The Wonderful One: After School Hero

Much better schmups than this exist. Visually, it is cluttered. The art director clearly is not good at 2D games. Gameplay has little depth to it. It is not bad, but why would you play it? Go check out Rive, or Layer Section.

The Wonderful One: After School Hero needs to pay better attention in class. [h1]Story[/h1] Exceedingly simple and uninteresting, After School Hero tells a very short tale about a young boy named Luka who spends his days after school training to join the Centinels, an organization dedicated to protecting Earth. Luka spends his time in a special virtual reality simulator to hone his skills under the guidance of a robot called P-Star. There is a bit more going on than that, but only a bit. An antagonist is introduced halfway through who never says a single word the entire game. There isn't an ounce of even vaguely worthwhile narrative to follow here. [h1]Gameplay[/h1] The Wonderful One is a side scrolling twin stick shooter with a few simple core mechanics and nothing more. Luka has access to a straight shot laser, a short range scatter gun, and a medium range bouncing hot as well as a dash attack. Destroying enemies will create scrap parts which can be collected to fill a rewards meter. This meter dolls out extra lives, as well as temporary invincibility/damage buff tokens, and tickets that can be used to activate single use screen wide attacks with a few different effects like damaging or stunning all enemies, making dashes invincible, or if you've saved up enough tickets; a devastating amount of damage and slow down effects. You'll face a number of melee enemies, flying enemies, and bosses across the game's twelve story chapters and four extra challenge missions. Despite all of these facets of the game and there relatively tightly implemented execution, the game is just a bore. The number of lives and buffs you're given make it nigh impossible to fail, meaning the true sign of victory is achieving a high score by avoiding taking hits and completing levels as fast as you with as many points as you can; but it's all just so empty and uninteresting to play from beginning to end. [h1]Presentation[/h1] The game isn't particularly interest to look at either. It has some fun enemy designs and somewhat pleasant background work going on, but the block repetitious nature of the levels combined with rather annoying voice acting, semi-decent arcadey music and sound effects; makes for an overall boring package. It's not an ugly game. It's just not a particularly interesting looking or sounding one either.