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curl-6 on 25 April 2016
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JWeinCom said:
curl-6 said:

As someone who adores Bayonetta 2 and strongly dislikes Wonderful 101, controls and aesthetics both played a part, but weren't the only factors.

I'll come straight out and say I hated the control scheme, (drawing on the Pad didn't seem to register my shape properly half the time, drawing with the sticks felt slow and clumsy, and both kept breaking the flow of combat with awkward pauses) and despised the art style. (I don't mind cartoonish graphics when done well but W101 just looked tacky in my opinion)

But other presentational issues also presented significant hurdles. The fixed camera was often annoying, the framerate could dip south of 30fps, and my blows always felt impotent, with little sense of real impact.

But the single biggest fault with the game was the crowd system; it was just so confusing to look at both from a graphical and a gameplay point of view. All these little figures all jumping and swarming around made it way more difficult than it should've been to judge my position and hitboxes, and to read the battlefield at a glance. Plus having to run around and collect your stunned members after being hit was massively irritating.

Those could have been your issues, but I didn't see those cited very often in reviews.   

The tacky look was intentional.  It's meant to look like action figures, which is why characters come in capsules.  The whole thing has a kid playing with his toys kind of vibe to it, which isn't quite cartoony.    It looked pretty much exactly as it should have whether you like that style or not.

If your blows felt impotent, then that was a problem on your end.  There are obvious physical cues, and compared to Bayonetta 2, you probably do more damage per attack.  The impact also depends on how big you make your weapon.  I can't see anyone feeling the attacks were impotent once you got a good combo going.  Especially if we're comparing this to Bayonetta, where against any reasonably strong enemy you need witch time or climax to really dent any moderately strong bosses.  If you liked Bayonetta 1 (where the default weapons do virtually no hitstun and even the shotguns won't really impact anything about a basic enemy), the issue was even more pronounced there.  

I agree with the camera.  There are certain parts where it was a pain.  Not often enough to really ruin my experience, but it did happen.

The rest of what you're talking about falls into the category of controls, and is pretty similar to what people are saying about star fox with how you have to pay attention to multiple things at once.  It's definitely more complex than traditional light/heavy system that Bayonetta uses, and it's definitely more confusing at first.  It also undoubtedly gives you more options in combat.  You have access to all of your weapons at any given time, and can switch between all of them in mid combo.  You can also send off chunks of your team to do support attacks for you, and of course there are things like recovering fallen squadmates, picking up and throwing enemies, stunning them with Pikminish attacks, etc.  

So that kind of goes with my point that some people prefer familiar systems.  And that's fine, but I much prefer mastering something new, which is why I enjoyed 101 more than Bayonetta 2.  And that's why I figured I'd probably like Star Fox's controls even if reviews were panning them.

When I say my hits felt impotent I mean more than the animation and sound/visual effects didn't give much oomph, and didn't make me feel like I was delivering powerful blows, even when I had a full sized fist or blade.

Demanding controls are definitely a major factor in the criticism of both Zero and W101, and one I share. It's not so much the learning curve that bothered me, as I've enjoyed many games with such a curve, like Skyward Sword and Red Steel 2, but rather the fact that there were scenes where I felt like I was fighting the controls as much as the enemies, like the controls were getting in between me and what I wanted to do rather than facilitating and empowering me.