What would it be like to be a God? That question has no doubt entered your mind at one point or another in your life and for good reason. The idea of being a god sounds intriguing. The ability to make things happen or to alter the fate of the world seems scary but also quite captivating. That’s why when WMY Studio announced their visual novel called Will: A Wonderful World, which was all about being a god and manipulating the fate of men and women, we were more than ecstatic to try it for ourselves. Does Will: A Wonderful World give the player the true feeling of being a god or does it end up being just another VN in the sea of them for the Nintendo Switch? Find out in our full review which is conveniently located down below.

Will: A Wonderful World has players taking the role of a young amnesiac who just so happens to also be God. With her companion—a talking dog/familiar—our forgetful God must try to help others on Earth with their various troubles. Using texts from those who seek God’s help, rearrange events in time to alter the reality of these men and women to ensure them a new future! Become a tech savvy god in Will: A Wonderful World!

Awakening with no memory in a strange place, a young woman learns from her dog-like companion—who just so happens to talk—that she is God and her duty is to help those in need. With her special ability to alter reality via “texts,” this God must save those in need to create futures for them! However, when you alter the fate of one individual, the world sometimes changes and in turn others have their destinies changed forever. Can this young God learn the responsibility needed to be the one and only God?

Visual novels tend to boil down into two main elements; Read a novel’s worth of text and occasionally choose a response to alter the story towards various endings/paths. Over the last decade or so, we’ve seen visual novels take different approaches to add in other gameplay elements like do puzzle mini-games or make choices more often that increase your chances of getting different endings. Will: A Wonderful World almost fits in both the modern day VN and the old-school method. You’ll learn more about what we mean as we dive head first into our full review of Will: A Wonderful World for the Nintendo Switch!

Will: A Wonderful World almost has an anime theme to it. You begin the story as an amnesiac who doesn’t remember who she is, where she is, and why a talking dog named Will—isn’t that convenient—is telling her she’s a god. From here on, you’ll learn that as a god you have the ability to help others and change their lives in the process. How you help though is where Will: A Wonderful World truly shines. Your main goal in Will: A Wonderful World is to fix/edit texts in order to change a person’s fate.

For simplicity purposes, you as God are given text message-like pleas for help from humanity and you can alter specific parts of those messages to change what happens to the person. An early example of this is one woman who loses her keys and ends up in a dark alley wishing she hadn’t missed her keys in the dark room she left them in. As the player, you’ll see several bits of text that you can rearrange which changes the event to the room being lit up so she can get her keys and the alley just remains pitch black. It’s a very simple game of move these words here to change the story, but it gets more complicated once you thrown in two people and both of their cries for assistance.

As you progress in Will: A Wonderful World, you’ll begin to see some humans have shared paths in life. When this occurs, you have to read both of their stories and then you in return get two sets of edits that you can work with. So now, rearranging one set of text might help one person but doom the other. This is where Will: A Wonderful World gets a bit more intriguing as it can be quite fun to experiment with text to see not only different endings—since everyone’s text usually has multiple endings—but also which text variations lead to the S ranked ending you’re going to want. When Will: A Wonderful World gets a bit harder, it will occasionally feel like random guess work to reaching the desired path, but this simple system makes for engaging gameplay, which is quite rare for a VN.

Outside of reading, there isn’t much more to Will: A Wonderful World. Like all other VNs you get occasional CGs for more explosive story events, but outside of that, you usually only see text with silhouettes that show the character you’re dealing with. That is our only major gripe with Will: A Wonderful World; we wished it had more CG moments as the art within is quite lovely and not always so anime-esque. Some voice over work would have also been fun to match the truly solid OST but we can forgive Will: A Wonderful World for not having dozens of voice actors in what is ultimately a 10-12 hour game.

Will: A Wonderful World is simple in design and aesthetic which initially seemed like a turn off. With mostly text and only a few moments of CG thrown in here and there, Will: A Wonderful World seemed destined to bore us. However, thanks to clever writing, truly captivating narratives and a unique system of altering endings/fate, Will: A Wonderful World is a fun VN that never actually feels repetitive. You might be mostly reading and altering just small portions of text for 10-12 hours, but thanks to the multitude of story paths and the way that stories interlock, you rarely feel the repetition set in. Will: A Wonderful World is an excellent VN that has mature—but realistic—stories that will keep you motivated to keep trying to be a helpful god even when sometimes being kind equals not so kind results. We 100% recommend downloading Will: A Wonderful World for your Nintendo Switch so you too can feel like a God at home or on the go.

Will: A Wonderful World really surprised us in a good way. When you have VNs that are complex with multiple puzzle elements or hundreds of endings, you almost would think Will: A Wonderful World would be too simple for its own good. Yet, due to some truly clever and engaging gameplay as well as narrative, Will: A Wonderful World has become one of our new favorite VNs and we’re sure many will feel the same once you get into it. Are you planning on also buying Will: A Wonderful World? Comment below why or why not as we love hearing from our readers! Be sure to keep stuck to our hive for even more game reviews and anime related goodness here at Honey’s Anime!