The Wonderful 101

The Wonderful 101 is arguably the strangest and at the same time most inventive action game of its entire generation. The player doesn't control a single hero but an entire swarm of superheroes in colorful suits defending Earth from an alien invasion. The camera watches the action from above, and the individual team members stick together like a flock. The core mechanic is the Unite Morph: the player draws a shape on the touchscreen or with the right stick, and the swarm instantly merges into a giant fist, sword, gun, whip, or ladder. Each shape has different properties, different controls, and a different role in combat and puzzle-solving, so the game feels like a mix of classic action, drawing, and tactics.

The structure is divided into operations reminiscent of episodes of a TV series, complete with over-the-top twists, giant robots, and battles that switch halfway through into something else entirely — a horizontal shooter, a giant mech fight, or a scene controlled from a single hero's perspective. This willingness to change genre every few minutes is among the best things the game offers, and at the same time it's the source of its reputation. The Wonderful 101 never explains anything twice, some players never quite learned the gesture-based controls, and the first hours can be confusing. But whoever pushes through finds an unusually deep combat system with blocking, dodging, and managing the energy needed for larger shapes.

Visually the game relies on bright colors, comic-book stylization, and enormous scene scale. The orchestral music sounds like the score to a superhero series from the seventies and supports that playful pathos remarkably well. Contemporary reception was mixed precisely because of the complexity and unusual controls, but over time the title became a cult item that found a devoted audience and later got released on other platforms as well. Today it stands as a reminder of a time when a major publisher could afford to fund a completely uncompromising authorial idea.