Playing A Game The Wonderful 101 WiiU

After playing through the Wonderful 101 demo on the eShop, I ... still don't really understand the game very well.

On a micro level, there are a handful of mechanics that - after being thrust upon me with little or no tutorial text - I've become accustomed to. You lead a team of semi-artificially-intelligent people through a level, but unlike Pikmin, the character you play as (the team's "leader") is itself one of these people, and you can change who it is on the fly. By either drawing simple gestures on the GamePad screen, or moving the right analog stick along the same gesture, you can direct your horde into the form of a weapon: a giant fist, a giant sword, or a (giant) gun, plus some other semi-hidden shapes I discovered by accident. You can then proceed to use this weapon to wail away on enemy robots -- or, you can order some of your teammates to take the weapon instead. You can split off up to three weapons in this way, and wield a fourth yourself, forming a dynamic AI team.

There are block and dodge moves as well, which involve respectively turning your crowd into a shield, and executing some kind of worm, shark, jump thing maneuver. In short, the pieces are all here for an attack-and-dodge character-action game; but the catch is that your character is made of a number of tiny people. And you'll add to this number by rescuing citizens on your way through the level; which allows you to make bigger weapons, and to split off more at a time.

And then you ... do what with all this? I'm still not totally sure. The level on display in the demo showed a pretty bewildering variety of activities, in the name of saving a city from alien invaders (I think): largely combat based, but also including some puzzle segments, where I had to turn dials to match a code, and some quick-time events that, mercifully, weren't all that quick. There were a few interjections from a helper-robot to explain what I was doing, but not enough that I actually got a clear picture of the level as I was playing in it. The game mostly felt like I was screwing around, not in service of any particular goal.

I'm willing to chalk that up to myself still not really understanding the game; it seemed like the demo level was pulled from the beginning, but not the very beginning, of the campaign, and so there were plenty of explanations missing. What I'm really struggling with, though, is the fixed-perspective camera. Considering the game's action is all in 3D, and particularly given the frequency with which foreground elements obstructed my view of the battle, being totally unable to rotate the camera - nor manipulate the zoom level, which varies between too-far-out and too-close-up depending on whether you're fighting or not - is a puzzling omission.

So in the end, I'm still waiting for answers from The Wonderful 101. At least I won't have much longer to wait.