I've been very partial to platinum games for more or less their entire time as a studio, there for their best games and worst games and always enjoying them even when other people tended to hate them, like the much maligned Babylon's fall being one of my favourite games or the really fun korra game that's been almost lost to time, but before all of this my first experience with them was actually their first game ever released, madworld, a game i got shortly after i picked up a wii in order to play the resident evil rail shooters by finding it in a bargain bin and thinking the box looked really rad, it really is a striking box at that, this first game had made me a fan of theirs for life and it still remains one of their best and most creative projects to date and it's a game that, even with its shortcomings, manages to be one of the best examples of just how much a team can accomplish when they're really allowed to go wild with creativity and a budget.

the main thing that'll stick out to you is the main thing that stuck out to me when i saw this game in the bargain bin i found it in, the art style. it's this striking mix of black and white, sometimes punctuated only by red when blood is on screen, with tons of cool comic text on screen and some really fantastic character designs, it stands out as not just one of the best looking games on the wii, arguably even the best looking game on the wii, but also as one of the best looking games even today, very few games nail their art style quite as well as madworld manages to and it's still impressive to look at from a technical level, plus the game does a lot with it too. the levels are all beautiful and incorporate the style well, with things like the falling flowers in the Japanese castle level or how the train station level uses the trains motion to show the games text effects well, the game is just an overall wonder to look at.

those beautiful levels are super varied and fun too, even if there isn't a ton of them, you have the aforementioned Japanese castle level (which has a unique playstyle with you having to rescue geisha's and its entirely linier which is neat), the train station which has one of the best environmental gimmick with the trains, casinos, towns, marketplaces, labs, zombie filled castles and big torture dungeons, tons of variety and they're all at bare minimum fun to play through, even the games worst levels, which here is mainly just the castle since it lacks a real defining environmental gimmick like the other levels have, i love how open they are too, you're just set loose and alowed to explore and do whatever you want for the half an hour time limit the game gives you, like tony hawk with murder (i have never played a tony hawk game), it's nice to just be able to explore them like this and find cool things, it has a good pace to it. you also have some one-off levels in there like a boss rush, some individual boss levels at the end of each zone that are always a nice time and even some cool bike levels to spice things up, you even get a combination of the two with a bike based boss fight which is one of the games highlights for me.

but what do you actually do in these levels, that's simple, the game is a game show about racking up points with creative kills in a small area, you combine things like gouging a signpost in a guys head or throwing him in a trash can before tossing him into something in the environment or cutting him in half with the chainsaw on your arm, the game is mostly about those environmental kills though and they're one of the games most fun parts, like, throwing a guy into an oncoming train or a catapult or a huge jet engine or a UFO tractor beam never gets old and there's tons of creativity to them here, down to even things like piranha's or throwing guys on sushi conveyer belts to get cut up by robot chefs or throwing them on a huge roulette wheel to gamble. there's also minigames that each level has at least one of, like man darts where you throw pepople at a dart board for points or ones where you have to combo people by throwing them into trains or even a personal favourite with a whole golf minigame centred around hitting peoples heads into goals, these are great, each one even has a really funny intro from the games best character, the black baron.

the actual combat in there is a little iffy though, the QuickTime events you do with the wiimote are fun and it's great to mimic the moves when you kill people, but any time the game expects you to do actual combat outside of these fun dumb environmental kills, the game shows its weakness with this combat just not being great the chainsaw does high damage and is fun to use but your punches feel weak and barely working, I'm not even sure they do damage at all, it makes boss fights feel a little simple and unfun at times, creative as those may be, the weapons you can pick up do help a little, the bat sending enemies flying or the duel knives shredding the enemies in seconds, though neither do a ton of damage, the unlockable duel chainsaw and katana do though and i would reccomend giving the ng+ mode a run just to try these out, the duel chainsaw is game changing (though there isn't much to unlock beyond that). the bosses aren't bad though, fun and creative and there's some really seriously creative executions in there, special shoutout to the cowboy you shoot so much he just ends up a skeleton, though i find they tend to be a little bit too difficult in the more directly combat heavy fights, my favorite tended to be the more puzzly or less skill based ones like the succubus or the bike boss, special shoutout the end boss though, super cool even if the inputs for it felt a lot more finnicky than they did every other fight (also some of these end up coming back in the kinda-sequel anarchy reigns!!). the game is also super short and pretty easy, your main weapon does big damage and bosses all have pretty easy enough tells, plus you have a few lives per level and you can even find more, so it's plenty easy to get into and on top of that you could easily run through it in a single session, since it's maybe at most 3 hours long, it's brisk and it uses its time super well which makes it very easy to reccomend, sit down with a nice coffee or a strawberry monster and you'll probably be near the end by the time you finish it.

the soundtrack too, oh my god, while i find the sequel's OST is a lot more memorable and iconic, the one on display here is *amazing*, classic after classic after classic, very few levels here don't have a track that'll stick with you, most of them have lyrics and they all fit the levels perfectly, it's mostly a lot of licenced musicians i think but the tracks feel (and might even be) tailor made for the game, the game does have a composer listed so i suspect they very well are, they're all such good choices and it gives the games sound a really distinct vibe, there aren't many games that sound like madworld outside of its sequel. the game is listed as being composed by Naoto Tanaka who has worked on a good few platinum projects like korra, wonderful 101, bayonetta 2, metal gear rising, anarchy reigns and bayonetta origins, plus other games like my goty 2025 with granblue relink, many ace attourney and megaman games and even viewtiful joe red hot rumble. other people working on it include bendy leggz, Christopher wilkes, doujah raze, sick YG, S.O.U.L, wordsmith and optimus, none of who i'm sadly very familiar with. recommended tracks here are for sure get it up, survival, ain't that funny, let's go, death and honor, crazy, you don't know me, move, so cold, soul, its a mad world and ride (you don't know me and ride are the best by far), it's a seriously fantastic OST, up there with the greats and it's super listenable even without playing the game, very very very very highly recommended.

