Marble Saga Kororinpa by Hudson Soft is a very imaginative and fun Wii game featuring a number of enhancements over the previous Kororinpa. In Marble Saga, you’ll play as Anthony the Ant as he searches for the Golden Sunflower. You’ll collect a number of essential items along the way to the Sunflower and eventually save his colony. With more than 150 levels and a complete level creator to boot, Marble Saga gets my award for best value so far this year.

I first got to play Marble Saga at Hudson’s booth at the NY Comic Con in February. I came away very impressed with the game seeing is how it has more value than a lot of games that are priced at $50, and it’s only $30!

When you first pick up and play Marble Saga, you’ll notice that instead of controlling your marble, you’re really controlling the world around it. The world tilts and turns by the twisting and turning of the Wii Remote or Balance Board. It’s a pretty unique system and works really well. You’ll find yourself tilting your way through the levels collecting all the crystals and reaching the goal in no time. After the first couple worlds in the game, things start to ramp up in difficulty. It’s no longer simple levels with railings and straight paths. Levels get much longer and much more complex. Some of the later levels even have 3 or 4 checkpoints throughout because of their size and difficulty. Each world has a certain theme such as underwater, grasslands, and wood. But within each level are contained many different challenges and obstacles. You’ll come up against teetering platforms, draw bridges, cannons, magnetic tracks, and many more.

Marble Saga Kororinpa is all about customization. You’ll unlock tons of different ‘marbles’ throughout the game, and most of them are irregularly shaped like the pig and panda marbles. Each marble has it’s own specs such as smoothness, control, etc. So if you get one of the furrier marbles, it’ll like not roll as easily so it’ll be better for levels that have a lot of pitfalls. The game also features items called ‘Junk’ that you can collect. You can piece the ‘junk’ together to make different items.

And one of the best features in customization is the ability to create your own levels using the built in Editor. The interface is very simple to use and you’ll find yourself creating wild levels in no time. Don’t have much creativity? No problem, just hop online and download levels from others online. The game uses WiiConnect24 to download new levels and even upload your own creations. You can even play online with people around the world in your custom levels.

The graphics in the game are pretty good and compliment the overall design of the game. The gameplay is really where the game shines and you’ll find yourself not caring too much about the graphics when you’re trying to beat your friends’ times rolling through levels.

Multiplayer in Marble Saga can be defined with two words: fun and frustrating :) You can play with up to 4 friends in any of the levels in the single player mode, so it’s got tons of replay-ability. And if you’re like me, you’ll love to take your skills online and compete with others around the world to beat their best times.

Conclusion

For $29.99, you can’t go wrong with Marble Saga. It’s got more features than many of the AAA titles on the Wii and it really is a fun game to play with a group of friends. I would equate the game experience to something like Boom Blox, where you and your friends will find yourself trying to beat the challenges and playing til all hours of the night. So if you’re looking for a game that features some good multiplayer for under $30, Marble Saga is your game!