Wario's back for more...and more...and MORE! Hey! You! Yeah, you! Listen up when Wario's talking to you! I just read about this legendary Pyramid of Gold, and you're gonna help me go explore it. There's lots of treasure in there for the taking, and I want it all. I'm sure there are gonna be all kinds of weird enemies and big, bad bosses in there, so if you don't think you can hack it, put the game down now. I don't want any losers making me jump into bottomless pits, you hear me? -Wario invades the Game Boy Advance! See Wario in all his greedy glory as he explores vivid worlds made possible by the power of the GBA! -Flex your muscles! Wario is no longer immortal, so you'll have your work cut out as you roll, punch and jump your way to tougher and tougher challenges. Wario will get stung by bees, zombified, bitten by bats, set on fire, and much more - what a way to make a living! -Over twenty enormous stages await! Hunt down CDs for your listening pleasure, or collect treasure to spend on all-new items that you can use against the most bizarre bosses ever!
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UNTIL NOW
This time I played on an anbernic and took my time with it and everything fell into place, i don't know if it was Wario Land's weirdness or the complex level design but something stopped me fully chilling with this game in the past -- now though, I'm all in.
Vibe for days, incredible music, fantastic platforming challenges and puzzles make this a joy to play. Why aren't there more platformers where you control a brick-shithouse type character?
Bursting through walls and enemies with Wario's shoulders, head and arse are joyous, additcive actions. I finished the game and immediately started again, just because i wasn't done blasting dweebs.
The bosses can be frustrating, but this can be negated with single-use powerups, but earning the currency for these is boring. But it's fine. It dosn't hurt the experience too much.
The game has so much personality too, Wario feels at this point fully fleshed out. Yelling regularly to himself about treasure, or at you to "Hurry up!", he feels like the Wario he's now famous for being.
Terrific game, and ts great to see the series getting some sort of recognition from the Indie scene with Pizza Tower and Anton Blast aping the format of this game.
A great game must have a flavor of its own, ooze character and passion at every corner, feature tight mechanics, and killer presentation.
Above all, my high regards for this game come from the evident level of trust in the vision and ambition of it's creators to hit the player with the weirdest shit in order to bring the game closer to said creators' purest form of expression of the envisioned experience.
Also Toxic Landfill is the best level hands down.
Wario's movement remains pretty much the same from the previous games. You still have the charge and jump and the controls are really solid and satisfying. It seems that the developers dropped the powerups almost completely in favour of a larger healthbar. There are still some enemies that give the character status effects that often are required to complete puzzled for progression, but Wario himself has only one standard form to play around with.
Bosses are also more traditional platformer bosses with specific ways of beating them. Bosses and enemies overall aren't very hard by themselves, but most of the game's difficulty comes from navigating the levels, clearing the puzzles and completing the time trials. On normal, these all are pretty generous and a casual platformer player shouldn't have too much trouble.
The game's look and feel is pretty par for the course at this point. The graphics are well polished with well defined backgrounds and foregrounds, animations are all cute (as cute as Wario can be of course) and the music slaps. Each level even has a hidden cd you can collect to get the level's theme in your collection. While the "worlds" themselves usually have some overarching theme, each level takes you into a different place with it's own gimmick and look, so no single location is going to grow stale (outside of those hotel and domino levels of course).
While collecting treasures is in the core of the game, I'm kinda left missing the exploration and finding all sorts of hidden paths and unique artefacts from previous games. It seems that progression was made more straight-forward, so you'll probably spend a little less time with this one. There is some replayability with multiple endings and harder modes, which makes some minor chances, mostly just decreases the time you have to clear everything.
It's more Wario, a little less trolling and a stellar GBA game.