Re-release this: Wario World

When is pretty good not good enough for some?

This column is “Re-release this,” which will focus on games that aren’t easily available, or even available at all, but should be once again. Previous entries in this series can be found through this link.

The weight of expectations can be crushing. Wario World is a pretty good game that’s quite fun to play, but it has a few things working against it that kept it from being considered that way by a large enough section of both critics and audience. It’s the second of three games that Treasure developed specifically for Nintendo and in partnership with them — the others being Sin and Punishment and its even better sequel. Treasure was considered at the time to be a fantastic developer, with some legendary titles like Gunstar Heroes, incredible subversions of established genre in Radiant Silvergun and Ikaruga that resulted in two all-time greats, and a library so full of classics that my top 10 list for Treasure actually has 10 games and an entire series on it, and doesn’t even include every title of theirs I’ve written about in this space. Wario World is not on that list, but it’s not as far off as its Metacritic score or what have you would lead you to believe: a back of the envelope calculation has it in the tier just below those that snuck in.

In conjunction with a critical darling boutique developer was that Wario’s main series, Wario Land, was four games long, and three of them were at that point easily among the 50 best games Nintendo had ever put out. (Two decades later, the lowest-ranked of that trio came in at number 63 on my Nintendo top 101; the highest at number 10.) WarioWare Inc,: Mega Microgame$! had just released a few months before, too, and was an incredible debut title for his career shift from treasure hunting to scamming gamers and workers for money. Wario games were beloved, and while they didn’t sell like Mario platformers, they still did well enough: the original Wario Land sold 5.19 million copies, just ahead of Kirby’s Dream Land, and its three sequels managed nearly another six million combined, while, despite the utter weirdness of WarioWare’s entire concept, Mega Microgame$! also crossed the million sales mark.

So, expectations were understandably high from those in the know. And when the game released, for the most part, critics loved how it played. The expectations for how long a console game was expected to be compared to one on the portable realm, though, ended up sinking its scores, and likely its sales, too. Wario World, if you don’t bother collecting everything, probably takes about three to four hours to blow through, which was a hard sell by the time the GameCube era rolled around. There were a few more hours of game to be found — why are you playing a Wario platformer if not to mine for and unearth its secrets? — but even with that, you’re still talking six hours or so, as there were four worlds with three stages each to complete. On the portable side, that wasn’t considered particularly short for a platformer, but more was expected on the console side.

Image credit: Polygon

And all those complaints about Wario World’s length are why it has a 71 on GameRankings and Metacritic despite how effusive the non-length portions of many reviews from prominent outlets were. And those concerns resulted in it being the worst-selling of all the Wario platformers, with under half-a-million sold. Part of that was it being on the GameCube, sure — it was Nintendo’s Game Boy family of systems that kept them in the black during this era, not the system that took a historic beating from Sony — but how it reviewed and how much it cost surely played into that as well.

It’s nearly two decades later, though, and we can unshackle ourselves from concerns about game length for portable vs. handheld and game cost and all of that, as well as any discussion over whether a score of 71 still constitutes a “good” game. How does Wario World hold up, gameplay-wise? It’s still a pretty good game that’s quite fun to play, just as it was in 2003 when it first released. It’s even more expensive than it used to be since Nintendo is content to just let the vast majority of its GameCube library rot in the past and on the secondary market, but hey, that’s what emulation is for.

Unlike the Wario Land games, Wario World is a 3D platformer. It’s not a more open experience like a 3D Mario, and still retains plenty of side-scrolling elements like the Land games — you will be going left to right or right to left or moving vertically the whole way through — but there is depth to the platforms Wario is traversing: it’s a 3D platformer often encased within the stricter corridor-esque design of side-scrolling 2D.

It managed to combine elements of Wario you were used to — dash attacks! butt stomps! — with the kinds of things you’d expect from Treasure’s own platformers. Namely, pummeling and grabbing your enemies, so that you can use them as weapons or simply throw them. It’s a game that revels in the absurdity of Wario’s whole deal, and what helps create this joyful, weirdo mood is the voice performance of Charles Martinet: he was traditionally the voice of Wario in addition to Mario and plenty of others in that corner of Nintendo’s universe, but those voices were more often than not in spin-offs and sub-series. Wario Land didn’t have Wario exclaiming, “Have a rotten day!” after throwing an enemy clear across the screen, or “I’m number one!” just because the truth must be said aloud. Wario World does, though.

