I've played this game a few times before and always had a good time with it. I grew up playing the shit out of Wario Land 1 & 3, skipping 2 for some reason, and should have been lined up perfectly to adore this game, but it never clicked.
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.

For 2D platforming fans, there's a lot to love about Wario Land 4. There's a great amount of variety in the game mechanics, and some of these levels impressed me with their creativity. The aesthetics are pitch perfect, embracing an unapologetically weird style that fits Wario like a glove. I miss when Nintendo games were this weird. The music is good, the controls are tight, and there's a great amount of secrets to uncover. I wish there were a few more things to spend your treasure on besides mini-games and handicaps for boss fights, but that's ultimately a minor complaint. Above all else, though, this is absolutely a Wario game. The platforming is crunchy, the powerups are cartoony, and the amount of treasure to find will make your eyes pop out of your skull. As cliche of phrasing as it is, this game makes you feel like Wario. And that's a really fun thing.

I see some people that say it's a bit contrarian as a game vs those who say it's better than Mario games.

The way I see it, is that it's both (for better or for worse) Anti-Koji Kondo, and Anti-Miyamoto in terms of music, gameplay, just about anything here really.

I suppose you may do with that as you will, it did make for a really fascinating experience.

For my first log, let me make one thing very clear: this is my baseline for what a great game should strive to be.

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.

I've always preferred Wario Land games over Mario platformers. While Mario has used conventionally safe mechanics, Wario games usually have all sorts of weird and experimental things going on for it. I've always fancied how they seemingly go out of their way to outright troll the player and punish heavily for missteps, almost as if there is someone carefully designing parts of the levels to take up as much of the player's time as possible. With the fourth iteration of the series that aspect has somewhat toned down and more weight is put on time trials. Every level has a switch somewhere in them that opens the end portal and starts the clock you need to race to finish while collecting whatever it is left to collect in the level.

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.

i absolutely adore how much character this game has. wario games are always so expressive and personality-ridden in a way other nintendo (and particularly mario) games just can't seem to ever fully match, and when everything about the game so thoroughly feels like the devs had so much fun creating it, it really seeps in to the game and adds a lot to the experience in a way that i find really hard to explain. the pixel art and how animate everything - especially wario - is, all the different level theming and the level design within them, the insane sound design (cough cough) - it just makes for something so deeply fun. this game might be short at only 18 levels, but essentially all of them are so well crafted that it isn't much of an issue, at least for me - having that many fantastic 2d puzzle platformer stages in a row really felt fulfilling enough as is. simply put, this is a fantastic game - probably the best 2d platformer within the mario franchise and maybe even for nintendo as a whole. play it!!

Wasn't expecting this game to be as good as it was, just didn't enjoy it as much as the other platformers I've been into lately. The areas are cohesive, and the level design and gameplay loop is pretty neat: explore each level as linearly as you want, get all four gem pieces, and trigger the timer and escape before it runs out. This game is super weird and full of charm. The main turnoff for me was that I didn't love how Wario controlled, but I'll chalk that up to hardware limitations. I would definitely play a modern entry to this series if one were to be announced.