It's new to me: Mario & Wario
It's new to me: Mario & Wario
A Super Famicom-exclusive game that used the system's mouse peripheral, where Wario stars as a plane-riding villain.
This column is “It’s new to me,” in which I’ll play a game I’ve never played before — of which there are still many despite my habits — and then write up my thoughts on the title, hopefully while doing existing fans justice. Previous entries in this series can be found through this link.
One of the reasons it was easy to transition Wario from the villain role to more of a lovable pain-in-the-ass for Mario kind of character is because his villainous stuff was never that heinous. Bowser is redeemable fairly regularly in things like Super Mario RPG and Paper Mario despite the fact he straight-up kidnaps Princess Peach or tries to take over the literal galaxy, but Wario? What are his crimes, exactly? He took Mario’s castle in Super Mario Land 2: 6 Golden Coins, but that’s mostly a game about squatter’s rights, and he only did it the one time: from that point on, he tried to find the funds and treasures to buy his own castle, rather than stealing someone else’s. And in Mario & Wario, he’s just throwing objects like buckets and cracked Yoshi eggshells onto Mario’s head to make traversing dangerous puzzles a lot more dangerous. But also funnier, so it’s impossible to say if it’s bad or not.
Mario & Wario, despite being entirely in English, is a Japan-exclusive on the Super Famicom that utilizes the system’s mouse peripheral. It was developed and released by Game Freak in 1993 before they were the studio known for Pokémon, with Satoshi Tajiri, creator of Pokémon, the director and designer of the game. It’s actually a little unclear as to why it didn’t see an overseas release, too: it was previewed in Nintendo Power in 1993 as a future SNES title for release in ‘94, and was included in magazines released in multiple European countries as well as Brazil. And yet, it ended up sticking in Japan, fully in English. Very weird!
It’s especially surprising since this was 1) a Mario game and 2) a Wario game, two things Nintendo were pushing pretty heavily 1) always and 2) at the time. Wario made his debut in 6 Golden Coins in 1992, and 1994 was a significant year for the character. Wario Land: Super Mario Land 3 — his first solo title — would release in 1994 on the Game Boy, as would Wario’s Woods, which saw iterations on three different platforms (NES, SNES, Satellaview). The crossover with Hudson’s Bomberman, Wario Blast: Featuring Bomberman! was also a 1994 release. Save the Satellaview title, all of those games were available in North America. Nintendo obviously felt the need to do something with this character, and put him in a whole bunch of places in a hurry, but for whatever reason — the Super NES Mouse peripheral, perhaps? — they decided against releasing Mario & Wario outside of Japan, even though all that was needed to do so from a development point of view was a translated manual. Like I said: weird.
It also never saw a later release on something like the Nintendo DS, even though it made a ton of sense as a port to that system. What you could have used the stylus for is exactly what the mouse peripheral was used for: clicking on the character you actually control, in order to get them to influence where Mario will walk or climb. Here are the basics of how Mario & Wario works: it’s a puzzle platformer where Mario — or Princess Peach or Yoshi, you get a choice from among the three — walk around on their own, but do so while their vision is obscured. Wario flies by in his little plane that’s comically about the size of his head, and drops some kind of object on theirs, such as a bucket with an M on it that, once upside down, looks like Wario’s W instead.
You might even recognize that bucket, since it’s been reused in a number of contexts over the years, in games that did make it out of Japan. Pokémon Red and Blue both reference it on one of the TVs in the game (when you check the TV in question, it describes “a game with Mario wearing a bucket on his head”). Kirby Super Star includes the bucket as one of the various Nintendo-universe treasures to be found in The Great Cave Offensive. It’s a trophy in Super Smash Bros. Melee (and Wanda, the fairy you control in Mario & Wario, is is a spirit in Super Smash Bros. Ultimate). In Mario & Luigi: Bowser’s Inside Story — part of a series of games that borrows heavily from the design work and art that Game Freak put into Mario & Wario — one of the enemy’s attacks drops a bucket on Mario and Luigi’s heads, causing them to move a whole lot like the characters in this puzzler do.
Sorry, sorry, enough about the bucket, let’s get back to how the game plays while Mario wears said bucket on his head. You control Wanda the fairy with the mouse, flying wherever you need to on the screen to manipulate both the puzzle environment and whichever character is traversing it. Click on Mario to get Wanda to whack him with her wand, causing him to change direction. Click on the outlines of where blocks could be or on blocks that are already there in order to place them or remove them, depending. Click on cracked blocks to break them and open a path for Mario, on enemies to defeat them before they can harm Mario, on coin blocks to earn coins toward extra lives — I’m sure you can guess how many you need to earn one of those — on whatever manipulable objects are within a particular stage.
