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Unite up to save the day! Your mission is to be the defenders of Dearth…er Earth as 100 wonderful heroes in the Wonderful 101! Clearly this game was meant to make fun of the superhero comics with some humorous tones, and it was pulled of well.

In the Wonderful 101 you take control of numerous normal people who work ordinary jobs. However, when earth is threatened, they don their Wonderful Masks and become a masked superhero who work for the organization the Wonderful 100. You'll start off with a measly 10 heroes, but as you traverse the game, you'll find the other 90 heroes. These 100 heroes have the spectacular power to unite up and become Unite Morphs: various weapons to solve tasks and save the day. You will unite up to defend the Earth from the Geathjerk Galactic Armada who is trying to destroy it.

The Wonderful 101 has a lot of charm to it with witty dialogue, a rather hectic but satisfying gameplay, and hours of world exploration. You'll have a total of 11 possible Unite Morphs by the end game, with 7 by the midway point of the game starting off with the Unite Hand wielded by Wonder Red, the main protagonist of the game. A vast majority of the game revolves around drawing various shapes to form the Unite Morphs. The more heroes you have recruited (via circling potential recruits from civilians to the hidden heroes) the larger your morphs can become, meaning more power to their attacks. By the end of the game, I managed to find 60 of the 86 hidden main heroes but this did not severely cripple my game and it does have the replay value for better scores and to find the remaining hidden heroes as well as some secret heroes.

Gameplay is similar to Pikmin combat wise, but still remains quite fresh compared to it. Though I had some errors when trying to make morphs where things would become the morph I didn't want, but this was a minor hiccup here and there and is mainly my fault but given that some unite morphs use similar start up, you may find this problem a few times, but not too often once you master the unite mechanic. Other than that, a lot of the combat revolves around memorizing attack patterns and each Unite Morph is designed to specifically counter a certain attack property such as the Whip to remove Spiked armor of Sword to reflect lasers. The gameplay is a mix of open world 3D platforming, Pikmin-esque combat, and obstacle runs. There is even a few sections that pay homage to Punch-Out!!. Not to mention the numerous and seemingly endless amount of Quick Time Events, though these are mainly during scene transitions and the end of boss fights so don't expect them to ruin the pace of level exploration.

The score stays in line with the superhero theme as I felt pumped in nearly every chapter and the final boss theme really feels like a heroic fanfare as I commanded the Wonderful 100 to save the Earth from a Geathjerk-lead Armageddon. Other boss fights certainly made me feel like I was truly doing superhuman feats in the game.

Nonny's rating: 8/10. This game is really a WONDERFUL game. I personally enjoyed every second of it and is certainly worth trying it now that the price has been reduced to about half of its original price.

Nonny's Tips: Watch your special skill slots. Avoid using anything that slows down Unite Gague regeneration or quickly depletes your Unite Gauge. Honestly, you need to be able to Unite Morph as much as possible.