievements. This is a real videogame!