The Wonderful 101 combo guide

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It’s no surprise that Platinum Games’ latest foray into the frenzied action genre has a complex and layered combat system that, if properly mastered, can provide hours of relentless, limb-rending fun. For those struggling with idea of dishing out waves of combo attacks, there’s Very Easy and Easy modes that will generously reward button mashing by executing auto-combos with single button inputs. But for those that are committed to the gruelling long-haul, we’ve compiled a basic guide to the Wonderful 101 combat system to help you on your way to greatness!

Basic Combat

Each Unite Morph is selected by either drawing the desired icon on the Wii U pad or with the right analogue stick and pressing A. The larger you draw the shape, the more powerful your Unite Morph will be. To really take advantage of the combat system, you’ll need to rely on the stick to pull off fast, fluid combos so it’s important to familiarise yourself with using it as quickly as possible. Unless you’ve already forked out for the Attack Liner skill or are up against a vulnerable or unarmoured enemy, always draw your shapes away from them to avoid taking damage. It also makes it easier to see what you’re drawing which will come in handy when you move on to Team Unite Morphs.

Unite Morph Skills

You can unlock multiple ‘skills’ for each of your Unite Morphs, which are essentially just special moves that can later be used for advanced combos (a Unite Mix). Each Unite Morph will have its own variant of moves like Wonderful Rising, Wonderful Cyclone and Wonderful Stinger, so for example, the input for Wonderful Rising with the sword would be the same as it would be for the hand or any of the other shapes. You’ll want to practice these with the stick as you unlock them so that you become familiar with using them in combat, making it easier to string them together when you move on to the advanced combos.

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Team Unite Morphs

Your team isn’t restricted to a single Unite Morph; you can have the other members form up into their own Unite Morph by hitting X after drawing your chosen icon to have them release a flurry of attacks with their own burst of combo moves before disassembling. As with the primary Unite Morph, the larger you draw the icon, the more powerful it will be. Utilising this technique will boost your combo points and seriously mess up your opponents, which is great news because you can have up to four Team Unite Morphs on the go at any one time.

Unite Mix

As we already covered in Basic Combat, to make a Unite Morph, you draw the shape of the weapon you want to whoop some butt with and press the A button to summon it into being. In Unite Morph Skills, we saw that the input for each special move ends by pressing the A button.

So here’s a crazy idea: what if we draw the glyph for the weapon, then rather than just pressing A, we go ahead and input the command for a special move instead? This is the first step into the world of Unite Mixes, opening up the possibilities for all kinds of cartoonish, violent shenanigans.

The beauty of this system is that you don’t have to wait for the Wonderful 101 to morph into a weapon before initiating a special attack – you can essentially queue up the attack so that the Unite Morph executes it at the moment it takes shape.

To begin with, you might want to practice mixing using just one special attack across two glyphs to familiarise yourself with the system before moving on to chaining multiple Unite Morphs and special attacks together.

With some practice and an unquenchable thirst for the blood of your enemies, you’ll soon be juggling metallic juggernauts and slicing through huge mutant scorpions with the confidence of Aquaman in a synchronised swimming contest. Good luck!

And if you're looking for more tips for Platinum Games' latest, check out GamesRadar's Wonderful 101 shop upgrade guide.