Balan Wonderworld (demo) - all flash and no substance

"Balan Wonderworld," as projected by the demo, is fundamentally flawed. I have several gripes about it, but most of them come from one root problem.

The gameplay itself - which is the most important part when making a platformer - isn't enough for what it's trying to be. Behind its distortion shaders, it's as basic and straightforward as a 3D platformer can get. You move around and do one verb, and can change between up to three of those verbs after finding them. Getting damaged takes the verb you're currently using away.

And this barebones gameplay is in service to the hook of "80 actions." Eighty verbs, all of which do a single thing in all contexts, usually accomplishing at best two tasks though that thing. None of the verbs presented have the nuance and versility of Mario's jump, Sonic's spin, or Wario's shoulder bash. Imagine early "Kirby" games where the copy abilities only did one thing, except when you had a copy ability, you couldn't also jump or fly. Or manually dump it to return to the default.

The problem is not that the game is slow, so increasing movement speed won't help. The problem is not that the game is easy, so having more than three enemies in each stage won't help. The problem isn't even that the game is so shallow that stepping into it wouldn't get my ankles wet. The gameplay is serviceable, and would be acceptable if this was, say, a $5-tops indie puzzle platformer.

But it's not a $5 indie title - it's a $60 AAA title. It's directed by the most well-known name associated with Sonic Team and published by Square-Enix. They developed a subsidary "Balan Company" and there're also releasing a related light novel, with an English translation. They are hyping the hell out of this game - and all there behind all that hype is a cardboard standup with "FUN" painted on it by a four-year-old, backwards "N" and all. The opening cinemeatic is beautiful and apparently the music is good, but it's all on top of functionally what "Paper Mario: The Origami King" would be if all you could do in that game was move around the overworld and throw confetti.

This shallowness shows greatest in the boss fight presented in the demo. The boss dies in three hits. Just three hits. For maximum points, you apparently have to damage them with different verbs each time, so it seems like that every boss will die in three hits. The only other games whose vast majority of bosses go down in three (or so) hits that I know about are "Sonic CD," which has the worst bosses of any 2D "Sonic" title, and the ones in the first "Spyro," which are the weakest part of the game. Other bosses you may be thinking of like from "Zelda" games don't go down in three hits - they go down in three *cycles*, each of which involve multiple actual hits.

"Balan Wonderworld" is all flash and no substance. This is not a thing that can be fixed with a day-one patch. This would require a complete restart. If people protested against "Pokémon Sword & shield"'s production values, then what makes this different? A triple-A game with a pedigree like this has *no damn business* being *this* bereft of complexity.