The bad movement and mediocre levels from the demo were enough to keep me from pre-ordering it, and the terrible reviews meant that despite wanting to play it at some point I didn’t buy it at launch. Character acceleration was the biggest issue, since the few moments it took to get your character up to their slow top speed felt particularly sluggish and made the game feel unresponsive. Your character in the demo ran at a pretty slow pace and it made the movement feel a little bit clunkier than it had to. The game is also buoyed by its soundtrack, which is the only thing about it that I can say I really enjoyed with no reservations (there are levels in the game that are pretty ugly but all the music is good.) The cinematics are at times pretty appealing and the character design is very kid-friendly but sometimes creative and never unpleasant. It looks like a fancier version of a Dreamcast game, and I loved the Dreamcast. It’s true that the graphics can’t measure up to the best of modern games in the genre like Super Mario Odyssey or Psychonauts 2, but I genuinely liked the graphical style, and having played through the whole release I still do. The least concerning issue was that the game looked dated. I downloaded and played through that demo and while I didn’t hate it, it had some very worrying elements.

I can't believe you have such a dirty mind about something so innocent. Balan Wonderworld saw Naka collaborating with some of his old colleagues and the graphic style and music were very much my jam so it’s fair to say that I was relatively excited when the first announcement happened. It’s easy to say that Naka hasn’t done anything of note since Sonic Adventure 2 (I am, of course, omitting future greatest game of all time Billy Hatcher and the Giant Egg because nobody could live up to that legacy) but Rodea the Sky Soldier’s Wii version, the one that Naka considered definitive, has a lot of defenders, and that came out in 2015.

Yes many of Naka’s more recent projects have been either not great or tiny budget affairs, but we’re talking about a legendary designer working in a genre that he did ground breaking work in back in the day, and finally given substantial money to bring his vision to life. A new 3D platformer from Yuji Naka, backed by the financial might of Square Enix was a very enticing prospect. I feel like that’s important to say, because at this point the game is kind of a joke and a meme and it’s popular to make fun of it, which I’m going to do some of, but it wasn’t always that way. I was legitimately excited when Balan Wonderworld was announced. It is somehow both irreducibly weird and terminally bland.

Balan wonderworld memes