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  • Adorkable: Wonder-Yellow. Looks like a pretty mean dude, but he's very sweet and considerate, and even when he has the chance to deliver a badass one-liner to one of the GEATHJERK Officers, he fumbles his chance, embarrassed with the fact that his country doesn't have catchphrases.
  • Base-Breaking Character:
    • Wonder-Pink is disliked by some, either due to blatant fanservice, voice acting, or finding her crush on Vorkken annoying. However, others like her very much for being a highly amusing parody of a Girly Girl, a competent Action Girl, and attractive to boot.
    • Luka, who was a loud, annoying, bratty kid, willing to doom the entire human race simply because the Wonderful 100 failed to save his mom, not to mention both Wonder-Red and Wonder-Pink bend over backwards to excuse his behavior, no matter how badly he acts. While he tries to make up for it by the end of the game, there's debate over whether this makes him Rescued from the Scrappy Heap, or a Karma Houdini.
  • Best Level Ever: The entire Operation 009. From the awesome Space Harrier-style parts, to obliterating the whole Geathjerk float just to suddenly come back and reveal its main base, to storming the Geath-Waksey to having Vorkken as an ally to the epic final battle against the Big Bad Jergingha, which does nothing but get better and better till the final QTE, you have an easy contender for the greatest finale of any action game ever made.
  • Breather Level: Operation 008 is mostly a Remixed Level consisting of parts of Blossom City from Operations 001 and 002, and is quite easy compared to the hell that is Operation 007, but is sandwiched within it and the also difficult Operation 009, thus making it this. Its boss fight, on the other hand...
  • Broken Base: The Gameplay Roulette element of the games' design has not been implemented without controversy. While Platinum Games are no stranger to varying up their gameplay with minigames and the occasional puzzle, The Wonderful 101 is notable for how often this occurs, to the point of being Once Per Mission. These frequent minigames are argued to be detrimental to the core combat experience, due to taking focus away from pure combat, and are often derided for their lack of polish. Others swear by their inclusion as an essential part of the game, demonstrating how versatile the Wonderful 100 are as a group and providing an interesting change of pace. That being said, even the staunchest of the anti-minigame crowd admit that the Punch-Out!! boss fights are a good time.
  • Best Boss Ever:
    • Special mention goes to the battle with Jergingha, especially his Planet Destruction Form. Holy shit. It's challenging, it's overblown as hell, it's in space, and it ends on a hilarious quicktime event.
    • The final battle with Vorkken. He's challenging, especially going for one of the higher ranks, it's set to crowning music of awesome, and he engages his own version of Unlimited Form.
    • The first boss, Diekuu Ohrowchee (and Laambo). Nothing better for a first boss than a flying chase through the city, then fighting the boss itself on its back, culminating on a Free-Fall Fight before delivering the final blow.
    • The fifth and eighth bosses, Walgah-Goojin and Giga-Goojin respectively, mainly for being awesome Punch-Out!! Shout Outs, and having some really epic takedowns.
  • Cliché Storm: A positive example. It pulls clichés from several genres, like Sentai, Anime, and Alien Invasion works, but the game uses this to its advantage by being utterly ridiculous. It helps that the game pulls legitimate twists, like Luka's betrayal or the W100's far-future villainy.
  • Common Knowledge: Many believed that the original game was a third-party title owned by PlatinumGames, rather than a Nintendo-owned IP, even though the first name that pops up in the opening credits is Nintendo. To be fair, Platinum signed their work and threw in gratuitous company logos and references to their past work throughout the game, so it's not unreasonable that people would associate it with the developer more than its publisher. The fact that the remaster received a multiplatform release when Nintendo is usually firmly against such things only added to the confusion.
    • As a corollary to this, many people are convinced that Nintendo later sold the rights to the series to Platinum due to such information being attached to early rumors about the aforementioned remaster. However, no changes to the game's copyright (co-owned by Platinum and Nintendo) or trademark (solely owned by Nintendo) have been seen, and when questioned directly in an interview on whether or not Platinum owned the series, instead of confirming one way or another, Platinum's response was essentially "No comment". All interviews indicate that Platinum went to Nintendo on doing a remaster, but when they told Nintendo that they aimed for a multiplatform release of the title, Nintendo rejected the idea of funding such a project, but allowed them to license the IP because of their close relationship.
