Balan Wonderworld managed to be a center of the attention of many. Unfortunately, not for a good reason. This new Square Enix game is originally something people looked forward to as Yuji Naka, the creator of Sonic, will be the guy in charge of. Now, most Sonic games are awesome platformer games and since Balan Wonderworld is a platform game, it seems like nothing could go wrong. But something did, which lead us to a question, Is Balan Wonderworld really THAT bad?

For those of you who have not played the game nor have any idea about it, we highly recommend you to check our previous article first to get a glimpse of what Balan Wonderworld is and our initial expectation. If you’re done, buckle up because this will be a wild ride!

When starting Balan Wonderworld, we will be welcomed by a beautiful, fun, and well made cutscene animation about how our main characters met Balan. And then, BOOM! We are left in the middle plain and bland area with some cutesy bird-like creature and the first stage we could visit. Why and how we get there is not explained, making it the first red flag for us.

Before even entering the first stage, we can’t help but the expectation we had for the beautiful animation has turned to ash. The animation is rather clunky, somewhat similar to the PS2 era animation. While entering the stages, we realized another problem. In case you lived in a cave, you must have known that controllers nowadays usually have 4 action buttons, each could be programmed differently. However in Balan Wonderworld, all the buttons do the same action. At first we thought that we could only jump because we have no costume. But lo and behold! When we got our suit, we actually gained the suit power but lost the ability to jump. So unless your power suit is designed to jump or other variation of it, you won’t be able to get on top of something. Since there are 80 costumes in Balan Wonderworld, some are bound to have a similar power which is a waste.

Now, Balan Wonderland allows you to play in the coop mode. Unfortunately, they never made a promise that it will work properly. Balan Wonderworld coop mode proved to be even more frustrating due to its glitches. However, we have to agree that these glitches actually made the game somewhat more fun as you can’t help but to try to find a way to cheat the game mechanic.

So, aside from the wonderful cutscenes and beautiful music, is there really nothing to be enjoyed from Balan Wonderworld? Well, this is where things get tricky. There are actually quite a few things to enjoy from Balan Wonderworld, but not in the traditional way. If you want to enjoy Balan Wonderworld, we personally recommend you to think out of the box. Explore areas with costume from different stages, find glitches to cheat the game, immerse yourself in the well made setting on most stages. Those are actually the hidden gems of Balan Wonderworld that most managed to oversee.