Artistically, it looks like Wario was plopped inside of a Treasure game. None of the elements you’re used to from Wario Land are here, but instead, everything has distinct Treasure look to it — the bombs with faces look like they were ripped straight out of Mischief Makers, for instance. This is not a complaint, especially since Wario tends to end up in weird venues due to curses or dimensional travel, anyway. He just happened to end up inside of a world drawn by Treasure’s artists this time, and composed by Treasure’s Norio Hanzawa, as well. One of Nintendo’s own composers worked on the game as well: it was Minako Hamano’s first but not last Wario title, but she had worked as a composer and sound editor on plenty of games the developer of Wario Land, Nintendo R&D1, had created in the past, including a ton of Metroid titles. You can thank Hamano for the existence of both Link’s Awakening “The Ballad of the Wind Fish” and “Ridley’s Theme” from Super Metroid. The game definitely sounds more Treasure-like than Nintendo-like, despite Hamano’s presence, but it all fits Wario regardless, which was the point.

You’re going to spend quite a bit of time brawling in Wario World, but you’ve got the tools for it. There are some different classes of foes, which are easy to spot since it’s size-based. The smallest ones can be taken out with a dash or a punch. Slightly larger ones will be knocked down when you hit them, not defeated, which gives you a chance to grab them. From here, you can either charge up a throw that’ll knock down or defeat even more foes in your way, perform a spin attack with the analog stick that transitions into a devastating, enemy-defeating auto-spin that’ll occur over 20 times before it ends, or jump up in the air and piledrive the enemy into the ground, the impact of which will defeat or damage any nearby foes as well — the higher the jump, the more impact the piledriver will have. Additionally, all three of these special attacks will be used for environmental puzzle solving, which you’ll deal with not just to progress, but also to find Wario’s various lost treasures. Of which there are many.

These are not the only special attacks — there is also a dash plus jump combination that lets you collide Wario’s bulk with flying enemies you otherwise can’t hit hard — but they’re the ones you’ll find yourself using the most often in battles. Which again, are constant: enemies respawn after you leave the area they were in, but don’t worry, you don’t need to continually fight them. You can if you want more money, but it’s not a necessity, and actually ends up being useful sometimes when you need another enemy to throw/piledrive/spin for one of those puzzles, or to help clear out the next big wave of foes you do have to defeat for the first time.

Collecting! You will be doing so much collecting in Wario World, but it’s an active activity instead of a passive one that will require you really dig around the world and solve a suite of platforming puzzles, to boot. Rareware Collectathon you grow tired of this is not. The reason there is so much collecting to do is because a piece of Wario’s vast treasury, a Black Jewel, is apparently sentient. It takes over Wario’s castle, turns his treasures into monsters, and locks away the creatures that had previously kept it sealed away. These Spritelings look like little forest fairies, and there are 40 of them to rescue. They’re the easiest thing to find in the game, as they’re oftentimes just out on the path or a little bit out of sight, with muffled audio clues letting you know you’re near one of them. The more of them you collect, the more magnificent Wario’s post-game castle is going to look. Don’t rescue enough, and Wario doesn’t even get a castle back, but instead sits on a throne in the woods. You’d want to rescue them even if you didn’t care so much about the quality of Wario’s residence, though, since each Spriteling gives you some advice on how to tackle a coming situation, or on gameplay in general. A hard-to-reach Spriteling might have the key you need to defeat a boss that’s impervious to all of your attacks save one.

Other than the Spritelings, you also want to collect coins, which you receive from every defeated enemy as well as in some treasure chests. Coins here, way before Super Mario Odyssey did the same, determine whether you have extra lives or not. If you die, you’ll return right where you were, just with lighter pockets. If you don’t have enough coins to revive Wario, then that’s a game over, and you’ll have to restart the stage. If you fight the enemies you see and seek out treasures, though, you should have plenty of coins, as well as health, to get by without being in real risk of this happening. You can recover health with your coins, too, so long as there is a garlic dispensing garlic man nearby. He’ll charge you for the health-restoring Allium sativum, but it’s cheaper to restore some health than it is to pay to come back to life, and you get to punch him in the face for the bulbs, too.