  • Cult Classic: Though not quite as big of a cult classic as Vanquish, the game has a strong following among fans of Stylish Action for its unique premise and design. Despite poor sales at launch on Wii U, the Kickstarter campaign for Switch/PC/PS4 remasters reached its initial funding goal within 20 minutes, with the 500,000 dollar PS4 stretch goal being met within three hours.
  • Demonic Spider: Megangs, the turtle-like Jerks, are some of the toughest units to deal with. Their main weakness is the slow and hard to use Unite Hammer, and while it does decent damage to them, unless you can break their shell, it's the only Unite Morph you can use on them, barring knocking them over after a Unite Guts counter. As well, they have a ton of nasty attacks due to some poor Hitbox Dissonance — they can hit you with their claw stop while you're above them somehow, and their lunging bite comes out fast and hits hard. The first time you encounter them is also the first time you use the Unite Hammer, meaning getting the hang of Unite Hammer's strange symbol and dealing with them can be a serious wall to first time players.
  • Ensemble Dark Horse: Laambo is fondly remembered, due to his VA's hilariously hammy performance.
  • Fan Nickname:
    • The Wonderful 101 Copies SoldExplanation 
    • The Wonderful Git GudExplanation 
  • Germans Love David Hasselhoff: The game achieved the #1 Wii U software spot in France.
  • Game-Breaker:
    • Ukemi. It may be one of the most expensive Custom Blocks available, but it pays dividends in terms of gameplay. If you end up getting knocked through the air, if you can hit B just before hitting the ground, Ukemi will nullify the damage you just took. Learning to use it properly can effectively render a good player invincible, barring attacks that pancake the player, rather than sending them flying. Furthermore, hits that are nullified by Ukemi don't count against the player's Defense rating for the mission, making scoring high ranks easier.
    • Energy Converter + Attack Liner + Speed Charge = You're practically unkillable against large groups of smaller enemies. Speed Charge increases the charging rate of the Unite Gauge, and Energy Converter will convert any excess energy to additional health and visa-versa. With the Attack Liner doing damage when it attacks others, and the damage dealt being counted towards replenishing energy, ramming into enemies with it will heal quite a lot. What makes this especially broken is that this also applies to the Vorkken battles, meaning that at the very least it's nearly impossible to get a continue point-dock even in Operation 006-C. By that point in the game you will also likely have enough to buy all three of these powerups, and have a pretty large health bar.
    • Bomb + Attack Liner = The bomb slows down time for the enemies, the attack liner normally just does barely any damage. Combine these two and you'll get an attack that deals damage equal to a strong attack for every person you move to the enemy, which can be up to 100. Result: Watch as the boss health bar goes down like nothing and the boss getting destroyed in no more than 3 seconds in.
    • Wonderful Cards cost 30 of each craftable resource to make, but let you automatically buy an upgrade for free from the shop. This is huge in the early game, as it'll let you get your hands on stuff like Ukemi, Speed Charge and Unite Charge long before you'd normally be able to afford them.
    • Unite Big. Though it's hard to unlock, it allows you to obliterate nearly every enemy. Immorta's is even more of a breaker than the others. A video on YouTube shows her decimating WONDER-JERGINGHA.
    • The additional Prince Vorkken game mode added as DLC to the Remaster. Along with Vorkken having somewhat higher strength than the standard Wonderful Ones (even when solo), the Multi-Unite Morphs have been replaced with Unify Morphs that turn the Guyzoch into various enemies you fight throughout the game. They rack up combo points VERY quickly (having a x.50 multiplier for every hit). On top of that, doing a Unify Morph of the Boomerang summons an independent Big Vorkken, up to four times. Allowing for four giant princes to rampage through the battle.
