Balan Wonderworld is a game from another era, that does not work in any way by today's standards. So many good ideas that were put into a game that did not know how to capitalize on them. Elements of a good Kirby game, or even Mario Odyssey that just completely ended up falling flat in any number of ways. The few good elements are either hidden in end game content, or are made useless almost immediately. Balan tried to do a lot of things, and ultimately failed at all of them.

The costumes in Balan, the main gameplay loop of the whole game, absolutely suck. By making a game that only utilizes one button, every suit just feels empty and lacking any amount of creativity. They all perform one basic action, and many of these actions are either ultimately useless, or used only once or twice. The rest of the costumes end up being just reskins of previous costumes, or just variations on gliding/punching/shooting etc. Other than the secret Balan suit you can unlock, none of them left any sort of meaningful impression, other than the ones that were laughably useless.

The story isn't what you'd come to this for, but it is also utter nonsense. A kid is mean to his friends, so a giant hat man takes him in and makes him help solve people's problems to teach him a life lesson. This culminates in every person getting their life together in some way, and then dancing with Balan. Repeat 12X. Then you go back to your friends and dance with them and be friendly. The end.

The main problem with Balan is the seemingly zero percent of quality control that went into developing this game. The level and costume selecting is atrocious, the isle of tims is extremely boring for your main hub area, and offers nothing of value. Getting around from world to world takes far to long for as much back tracking as you have to perform to get costumes necessary to proceed. And I don't think anyone on the development team tested the cooperative mode, as it completely breaks the game and lets you basically just fly around every stage. All that along with terrible controls, a terribly wonky camera, and bad music that just repeats endlessly. there is a lot that could have been fixed for this game.

This all comes together in one nightmarish package that just overstays its welcome. Had the game been condensed into fewer worlds, with some more well defined costumes and stages, it could have been a very decent platformer. Instead every aspect of the game falls apart and just leaves you sad and upset and unfulfilled. Balan Wonderworld is a bad game and you should probably not play it, unless you lost a bet like me and had no choice but to 100% it. Don't make my mistake. Just beat Sekiro like you were supposed to and this could have all been avoided.