The Wonderful 101 Review: 100 Heroes, One Drawn Symbol, and a 7.4 That Never Matched the Ambition

PlatinumGames built a game in 2013 that asks you to command 100 superheroes at once. The Wonderful 101 shipped on the Wii U, published by Nintendo, directed by Hideki Kamiya and produced by Atsushi Inaba. It received generally positive reviews and failed to meet sales expectations. Those two facts sit awkwardly together, and they still define how this game is remembered.

A School Bus, a Teacher, and the Invasion

The Wonderful 101 opens with a school bus full of children under attack by alien invaders known as the GEATHJERK. The teacher, Will Wedgewood, transforms into the superhero Wonder-Red and joins other superheroes to destroy the aliens with Unite Morph powers. One student, Luka, appears disillusioned and expresses his hate for both the heroes and the aliens.

That setup is pure PlatinumGames comedy. It is also the engine for everything that follows. Earth is protected from invasion by a shield known as Margarita, powered by five Super Reactors. The heroes must travel around the world to protect these reactors and destroy the aliens who slip through the shield, along with their leaders. Professor Shirogane explains that once the reactors are safe, they will use an orbiting satellite cannon, the Shirogane Comet, to destroy the remainder of the aliens.

The plot is loud and sincere about heroic bravery and friendship standing tall against evil. It never apologizes for that. Kamiya and Inaba assembled a story that treats a schoolteacher in a red mask as a legitimate answer to an extinction event, and the game’s commitment to that idea is its strongest asset.

Drawing an L for a Gun

The core mechanic is the Unite Morph. Players control a horde of superheroes from an aerial viewpoint and turn them into objects. To transform the horde, you draw a symbol on the Wii U GamePad’s touchscreen or right analog stick — an L for a gun, a squiggly line for a whip.

Each level pushes you to explore and find helpless citizens, recruiting them into your army. The more heroes you gather, the greater the special morph powers become. Unite Morph forms defeat enemies, solve puzzles, or traverse the environment. They cost battery meter, which recharges through normal attacks or by picking up batteries dropped by defeated enemies. Enemies also drop O parts, the in-game currency for buying upgrades, plus new Unite Morph abilities and items.

In specified areas, the GamePad switches the view to a traditional third-person angle for tighter environments, such as indoors and inside caves. Each level ends with a grade based on factors like completion time and damage taken.

The cooperative mode supports up to five players. One person uses the Wii U GamePad, and four others each use their own Wii U Pro Controllers.

The roster is deep and specific:

• Will Wedgewood (Wonder-Red), a Blossom City elementary school teacher and the leader, whose father Arthur is killed by Laambo
• Eliot Hooker (Wonder-Blue), a police detective whose older brother is killed by Vijounne
• Jean-Sebastain Renault (Wonder-Green), a guns expert
• Mariana Kretzulesco (Wonder-Pink), a fashion modeler
• Ivan Istochinkov (Wonder-Yellow), a Russian soldier
• Momoe Byakkoin (Wonder-White), a ninja-in-training
• Krishna Ramanujan (Wonder-Black), a video game player and genius prodigy

Supporting them are P-Star, the robot assistant; Laurence Nelson (Wonder-Captain), the Centinels commander previously known as Wonder-Red; Virgin Victory operator Alice MacGregor; and science chief James Shirogane.

What the Remaster Changed

The Wonderful 101 did not stay on the Wii U. A remastered version for Nintendo Switch, PlayStation 4 and Windows was financed through crowdfunding and released in May 2020. It became PlatinumGames’ first self-published title. A version for Amazon Luna followed in May 2021.

A free downloadable expansion for the remaster, The Wonderful One: After School Hero, arrived in May 2023, with a standalone version released the following month. That expansion drops the horde entirely. It features side-scrolling gameplay with only a single playable hero, Luka, who fires laser blasts in any direction using his goggles and can switch between three laser types.

Here is how the two versions sit against each other:

The comparison is not a knock on either. It shows how far the idea stretches.

A Grade That Never Matched the Ambition

Seven point four out of ten. That is the score, and it is an honest one.

The Wonderful 101 is a game with a genuinely unprecedented premise — control 100 heroes at once — and controls that mostly hold up under that weight. Drawing symbols to build weapons is a clever translation of superhero teamwork into input, and the recruiting loop gives every level a reason to search rather than sprint.

The problems are structural. The battery meter gates your best moves, which means the game’s most spectacular ideas are rationed. The third-person camera switch works in caves and corridors but reads as an admission that the aerial view cannot handle every space. And the grading system rewards speed and caution in a game whose whole appeal is excess.

The sales failure is the part worth weighing. PlatinumGames made a game that asked players to learn a drawing-based combat language on a console with a small install base, and the market did not show up. That is not a quality verdict. It is a distribution verdict.

What matters now is that the 2020 remaster exists at all, funded by the people who wanted it, and that it became PlatinumGames’ first self-published title. That is a stranger and more interesting outcome than a quiet port. The Wonderful One: After School Hero then narrowed the whole idea down to one hero with goggles, which is either a clever epilogue or a confession that 100 was always a lot to ask.

The Wonderful 101 remains a loud, funny, overstuffed game about heroes who cannot win alone. Its score is 7.4 of 10 — good, flawed, and worth the trouble.

Game Reviews · Hideki Kamiya · Nintendo Switch · PlatinumGames · The Wonderful 101 · Wii U