the story here is also pretty good, the game is a lot more cutscene heavy than you might expect, I'd say about a third of the games overall runtime is cutscenes and they're all voiced and told really well (Steve blum kills it here with one of his best performances, alongside like, Onizuka) and the cast is very clearly having a really good time with it, the announcers especially . the worldbuilding is great and super detailed especially with those announcers dropping lore all the time during gameplay, the satire is really interesting and funny and i do like what it's going for a lot, a very dystopic story full of awful people doing awful things to each other and it gets surprisingly deep with its conversations on how we see and use violence as a means to an end, it had me hooked from beginning to end basically, i would have liked to see more lore about the bosses though because they all have super cool designs and gimmicks but outside of a few like the succubus girl you don't really learn much about them like you do the rest of the cast. it's also just really really funny, every scene with the black baron is hilarious and jack has some amazing one liners, though the commentators tend to miss more than they hit for reasons i'll get into, but they add so much character and flavour to the game that it's difficult for me to not think they're at least a good inclusion. the game show framing is a lot of fun too, with flashy introductions to all the minigames and the commentary and the framing of your place in the game show going up as you beat bosses, it's a lot of fun but it still does have a point, showing how this world is trying to frame the brutality of it all as a fun specticle, maybe even it could be read as commentary on game violence i guess, but it's a little unsettling if you really think about it, the story is silly and dumb but underneath it all there is a point to it, reminiciant of like how resident evil has a lot of commentary on the pharmacutical industry and paid healthcare, underneath all the boulder punching and one-liners. of note is that the game is actually written by long time square alumni Yasumi Matsuno who worked on games like ogre battle, final fantasy 12, vagrant story and the final fantasy tactics series, the game is a real departure, but a welcome one for sure.

so there is an elephant in the room, the games inaccessibility, not just because of the platform and the reliance on the controller gimmicks, but for its content, with it's very excessive violence, but Moreso for its dialogue and designs which can be very, not iffy but it's a game that i wouldn't recommend to everyone, especially people who can't handle excessive crassness, some of the most NSFW dialogue you may ever hear and some real poorly aged misogyny, homophobia and transphobia. i don't believe the game is homophobic or transphobic, it might be a little sexist but i also don't believe it's outright misogynistic either, it's very edgy and of its time but i also do believe its doing some of this for a reason, all of the games worst dialogue is said via it's commentators, a duo of outright disgusting people, a sex pest and a psychopathic former games winner, who crack jokes and mock you as the game goes on, they're charming enough at times but they're also very outright terrible people, the game makes no pretences about this, they're the worst and you're meant to hate them, they're obnoxious and disgusting and downright evil and they're the source of most of the games most offensive lines (along with the black baron who is treated as more of an outright joke, though he is also portrayed as being a large part of the problem with the world) and i think it's trying to say something here, at least that's very much how it comes across, though i also fully understand if you can't handle that, same with the violence which for sure doesn't bother me at all since it's very much not taken seriously and is so over the top that its difficult to even be grossed out by it. this isn't a game for everyone but if you can handle that and see what the game is going for with it, the game is still every bit worth playing, it is to me anyway, it's okay to have problematic favourites, it's good to, even, i'd argue, and this is for sure a problematic favourite of mine, it's just so cool and creative and fun and i mean check out those designs, i can't hate a game that looks this rad, mathilda and jack and some of the bosses like the succubus girl and the cowboy all own, the game even has an evil twink, it's perfect.



it's never been ported or anything, sadly, it's so reliant on the specific gimmicks of the machine with things like the executions or the chainsaw attacks that it'd be difficult to really do it and i do think the game would lose a lot of its character in the process, thankfully it's also one of the cheapest and easiest to find games on the system, you can still get this game sealed for a very reasonable price and if you go used it'll never cost you more than like 10, could probalby find it cib for around 5 in some places, a refreshing change of pace for retro gaming. the game would go on to have a sequel of sorts, anarchy reigns is very different gameplay-wise with being more of a power stoney 3D fighter, or i guess more gundam versus, it has a campaign that takes place in the same universe and shares many characters though, plus that killer OST too, it takes what was started here and does things its own way, though it does lack a lot of the visual flaire, it's sad to say. that's about it though, anarchy reigns had a really fraught release and never caught on and madworld as an idea is seemingly dead in the water, which is a real shame, this world was so charming and had os much potential, but seemingly just never got the chances it deserved. platnum would of course go on to make tons more hits, babylons fall, metal gear rising, bayonetta, vanquish, nier automata and astral chain to name but a few, even working on 2025 GOTY for me granblue fantasy relink with its combat, madworlds director (at platnum) Shigenori Nishikawa went on to make vanquish before moving to tango gameworks and working on the evil within 1&2 and ghostwire tokyo, before this though he worked on games like dino crisis 2 and resident evil 4. the other director (at sega, the games procucers and publisher) Mitsuhiro Shimano would go on to have just as illustrious a career, working on games like infinite space, bayonetta, resonance of fate and the project x zone games, before eventually joining and focusing on work at RGG studio on various yakuza games and the original judgment. overall it's for sure not the easiest reccomendation in the world because of its content, but if you can get passed that? hell yeah you should play this, it's one of the best games on the wii, one of the best games of its generation and it's a nearly perfect example of just how creative games as an art form can be, especially ones given the sheer budget and creative freedom to execute it to the sheer level this game managed, it's a total must play.