  • Heartwarming in Hindsight: In the face of Wonderful 101 getting its second shot thanks to Platinum's explosively successful kickstarter campaign, the game's central mechanic of people coming together to save the world carries quite a different connotation when playing the remaster, as does the opening video explaining that the title covers the Wonderful 100 and you. At least until Luka becomes the 101st member.
  • Hilarious in Hindsight:
  • It's Hard, So It Sucks!: One of the few complaints about the game is that it throws you into the action with little or no tutorial and that it's difficult to find the weaknesses of some bosses.
  • Jerkass Woobie: Blue and Vorkken aren't the nicest of people, but they both lost things dear to them (Blue's brother, Vorkken's race and planet) to GEATHJERK. Surprisingly, all of GEATHJERK can count as well, as they lost their worlds to the Greater Galactic Coalition, though the Jerkass majorly outweighs the woobie. The only exception is possibly Supreme Overlord Jergingha, who is shown to be desperate to save their future.
  • Memetic Mutation:
    • "Team, Unite Up!" Explanation 
    • Diplomacy has failed! Explanation 
  • Moral Event Horizon: Despite being a Well-Intentioned Extremist group, GEATHJERK and its officers repeatedly go this route. Laambo for not only killing Red's father but also taunting Red about it and moving to kill him too, Vijounne for being a double agent who got Blue's brother murdered and later rubbing it in Blue's face, Gimme for his attempt at Vorkken's life and even admitting he was going to kill him anyway, and Jergingha, who, despite being the most vocal in stopping the Greater Galactic Coalition from rising, was willing to destroy the planet even though he originally wanted to spare it.
  • Narm Charm: The theme song, The Won-Stoppable Wonderful 100, has lyrics that are absolutely (and intentionally) ridiculous. But the song itself works well enough with the game's tone and is otherwise so epic and grandiose that it'll still manage to pump you up during the game's more intense moments.
    Go, go team!
    Demolish those fiends!
    Toss 'em in a garbage caaaan!
    Wipe the floor with aliens galore!
    'Til the world is spick and spaaan!
    They can do iiit!
    They can do iiit!
    'Cause they're fearless daredevil prooos!
    The won-destructible Wonderful, Wonderful One-Double-Ohhh!!
  • Special Effect Failure: The game otherwise works amazing, but there's one exception: During Wonder-Red and Wonder-Blue's Pummel Duel, the sequence uses the in-game models instead of the higher-defined cutscene models. This wouldn't be noticable from far-away, but this scene takes place up close, so the lower resolution is very apparent.
  • Spiritual Licensee: It's the best Power Rangers/Super Sentai game ever made. Some have also been calling it a pretty great Tengen Toppa Gurren Lagann game too, thanks to some thematic similarities.
  • Superlative Dubbing: The English dub is absolutely phenomenal, with the English translation of the title song being a perfect transliteration of the original Japanese tune beat-for-beat.
  • That One Achievement: The "Punch-Out!", bottlecap, which is gotten by finishing either giant robot boxing match which play like the game the achievement is named after without taking any damage. Not that hard in theory, but there's 2 things that make it needlessly difficult: the last checkpoint before the first said segment is a drawn out 2-minute tutorial segment that can't be skipped and which you have to replay every time you screw up even once (not counting the loading times), and while there's a Kahkoo-Regah that only has the said segment without the tutorial, it doesn't count, and the said bottlecap is required to unlock one character directly and another by proxy. Thankfully, there's 2 ways around this: you can play the level on Very Easy, which makes it so that you can just keep attacking repeatedly and not get countered as you normally would and eventually win the fight, or just use one of the cheat codes to unlock the character and several others the same way you could unlock some hard-to-get items in Bayonetta.
    • The final bottlecap, "Wonderfully Wonderful Player", takes this up to eleven as you need to unlock every single previous bottlecap to get it. And as an added kicker, you also need this one to unlock Wonder-Bayonetta.
  • That One Boss: Vorkken can be a real pain every time you fight him, but especially in his final bout at the end of Operation 006. He's fast and has a ton of abilities that can and will give you trouble, especially when he Turns Red in his second phase.