You are not done with things you need to collect. Each stage has eight hidden treasures in it, which are contained within chests. The chests don’t reveal themselves unless you find the button — featuring a W on it — hidden in the stage. Once you do and stomp on it, throw something at it, whatever, the chest will appear on a W panel of the same color. What’s within those chests doesn’t matter so much, in terms of gameplay — Wario isn’t going to use the NES he finds for anything — but collecting all of the treasures in a stage does let you unlock a microgame from WarioWare on your Game Boy Advance, which you can connect via Link Cable. A little more important are the health upgrades — find each one scattered throughout a stage and earn an extra half-a-heart each time — and the red crystals. You need 3-6 of those crystals per stage to open up the path to the boss of each one, but there are eight of them per stage. Why would you bother collecting the extras? Two reasons: the first is that a golden statue of Wario is erected outside of the entrance to the game world if you do, and who wouldn’t want to have as many twin Golden Wario statues as they can, and second, you find the red crystals by completing platforming puzzles, which are highly enjoyable.

There are two different kinds of platforming puzzles here. The first type are hidden beneath wooden trapdoors that Wario butt stomps his way through, and they are perspective-shifting 3D puzzles that often see Wario climbing vertically through a puzzle of some kind. It might be based on timing (hitting switches on the ground to move ascending platforms) or it might be kind of a trick of the eye thing, where the location of the platforms or the path through the interior or a large cube will be difficult to discern if you don’t shift the camera around. The second type are somewhat like the Super Mario Sunshine stages that hid shine sprites away: ever-shifting 3D platforming puzzles that require precision to complete. In these, you just get to try again if you fall, but any coins you collected will be taken from you and need to be picked up in the puzzle once more. So it pays to be careful, literally. The aforementioned health bonuses are often hidden away in these red crystal puzzles, too, so if you decide not to put in the effort on collecting the extra crystals, you very well might miss out on health boosts, too.

Give Treasure control of Wario and this is the (tremendous and right) result. Image credit: The Models Resource

What might make this game feel more Treasure-like than the grabbing and throwing and hidden bits that reward patience and perseverance, though, are the bosses. There are so many of them. Each stage has a boss, and then each world has a stage dedicated solely to an even bigger boss. The design of them is like a cross between the weirdos you’d see in Wario Land games and the weirdos you’d find in a Treasure one. And as is fitting for both, you defeat them by hitting them very hard, in one way or another, or even be picking them up and throwing them out of the arena you’re facing them in. There are some tricks that make harming them easier, but none of them are available often enough to ensure you will completely defeat the boss with them, so there’s a measure of strategy to when you want to, say, pick up a stone column and swing it at the foot of a giant lizard wearing a bikini so she grabs her foot and hops her own way out of the arena in one go, as opposed to relentlessly punching her while she attempts to stomp you to death and you eventually pick her up to throw her out of there yourself. You’re probably better off doing the punching early, before the intensity of attacks increase as a boss’ health decreases, but this is all your call.

The length of Wario World might have hurt from a cost perspective — arguing that it should have been another world or two longer is tough to refute — but what’s here is a ton of fun even now, nearly two decades and many more 3D platformers later. Wario is loaded with personality in large part thanks to Charles Martinet, the brawling is fun and a breeze once you feel comfortable with the special attacks, and there is plenty of precision puzzle platforming and physics play to contend with here, the kind of stuff Treasure had put into other games of theirs like Mischief Makers. There’s a ton of collecting to do, but so much of it is wrapped up in bits that enhance the experience and the platforming instead of there simply being A Lot Of It, and since the game doesn’t overstay its welcome, that doesn’t get old, either. There aren’t a ton of stages, but they are all dense, and become more complex as the game goes on.

The most significant issue with Wario World at this point is that it’s just not available. Copies of it without a case or manual on Ebay cost more than the game originally did, and since it wasn’t a multi-million seller, there isn’t an endless supply of them to go around, either. It emulates well enough on machines that will run Dolphin, so there’s that, but it would be lovely if Nintendo would instead just re-release a game that should have more fans than it does. Afraid it won’t catch on a second time at standard console game pricing? Slap an HD upscale on the original and sell it for $20 or $30, then. Add GameCube games to the Nintendo Switch Online subscription! This is a solvable problem, which doesn’t mean it will be solved, but there it is. Regardless of the platform, Wario World is worth playing. It’s not of the same caliber as Treasure’s greatest efforts or the best Wario Land titles, but that’s something you can say about the vast majority of video games.

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