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.

This game has some surprising depths to it. At the beginning, I just went into the story mode and stumbled through it with mashing and executing strong combos when I unlocked them. I think I had actual issues with only one of the fights since I just couldn't get an opening, but in the end the game was over before it even properly began.

Turns out the meat of the game lies in the tournament mode, where you're pitted against some crazy strong enemies and have to really know the game if you don't want to get dunked completely. The story mode feels more or less like a tutorial where things don't get explained at all. The mechanics are left mostly for the player to figure out, for example I don't think how the distance affects your moves or how the stats and boosting them works were explained at all. Maybe it was all in the manual, but good luck finding one, if you can even understand what it says.

Once you figure out how everything works, the game becomes your oyster. It's really fun in a masochistic way to try mastering the game in the tournament mode. The game manages to be quite simplistic on the surface with limited controls, but the complexity comes from combos, patterns and different tactics you can utilize to beat pretty diverse cast of opponents.

The game looks and sounds pretty good. I haven't read or watched the works it's based on, but I have only good to say how this game looks. The characters have all their distinct designs and looks and the battles look like straight out of Virtual Boy (in a good way). Unfortunately, since I haven't consumed the original work, I had no idea who any of the characters are or what the story is. The game gives little to no story and seems more like a boxing game designed for fans of the series.

So, if you're fan of the series I think you would like this game at least for the duration of the story mode. For the rest, if a mix of Punch-Out and Teleroboxer sounds intriguing, give it a go.

Pretty much an upgraded experience to the first one, though I played the psp versions of both the first game and this one, so not much had changed mechanically. If you've played the first game, this is pretty much the same gameplay-wise, battles go pretty much by mashing X (outside of couple selected boss fights of course) and you can pretty much annihilate the game's challenge with the right skills, menu no jutsu and savescumming. Casually you probably won't even need those, but there are some late- and postgame content that seems to require some cheesing and guides to even find them.

Visually, this game is just as beautiful as the first one, maybe even more. The interiors seem to be 3D-renders and while it helps your pixelart-character to pop out in the scene, it makes actually navigating and interacting with the environment taxing. The pixelart itself is really well done and the little animations are cute, kinda reminiscent of jrpgs on SNES (gee, almost like they had the experience or something). There is also some FMVs and character art done by animation studio. These were a nice little touch, though the cutscenes were reserved for only major moments and showed only the main characters. I don't blame them, animation can get quite expensive.

I found the soundtrack to be tad underwhelming compared to the first game. I can still remember some of the songs from the first one, but hardly any of the songs here made an impact. I don't want to say that it was bad, the soundtrack definitely served it's purpose. There just isn't any songs that stood out or made me return to listen them again.

Then there is the story. This is probably the biggest upgrade to the first game I noticed. The main character in the first game was bland by design, someone the player could project themselves onto and relate with. The second game took a wildly different route and made two playable protagonists with their own stories and personalities. They are actual full-fledged characters with their own goals, dreams and weaknesses beyond just saving the world from evil. It's a bold choice and pays off somewhat, I really like Rena and her story whereas I find Claude rather irritating. I get it, he's supposed to be stupid teenager and have all this pressure and grow during the story, but he can get really insecure and insufferable. The side characters also shine well, some more than others. In the end I can't think of single boring side character who didn't have something interesting going on for them and I could enjoy myself with the story. Despite the name "Star Ocean", this game also continues the good tradition of the first game of introducing us to a scifi setting and then putting us in the middle of a medieval fantasy. I'm not saying you can't do medieval fantasy well, you just might feel rather fooled if you think you're going to play a scifi-rpg.

I can recommend this game if you like jrpgs. It got a bit more involved battle system than just turned-based and the story is great. It's not without it's shortcomings, but if you played and liked the first game, you're most likely going to love this one.