    • Gimme's Giga-Goojin from Chapter 008 is also quite hard. After going through a long chase and gauntlet, you have to fight the Giga-Goojin with the Platinum Robo, with the same control scheme from the Walgah-Goojin in Chapter 005. And given that the latter wasn't that hard, you'd think the Giga-Goojin would be the same, right? Well, there's the fact that he's much faster and stronger, and can destroy you in a few hits (especially on harder difficulties). There's also a Game-Breaking Bug if you launch the laser after he recovers control, and if it happens, you'll be forced to restart the whole fight.
    • Jergingha is the Final Boss, but even then he deserves a mention. While the fight itself is already quite challenging (particularly the second and third forms), getting a high rank is where the real pain comes. Due to his fast and hard-hitting attacks, on top of being a Marathon Boss that can take at least 30 minutes, this means that if you're going for a Platinum run, you're going to get mad from this boss fight. And that's not even talking about a Pure Platinum run...
  • That One Level:
    • Operation 007 has gotten a little flack for this, mostly for the reduced team count for the first missions and the platforming being strict even by the game's standards.
    • Operation 006-B is extremely tough, due to numerous difficult segments all following each other. First you're locked in a fight against Laambo as Wonder Red (Emeritus), and thus need to learn how to use a Unite Morph in the middle of a boss fight. After that is an extremely tough SCHMUP section that can kill you flat with ease, at the end of which is a fight against Vijounne's mech. Following that is a series of decently tough battles to the end, but most of them have really tough requirements, meaning getting a Platinum rank can be a challenge to say the least.
  • That One Sidequest: The Kahkoo-Regahs in the epilogue. Thought the robot boxing matches were challenging enough? Now do each of them without taking damage. Normal requires you to beat Wallgah-Goojin, Hard requires beating Giga-Goojin (which loves to counter with a very quick backhand that looks similar to his tell for a kick — and you have to dodge the former, and jump over the latter. Making the wrong move kills you instantly), and 101% Hard goes back to Wallgah-Goojin... with the additional requirement of only being able to damage the mech with the KO punch. Beating them requires having near-perfect memorization of the boss's tells and the mechanics behind robot-boxing, as well as lightning quick reflexes. And just like most gameplay-change segments, there's no way to make this easier: Robot boxing is not affected by team count, custom blocks, unlocked/bought skills, and you can't use items (not that you could in Kahkoo-Regahs anyway). On the bright side, this can be used to help practice for getting the "Punch-Out!" bottlecap.
  • Uncertain Audience: This partly contributed to the game's low sales in spite of the praise it got. The bright, colorful, toylike art style and premise of heroes linking together to make giant weapons to fight aliens in over-the-top action sequences paint the game as though it is aimed at younger audiences. Yet the steep learning curve, themes of loss and revenge and jokes to Avoid the Dreaded G Rating suggest a more mature audience. Older audiences were turned off by the initial presentation, but the game itself isn't suited towards young children either.
  • Vindicated by History: Despite generally positive reviews, the game sold poorly and player reception was somewhat polarized. This was chalked up to the game poorly explaining its myriad systems in tutorials, and Surprise Difficulty turning away many casual players. As time has gone on, many have returned to the game with newfound appreciation for its unconventional and unique design. Also helping is a number of reviews from people like Matthewmatosis, who hailed it as a classic not to be missed. When Platinum later launched a Kickstarter to remaster the game for Switch, PC, and PS4, the campaign reached its initial goal of $50,000 for a Switch port in less than 20 minutes and $500,000 goal for all three platforms in a few hours.
  • What Do You Mean, It's Not for Kids?: It may seem like a humorous game about brightly costumed superheroes saving the world from invading aliens that use robots to fight their war. However, it's really hard, the characters are often lewd, and it deals with adult themes. At least in regards to the potty mouths of the characters; these were added to the game to Avoid the Dreaded G Rating, but it may have backfired resulting in a game that appealed to only a niche audience.

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