Last week Nintendo of America began their coast to coast tour giving lucky press members time to try out the Wii U and some of the newly announced content.

The Wonderful 101

Platinum Games’ title for the Wii U, which recently received its name, has promise to be one of the premier games on the system. Wonderful 101 may or may not make it out by March 2013—seriously that’s all they’ll commit to. If I had to create an amalgamate to compare, the game is Marvel Ultimate Alliance meets Pikmin meets any brawler you’ve ever played meets The Incredibles. If you can picture what putting all of these games together would look like, you’re probably close, and you’ll be closer once you put the Viewtiful Joe art style over the top of it. Game play was quick and simple, and, within minutes, quickly began to show its depth.
 
You can expand your army of heroes by standing next to any citizen you see in the game. As you go through the story, you can also unlock “special heroes,” which will change the way your party functions, and I assume will help you find secrets and other items. As the gamer, you will have multiple attacks at your discretion: the basic group attack is X, they do a standard jab style attack in mob form. The real genius of the game comes with the touch pad controls. You can rally your group to form a Voltron style super attack. Drawing a straight line will turn them into a sword. Drawing a circle will grow them into a fist, an L shape turns them into a gun. Once the move has been set you can push A (which is your power attack) to turn them into the most recently used “weapon.” During boss fights, utilizing this is necessary. I can’t tell you how many times the Nintendo rep laughed as I tried to jab my way through boss battles.

Wonderful 101 stands to be one of the top titles I have played for the WiiU yet. I can only hope the launch date is sooner than later.