Retro spotlight: Wario Land: Super Mario Land 3

Wario's first go of things as a protagonist is only part of the Super Mario Land series because he hadn't yet proven he didn't need the connection.

This column is “Retro spotlight,” which exists mostly so I can write about whatever game I feel like even if it doesn’t fit into one of the other topics you find in this newsletter. Previous entries in this series can be found through this link.

Super Mario Land 2: 6 Golden Coins is a Wario game, despite the character’s name not appearing anywhere in the title. He serves as the game’s antagonist, but even more than that, much of the style of what would become Wario Land exists within 6 Golden Coins. The enemies don’t resemble Mario ones, for the most part, but instead are drawn very much like what Wario would encounter in his own adventures. That’s not incidental, of course, as the designers and artists and directors from Super Mario Land 2 were also in those roles for the Wario Land games that would spawn from it, but it’s still notable.

Wario Land was kind of a fascinating experiment for Nintendo, where they had enough trust in their auxiliary characters to make games starring them, but didn’t want to untangle them from their Mario origins just yet. So, Wario Land isn’t Wario Land, it’s Wario Land: Super Mario Land 3, in the same way that Yoshi’s Island had to be Super Mario World 2: Yoshi’s Island even though, in both cases, neither is even a little bit like what came before gameplay-wise. Wario, at least, got top billing on his own game, and immediately dropped the Mario connection for the sequel. Neither managed to match the sales of the game they were connected to, but both did well: Wario Land was ranked sixth in sales among Game Boy games, sandwiched between Dr. Mario and Kirby’s Dream Land, while Yoshi’s Island ended up eighth on the SNES list, ahead of Star Fox and right behind The Legend of Zelda: A Link to the Past. The strategy worked, and two new series were launched from it, to boot.

You’d have to think these naming choices were due to the rivalry with Sega at this stage: Nintendo might have been branching out with extremely different gameplay from the Mario formula with Wario Land and Yoshi’s Island, but they also didn’t want to risk missing out on a chance to lean into the cache of their moneymaker, lest Sega see an edge in a hotly contested battle for supremacy. Sega, after all, was plastering Sonic all over everything they could to topple Mario: the first Sonic game released in the summer of 1991, but by the time of Wario Land just under three years later, there were already seven mainline Sonic games, four Sonic arcade games, and a falling block puzzle game that was exclusive to Japan.

Image credit: Retrovolve

In more modern times, with everything established and the various console makers much less at each other’s throats than they used to be, spin-offs are just that. It wasn’t Super Mario 3D World 2: Captain Toad’s Treasure Tracker, or Fire Emblem Presents Tokyo Mirage Sessions. Captain Toad: Treasure Tracker and Tokyo Mirage Sessions ♯FE sufficed. Good thing, too, because sometimes these newsletter headlines are long enough as is.

How does Wario Land differ from the series it’s still tied to by name? There is what Wario is focusing on, for one — treasure — as well as how the protagonist plays. While Super Mario Land 2 was a Wario game by my own and even the developer’s admission, Mario himself still played like Mario. He ran, he jumped, he had a fireball power-up, he had a floating power-up, and so on. The context he found himself within was different, but Mario is Mario is Mario — even his role-playing games have him doing Mario stuff. Wario Land kept some of the trappings of Mario — there is a fire power-up, there is a flying one — but the way they’re implemented and used is very different. Wario doesn’t throw fireballs: he puts on a hat that looks like a dragon, and he shoots a stream of flames out of it. He doesn’t fly or float like Mario, but instead, wears a hat with rocket boosters attached that enhance his dash and allow for air dashing, too. And rather than just jumping on enemies’ heads or kicking a shell to defeat them, with the kind of precision Mario employs, Wario is more about shows of brute strength. He’ll land on an enemy’s head, sure, but then he can pick them up and use them as a projectile to defeat more foes, or he can dash into enemies and send them flying, or he can butt stomp on them to end their existence. Wario might have come out of Mario, but he had butt stomping down to a science before the plumber landed his first one.

