The marketing push for Wonderful 101 is starting to pick up, as Ichi has taken to their Platinum Games Blog to talk up the story details and gameplay mechanics.
So, Platinum now officially and clearly explains the game's backstory. 40 years prior to the game's start, the GEATHJERK Federation Supreme Armada launched war on Earth with an army ten times the size of the planet's.
In response, Earth (note that there is no mention of the UN here) the CENTINELS Planetary Secret Service is launched to succesfully battle and defeat the aliens twice. It is now their third assault, and the CENTINELS have started their Wonderful One program, placing secret agents in 100 field offices around the world.
The game's scenarios won't just have you fighting giant monsters Bayonetta style, though. You will be exploring the wreckage the invaders have left behind to save (and possibly recruit) citizens, get past obstacles, and take on enemies on road to facing down the game's bosses.
Ichi plays up the experience of controlling multiple characters. You will choose one main character that everyone else will gather around. That main character will be controllable using the left analog stick, and your other characters will follow him or her automatically. You hold the Y button down to make your characters dash, and to command them to gather around the main character when they get scatterred.
And your characters will get scatterred when an enemy succesfully hits your group with an attack. They can get knocked out and will require you to approach them individually to revive and gather them again.
The B button makes your group jump, and you can double jump and even combine jumping with dashing to travel even farther. When you succesfully dodge an enemy's attack and then press the X button, you can then go for a Team Attack for your characters to start throwing themselves towards the enemy. You can keep pressing X for them to do a Climb Attack, literally climbing on top of their enemies.
When you've subdued the enemy enough, you can go for a Unite Morph, making shapes using either the right analog stick or the touchscreen. Unite Morphs can finish off enemies, and depending on the hero you use you can be using a fist, gun, sword or whip.
The process of dashing and jumping to dodge enemy attacks, using Team attacks to subdue them, and then finishing them off with Unite Attacks is called the Wonderful One-Double-Oh system.
Now that you've laughed at that, the game mechanics do sound fun, although I'm worried that touchscreen controls only show up for Unite Morphs. I was hoping they'd have integrated touchscreen more deeply, but maybe it's too early to judge.
The next blog post promises reveals about Wonder-Red. It seems that we in the English speaking world are still getting info a little later than Japanese are, but it's still coming to us faster than I initially expected. We'll keep you up to date on future posts.
Source: Platinum Games Blog
