PlatinumGames trying to talk with Nintendo about bringing The Wonderful 101 to Switch

PlatinumGames created the Wii U-exclusive game The Wonderful 101 for Nintendo back in 2013. Unfortunately, it was a bit underappreciated, and didn’t sell a whole lot in the end.

Some have been hoping that The Wonderful 101 will find new life on Switch through a potential port. After all, a number of Wii U titles have been crossing over to the new console. Even a couple of Platinum’s other games that released on Wii U – Bayonetta 1 and 2 – landed on Switch a couple of months ago. And while nothing is confirmed, PlatinumGames is interested in making it happen.

At Reboot Develop today, The Wonderful 101 director Hideki Kamiya and Platinum’s Atsushi Inaba delivered a special talk. When speaking about the Wii U title, they asked how many people played it – and it looked like the two were surprised by the response. Inaba then mentioned that Platinum is trying to negotiate with Nintendo on a possible Switch release of The Wonderful 101. And when the audience was asked to clap if they would buy a Switch version, there was again a strong reaction. “Hopefully Nintendo will see how excited you all were, and not place the blame on them, and seriously consider that as an opportunity,” Inaba said as relayed by translator Ben Judd.

Kamiya himself had plenty to say about The Wonderful 101 in general. As relayed by Judd, Kamiya shared the following on how he approached its creation:

“One of the games that I just mentioned, The Wonderful 101 – Kamiya-san loves that game. I think that was allowing him to do the toys and the game that was more suitable for kids and whatnot. And he was absolutely super proud of being able to make that game, but obviously it didn’t sell a ton, which is unfortunate. However, one of the things that they did on that title that they didn’t previously is the way that they built it out was different than other games. They focused on the action scenes.

For 101, they actually had the storyboards – they drew those up first. I don’t know if you are familiar with the game or not, but basically you move tons and tons of characters in a group. Many of them have their own individual attacks, and you can combine together to form a giant fist composed of all these characters or a giant sword that then cuts the enemy, etc. It was basically just seeing all those unique individual characters team up to fight an enemy that was visually going to be stunning and interesting, and so building up the storyboards, showing how that story and how those visuals work together, was one of the places that they started design on. They’d never done that before, so ultimately they were coming at it from a different approach, even after all these years of making a wide variety of different games, because Kamiya-san himself, he said previously before making that game, he had never seen a game that had so many different characters with unique abilities and you would combine together to fight enemies. That in and of itself seemed like a really interesting, flashy concept. For him, anytime he makes a game – and this is for all of his games – it’s all about the response, it’s all about the feeling, the controls – they have to be very tight, obviously that’s a trademark of PlatinumGames. But on top of that, he wanted it to feel like you’re doing something different rather than just controlling one character, you’re controlling multiple groups of characters, and then able to team up and do a wide variety of just of course crazy, exciting things within the game.”