You can get Mario to the end pretty easily sometimes, with the extra work being about trying to get him to collect things like the four stars scattered across the stage: if you get all four, you earn an extra life. And since Mario (or whomever) can die in a number of ways and your lives will quickly deplete if you can’t figure out how to avoid that, it’s best to put in the work and get all of the coins and stars you can. But don’t take too long, since each stage has a time limit, and you earn more points for having more time remaining, too.
This video shows the first level, which is made up of 10 stages:
It’s really just the basics here, with things never getting too complicated and stages being solved in a matter of 12-20 seconds, but as early as the second level, the difficulty picks up. Whereas the stages in level 1 were all single-screen and quickly solved, those in level 2 are much larger, and full of surprises you can’t immediately account for. Suddenly, you have to figure out how to reach collectable items that aren’t on the obvious path, and there are now so many blocks to break, and so many to fill in. You really need to bounce back and forth with the mouse in order to corral Mario in a contained area where he won’t fall to his doom while you try to build him a bridge, keep him away from enemies, and so on. This is also where the different choice in which character to use comes in: Mario is, as he always is in whatever game you’re talking about, the balanced choice, as he travels at a medium speed. The Princess is slower, which can be good in some situations, like level 2’s intense bridge-building, while Yoshi moves the fastest, which can be challenging to get the timing of, but is also well-suited to levels where you need to get to the end quicker.
As you progress through the game, you’ll have to deal with blocks that only stay up for a limited time, enemies that appear in larger groups or that also move around — meaning you need to time when you’re moving by them to avoid dying — sticky blocks that can trap you in place, trampolines and what results from launching Mario with one. It’s a lot, but in a good way.
There are initially eight levels to get through with 10 stages in each, but once you complete those, two additional levels appear. There are 100 standard stages in total, so there’s quite a bit of game here, especially since the difficulty ramps up and they tend to get a lot lengthier than the initial 12-20 seconds of the first level. And once you complete everything else, a challenge level opens up, featuring 10 EX stages that’ll test your abilities with the mouse.
Now, there isn’t a whole lot of Wario himself in this game, which is its only real downfall. He shows up before levels to throw an object onto Mario’s or Yoshi’s or Princess’ head, and at the end of the level, Wanda gets to smack his plane around in order to get coins. You see a lot more of Luigi (he’s at the end of every stage waiting to yank the bucket or whatever off of the head of the character you’re guiding) and other enemies than of the one whose name is in the game’s title. Lots of games — most games, really — have no Wario at all in them, however, so when you consider that, a little bit of Wario is something of a blessing.
The soundtrack is a high point — it’s not a particularly lengthy one, with the same music playing throughout a level — but it’s the kind of bouncy, game-appropriate work you’d expect from Junichi Masuda, who is responsible for so much of the Pokémon music you’ve loved throughout the years, as well as that of other Game Freak titles like HarmoKnight, Giga Wrecker, and Drill Dozer.
The above video serves as the entirety of Mario & Wario’s soundtrack, as well as a look at each of the different environments that the game’s levels take place in: from forest to ice cave to up in the clouds to Wario’s own castle.
Mario & Wario feels a lot like the spiritual predecessor to the Mario vs. Donkey Kong games, especially the DSiWare exclusive, Minis March Again! In that game, you have to analyze the level and figure out what you need to prepare in terms of pathways towards the exit and collectibles, and you don’t actually control the characters that are moving through it, either: they’re wind-up toys that start moving and keep doing so once you get them going, and the game focuses on guiding them through obstacles you know exist as well as ones that don’t crop up until everything is in motion. If you enjoyed that game at all, you’d probably like Mario & Wario, too. While you can (until the end of March 2023) get Minis March Again! on the 3DS eShop, Mario & Wario remains unavailable in the present. At least, officially.
You can always emulate it, and since it’s already in English and uses the mouse peripheral, it’s very simple to play it on a computer. The emulator SNES9x lets you select which kind of input you’re using — such as SNES Joypad or Super Scope — and the Super NES Mouse is one such input. Which you can just use your regular old computer mouse for! No need to map a bunch of controller buttons to your keyboard or figure out which actual controller you can plug into your PC to pretend it’s an SNES pad. Just use the mouse that you already have plugged in, and all of Mario & Wario is there for you to play as originally intended.
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