Getting to the end of the course isn’t really the point on its own, either. Wario Land is slower-paced, with you spending more time investigating and exploring and destroying than you would in a Mario game. You’re looking for coins, for secret paths to collectible treasures, as you’ll end up with a bad ending if you don’t. Remember, the plot of Super Mario Land 2 was that Wario took over Mario’s castle while the owner was away. After getting booted out of it, he aims to get himself a castle of his own, but he can’t do that if he doesn’t raise the funds and find the treasures to fill it with. So if you just blow through Wario Land without exploring, or without returning to levels you’ve already completed to see if new paths have opened up due to your actions in the world at large, well, Wario isn’t going to end up with much of a castle to brag about.

The very first treasure in the game isn’t available when you first play the level. You have to wait until you clear the first world, which in turn floods its levels. This makes navigating them a little more annoying, but it also opens up some new paths that Wario can now float to, and unearths a door that contains this treasure, so long as you can find the key. Don’t worry, it’s nearby, as it’s mostly meant to show you that you’ll have to find a key and bring it back to the door without losing it. The hidden treasures don’t get more straightforward after this, but at least the levels containing them appear differently on the map — rather than a blank white dot, they’re filled in dots — so you don’t have to guess and replay all of the levels again and again to find them all.

You’ll want these treasures, too, as they’re worth a ton of coins. The limit for coins is 99,999, which, if you reach that, earns Wario a planet with his face worked into its surface. (This is where I should probably mention that a genie ends up bestowing Wario with the castle he wants, but the genie charges for it — the more money, the better the castle.) The low-end is a birdhouse, which is slightly different than living in a literal Wario world.

Getting 99,999 coins isn’t easy even with all of the treasures, as you can pretty easily lose your coins upon completion of a level. There are two bonus games you can choose from at the end of each stage: one earns you hearts toward extra lives, and the other is a chance to leave with exponentially more coins than you entered with. There are two buckets with ropes attached: one contains a bag of coins equal to how many coins you completed the level with, and the other is a 10-ton weight that crushes Wario, ends the game, and also knocks half of his coins from the level away. So, successfully picking the money bag bucket three times out of three would double your coins, then double that total, then double that total once more, but even then you’re at best maxing out at 999 coins in the game. There aren’t 100 stages, and most of the ones that are there aren’t getting you enough coins to get to 999, plus you’d have to go three-for-three on every bucket game even if there were that many stages and opportunities for coins… you need those treasures, which will account for more coins each than you’ll be able to grab while playing. The coins are a nifty bonus that can help make up for a missing treasure here or there or boost your final total; the treasures themselves are what will determine whether Wario gets to live in a treehouse or a log cabin or an actual castle like he dreams.

There are still some vestiges of Mario here, even if they’ve been warped for Wario’s purposes. Wario shrinks when he takes damage, as Mario does. His powers are tied to whether or not he’s struck by a foe or an obstacle like spikes, as well. There are some differences, though, that make this system a bit more of a puzzle to figure out: Wario’s various powers can lock him out from some basic skills, for instance. If he’s wearing the hat that spits flames, he can’t dash, even though that’s something even a power-less, non-shrunk Wario can do. If he’s small, he’s not just a weaker version of the standard-size Wario like Mario is — he can’t even do his signature moves. A shrunk Mario could still do a spin jump in Super Mario World, for instance, which in turn let him break the blocks he couldn’t otherwise, but a shrunken Wario can’t dash, and blocks? Forget about breaking those. And since obstacles have to be overcome and powers utilized to find so many of the game’s treasures, being small is a big deal.

Wario has access to mid-level checkpoints, but they’ll cost you. It takes 10 coins to open up a checkpoint, and sometimes to open up the exit to a stage, too. Coins aren’t everything — again, that’s the treasures — but you clearly need them to get around, so don’t just run by blocks and avoid enemies when you might find coins in them after smashing them up. And it’s worth not just running ahead, anyway, since death means losing all the coins you’ve collected in the level. Oh yeah, Wario Land preempted your plan to collect a bunch of coins over and over, spending your lives for chances to bulk up those totals before hitting up the post-stage minigame.

