2007’s puzzle game Kororinpa: Marble Mania was an excellent third of a game masquerading as an entire one. Now Hudson Entertainment has returned with a second installment, Marble Saga: Kororinpa, which happily turns out to be not just the other two thirds of the original, but a complete game actually worth its asking price.
The Basics: Tilt and Roll
There are a number of additions to the Kororinpa series, but the core gameplay is the same. You have a convoluted, three-dimensional maze floating in mid-air that will tilt according to the orientation of your Wii remote. As you shift the maze, a marble on the track rolls along precarious pathways, through movable tunnels, down stairs and past blowing fans and dangerous hammers until it either falls off or reaches its goal. Along the way the marble must be used to gather diamonds on the tracks by running into them. It can also be used to collect bonus items.
While the similar Super Monkey Ball has players roll a ball along a horizontal plain, with Saga you must often move the marble from a floor to a wall to a ceiling. This gets rather confusing when you find yourself holding the remote upside down; it’s easy to forget how the track and the ball are oriented to gravity.
The game’s presentation is also the same as that of the first game, with sprightly music and a variety of colorful maze locations that includes a haunted house and the bottom of a shark-filled ocean.
A few new gadgets have been added, including one that will shrink or grow your ball. The low weight of a miniaturized ball makes it very difficult to control. While I generally liked the gameplay additions, I could have done without the new cannon. Roll the marble into the cannon and a dotted line will appear indicating where the marble will be shot to: tilting the remote aims the cannon. Unfortunately, two seconds is not enough time to aim, especially since the dotted line is utterly useless and either inaccurate or unreadable. It is easier to use an onscreen level to set the track flat then tilt it slightly, although I’d usually have to do this a few times before I got it right.
What's New? Quite a Bit
The original Marble Mania had a measly 40 mazes, so the 150 tracks of the sequel already make it a far meatier dish. Perhaps stung by critics’ bitter complaints regarding the first game’s dearth of content, the designers have gone beyond just giving players more tracks.
The most elaborate addition is the ability to design your own mazes and share them with friends. As you play, you can find bonus items that can be used to create maze items like hammers and blowers and moving platforms. Go into the Edit Stage and you can piece these together as you like and, if you’re online, send your completed mazes to friends. You can also download mazes from Hudson (or so says the manual; I’m on vacation as I write this with no wireless internet, so I won’t be able to see what Hudson has to offer until I get home). Unfortunately the game doesn’t offer the ability to store mazes on a central server a la the PS3 game Little Big Planet and share them with the world.
Saga also includes a few mazes that can be played with the Wii Balance Board, which means you tilt the maze by tilting your body. The mazes are by necessity less elaborate, but they are still quite difficult to complete. I wish the game made the balance board more sensitive; to make the ball roll forward I had to tilt so far forward that I was almost falling on my face. Still, it’s a nice, though exhausting, little addition.
The game also ups multiplayer from 2 to 4 players, but removes the first game’s co-op play. That feels less like an addition than a trade off.
Conclusion: Not Perfect, But Still a Must-Buy
Not every new feature is good. The game has introduced its version of a story, in which for some reason an ant named Anthony needs you to run these mazes, and it is as uninteresting and unnecessary as can be. The story scenes are, happily, skippable, but you do have to put up with Anthony sitting on a corner of the screen kibitzing in little speech bubbles. Some of these are irrelevant and pointless, as when he remarks “aren’t cookies yummy?” over and over again. Other times he will comment on your game, saying “nice” or “easy now,” but his comments don’t seem tied to what you’re doing; he will say “nice” or “easy now” even when you’re not doing anything impressive or difficult.
In spite of a few shortcomings, Marble Saga is a terrific game, and like Marble Mania before it, one of the best examples of something that would be almost impossible to implement on any console other than the Wii. And while Marble Mania offered about a day’s worth of gameplay for a hefty and unreasonable $40, Saga gives players at least five times the content for $30. At this rate, the next game will probably have a thousand levels and sell for ten bucks. I can’t wait.
