While Wario’s flagship platforming series has remained in the wake of WarioWare’s surrealist microgames for years, his classic platformers have that sort of passionate fanbase to drive 600-page eBooks. No surprise: Wario Land 4 reinterprets Mario’s basic 2D platforming concepts in a back-to-front manner in a profane, brash adventure never reluctant to push limits.
It’s hard not to make a comparison between Wario Land 4 and the first WarioWare title, WarioWare, Inc.: Mega Microgame$!. Both were created by Nintendo R&D1 with largely the same team; Wario Land 4 appeared on store shelves shortly after the Game Boy Advance when it landed on store shelves in 2001, and WarioWare two years later. They’re similar in look, visually two peas in a pod, with much of WarioWare’s psychedelic visual aesthetic and hyper-musical sensibilities having debuted in Wario Land.
It’s a bright, colorful game full of gold and purple to meet its namesake character and silly, ‘realistic’ pixel art that humorously contrasts with its cartoon-like main art style. The music employs the bizarre vocal samples WarioWare would later be infamous for, too, although some of the psychedelic music reminds us of another psychedelic Nintendo classic: EarthBound.
Perhaps as homage to Birabuto Kingdom, the initial ancient Egyptian-themed world of its predecessor, Super Mario Land, Wario Land 4 has our titular antagonist plundering a pyramid of gold full of secrets for riches. Rather than a traditional platformer, where all you have to do is get to the end of each level, Wario Land 4 has several objectives: retrieve the key that unlocks the next level; collect the four shards of jewels that unlock the boss fight at the end of each world; activate a frog-shaped bomb that explodes the entire level; head back to the beginning of the stage before the bomb detonates.
This design has its pros and cons. In certain ways, it can be very fetch-quest-y, with a random collection of magical MacGuffins required to advance to the next level. But it also gives each one a sense of freedom and nonlinearity, like in classic Sonic zones, and a change of pace from beginning to end of a level.
The first part of each level is spent exploring and searching for all the various collectibles, thanks to the lack of a time limit enabling you to do as you please at your own rate and take your surroundings in. The second half is once you’ve activated the time bomb, where the easy stroll becomes frantic racing to the beginning. R&D1 took Metroid’s ‘carefully explore the world and then narrowly escape total annihilation at the end within a time limit’ concept and applied it to every one of their levels.
Wario features your standard platforming controls, with the D-pad controlling movement, ‘A’ jumping, ‘B’ attacking, and ‘R’ running, but there’s an entire army of other abilities and mechanics you’ll need to master. When you whack an enemy upside down, you are able to lift them up and toss them; unlike the Mario games’ toss (which in some cases is a completely voluntary part of the plumber’s repertoire), Wario must learn how to toss at different speeds and directions in order to navigate through puzzles and slay some enemies.
That’s not all you’ll want to know: there’s swimming, rolling, jump attacks, dash attacks, smash attacks, stomp jumps, and crouching jumps. You may well want to have the manual to refer to when you’re stuck on some of the game’s more esoteric challenges. One of Wario Land 4’s bosses, for example, is a cute rat on an inflatable teddy bear. To damage it, you must:
Avoid the parachuting nails that are being shot by the teddy bear, and jump on the nails while in the air without shattering them
Retrieve the nails and throw them upwards at the hovering teddy bear so that it deflates enough to fall into the range of your jumping attacks
Wario lacks a straightforward attack, so jump attack is smash sideways and jump. Then jump up and kick the bear’s feet so the teddy will spin 180 degrees and the rat pilot on top is open
Jump and kick the rat pilot while avoiding the fireballs it fires at you. Whew!
You don’t really kill the boss until that final step. In that one, you do the damage, and if you mess up one other step, you’re starting over. You do it a dozen times to kill the boss. And, oh boy, you get to do it within the confines of four minutes. While Mario is open to players of any age and ability, Wario is aimed directly at veterans.
One of the game’s attractions is Wario’s powers. Like Kirby, he steals powers from certain enemies and uses them to kill enemies and navigate obstacles. But it’s a warped, Garbage Pail Kids take on the Kirby power: rather than pounding up enemies to get strong, Wario gets strong when he gets pounded – and the powers are all vicious punishments for the portly hero.
If he gets hit by an apple, he eats it and turns into ‘Fat Wario’, a gruesome giant from Monty Python who moves painfully slowly but can beat down walls. If he’s stung by a bee, he dies with a lethal allergy and puffs up into ‘Puffy Wario’, who involuntarily floats up to the ceiling. He’s flattened, burned, zombified, and snowballed in snow as well, all masquerading as ‘abilities’.
True to his Game Boy heritage, Wario’s sprite occupies a gigantic proportion of the screen, yet that’s precisely the point: his ridiculous, supremely detailed animations are one of the game’s strongest aspects, and it’s just enjoyable to see him amble around. In this day and age of 3D polygonal heroes, Wario Land reminds us of the lost art of flawless sprite design, where each movement he makes is imbued with his conceited, larger-than-life personality.
Every so often, Wario’s gigantic sprite will be a nuisance — climbing to the top of ladders to then climb down is a nuisance due to him being so wide and you having to stand directly in the middle of the ladder tile — but other than that, it only serves to add comedy, having you make this gigantic man crouch through tunnels and swing across ice slicks. Unfortunately, the villain designs fared no better than Wario himself; most of the bad guys you’ll be battling are forgettable platforming clichés.
The weak enemies are not even to be compared with its level of brilliance design, though; Wario Land 4 has wildly unorthodox, innovative, and varied levels. Unlike many platformers whose graphical styles are essentially window dressing, Wario Land 4 incorporates each stage’s theme into its layout. One of them has you walk through a huge hotel, and another is a huge dumpster that is packed with almost entirely destructible levels. There’s one within a toy box where you move children’s building blocks around to advance, and perhaps as homage to Sonic, there’s even a pinball level as well.
Beyond the primary platform levels, Wario Land 4 also anticipates WarioWare with a handful of minigames: an Atari 2600-style baseball game, an obstacle jump game using a single button, and a ‘remember the face’ barbershop game. They’re all rather boring and are a form of currency exchange; the points you earn in the main game can be traded for rounds at the minigames, and winning those earns you coins you can spend to purchase items to help you through boss battles. Why couldn’t we just spend our points from the main game on items? The minigames are middleman busywork at times, but a relief and a taste of things to come.
Conclusion
Wario Land 4 is a decently short experience, with the main campaign clocking in at less than 10 hours on normal difficulty. But quality over quantity it is, as the wily, nonlinear level designs lend themselves nicely to a few playthroughs and some extra exploration to unlock all the extras. It’s an old-school platforming game for old-school platforming hands, with mechanics that could be deep and rewarding to some but punitively difficult to others. Ultimately, Wario Land 4 is packed with impeccable level design and a quirky audiovisual presentation that set the template for WarioWare. If you’re not a huge platformer enthusiast, Wario Land 4 will simply enrage you, but for the rest of you, it’s a game that needs to be played.