As for how to earn more lives, there are hearts to be found just like in 6 Golden Coins. 100 hearts grant you an extra life, and you’ll probably need them: Wario Land isn’t particularly difficult, but between the checkpoints that cost money, having to replay levels to find treasures, and the number of instant-kill obstacles and enemies in your path, it’s not a bad idea to stock up just in case.

The music really leaned into the switch over to Wario, with very little of the Super Mario Land 2 sound still within. There’s some, for sure — the title screen is still very Mario, for instance — but once you get into the levels themselves, the sounds are all much more Wario, showing once again that Mario’s name being attached to this game had more to do with outward appearances than anything.

Graphically, too, this feels so much more Wario than Mario: the enemy designs continue on from Super Mario Land 2 far more than the music did, but they’re also more associated with Wario than Mario given they continued on that way for the yellow-clad treasure-seeker’s adventures while, for Mario, foes that looked that way were mostly contained to that one game. Wario animates well here, but he’s a lot more frozen and stiff in his facial expressions and actions than he would be in future installments, which leaned very much into how much of a Looney Tunes character this guy is in comparison to other Nintendo protagonists. You can’t picture Nintendo letting Mario’s face get blown off with a shotgun, Daffy Duck-style, but you can picture it happening to Wario, can’t you? The first Wario Land title hadn’t quite gotten him to that point yet, but the animations that are here are enjoyable, as are all those little hats.

Wario Land is a great example of developer Nintendo R&D1’s refusal to do the same thing twice if they could help it. When given the chance to make a Mario title for the Game Boy without series creator Shigeru Miyamoto’s influence, they made the supremely odd Super Mario Land. When a sequel was green lit, they made the even weirder 6 Golden Coins, which featured Wario, the developer’s obvious pride and joy from the game. Wario got his own series, and R&D1 set out to make it as distinct from Mario as possible, so much so that it doesn’t even resemble the game that introduced Wario to begin with. And then, when Wario Land II rolled around a few years later, that was completely different from the game it was a sequel to as well, a routine that continued on through the next two Wario Land titles, and then led to the creation of WarioWare, which, even with the same basic premise across them, so often tried to find some kind of hook or control scheme to make it distinct from the WarioWare games that had come before.

Wario Land: Super Mario Land 3 is the weakest of the Wario Land titles that R&D1 developed. That’s not just a matter of opinion, but also relative. In retrospective reviews that hit when it landed on the Nintendo 3DS Virtual Console in 2012, it still pulled in plenty of 9 out of 10s, showing it had aged just fine from its release nearly two decades prior, when it was a leading seller on the Game Boy and had picked up plenty of impressive review scores and praise. So, “weakest” is still better than plenty of other side-scrolling platformers: Wario Land is still a good time even now. It’s just not as layered, as complex, as obviously brilliant as the three sequels that would follow it. There’s nothing wrong with not being as good as literally the best side-scrolling platformer Nintendo has ever made, though. Only one game can be that good, and yet, the Wario Land series managed to sneak in two legitimate competitors for the honor. So as you can see, the competition Super Mario Land 3 is facing is pretty intense.

And yet, there are still those who prefer this version of Wario Land to what would come. It’s not an opinion I — a person who has gone to the mat for II through 4 again and again whenever I’m given the chance — personally share, but it’s at least one I can understand: this is still a damn good platformer nearly three decades later, one that is easy enough to get through, but will take more work to fully complete. The seeds of what Wario Land would become are planted here, and even though they hadn’t sprouted yet, even just the promise of what’s to come is plenty enjoyable. If you’ve never played, grab it from the Nintendo 3DS shop while you still can, or emulate it if you can’t. And if you have played, well, it’s a lot of fun to revisit, too, and you can’t ask for much more than that from a game.

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