Gotta say, I'm actually quite surprised with this entry of the series, both in gameplay and length. A Metroidvania-esque game is not what I was getting myself into with this, but boy was I pleasantly surprised. Well designed levels, a nice gameplay loop, and overall a really fun and ongoing game. Some enemy placements/dangers were a bit unfair & game can sometimes become a slog with trying to get back or to certain areas without hitting something. That, and while the hints for the game can be helpful, some are fairly cryptic, and going out of order is possible & can lead to all sorts of complications on where to go and such.

Overall, A really solid Wario Land game, probably one of my favs next to WL4 & World.

Isn't it weird how Wario became the face of experimental platforming in the Mario franchise? Really he's just evil Mario, yet he undeniably struck a chord so hard with some people that the indie hit Pizza Tower would eventually come to be.

There's something about this game's sense of progression that's so quaint and approachable yet respectably intricate. Any side scroller on an 8-bit handheld had to ultimately have smaller levels due to the small screen size. If you wanted big character models that was the necessary sacrifice. Wario Land 3 manages to do a great job at finding a middle ground. The camera movement, Wario's move speed and the overall level size is more than enough for you to always wonder "what's over there?" while still keeping your eyes on the goal.

What I love about Wario Land 3 that's different to other Metroidvanias is how much it highlights the acquisition of power ups. Every power up feel like natural improvements, like you're reacquiring the moves that you once should have had. At the same time it's not preventing you from having fun early on. While it may be somewhat disappointing to some people that ultimately the way forward is linear, it means level design is always balanced around what your moveset is at that point. Thus, you'll never feel that the game is either too easy or too hard due to the state of your moveset.

One of the big points of criticism here is something I actually never got. You get hit, you don't take damage and you'll never die. Instead the game's built around the idea of being "sent back," as in a puzzle or platforming segment to reach a treasure key or chest may have a hazard or jump that if met with will require you to repeat it again. I think this actually helps the game in multiple ways, some of which aren't immediately obvious.

This is what defines Wario Land 3's atmosphere. Have you ever died in a dream? Some may have "felt" that experience but unless you actually did (in which case you can't answer this rhetorical question anyway) you'll always wake up after it. This game takes place in what's essentially a dream world, and while the aesthetic isn't nearly as striking as a game that intentionally plays into it like Ico or Klonoa do it still remains one all the same. Being able to enter a level, deciding which treasure chest to go for, how many M Coins you want, or not even knowing if there's anything to get here leaves you with one resounding feeling - You can take it at any pace you like. You have the ability to just enjoy the music, the serene atmosphere of a night time stage's pleasant colour palette or the golf minigames if you're feeling burnt out by a difficult platforming section that keeps punishing you. The lack of dying doesn't hurt the game, if anything it's a memorable part of Wario's identity.

Is Wario Land 3 hard? Honestly I don't know, I played this game as a child so many times it's all hardwired in my brain now. But every time I play it I still have a lot of fun. Wario's just too much fun to control and it's why I've always been a little bitter on the Warioware games. I just want more of these, dammit. Forget 5, make Wario Land 10. I'll play 6 more of these for god's sake.

esse jogo é inteligente demais pro seu próprio bem. uma tendência em relação aos meus gostos é uma certa aversão ao game design hiper-higiênico, e apesar de eu estar sempre fugindo do dogmatismo e tentando ser sempre mente aberta pra tudo, é algo que surge no inconsciente -- e mesmo que Wario Land 3 não seja esse o caso, ele possui aspectos de um jogo que quer demais, consegue demais e também cansa demais.

algo que me fascina nessa série é o quão experimentais são os jogos, cada sequência é uma interpretação diferente da jornada do Wario (até o então) e gosto bem mais disso do que da abordagem de sequências iterativas.

Wario Land 3 é um metroidvania dividido em fases selecionáveis -- cada fase tem 3 baús e 8 "moedas musicais", sendo os baús os objetivos principais. cada baú contém um tesouro que na maioria das vezes libera um mapa novo ou algum power-up, e é aqui que entra a parte de metroidvania: todas as fases são pensadas milimetricamente pra funcionarem seguindo os limites do corpo de Wario e os eventos do mundo (porque a maior parte dos tesouros que liberam fases causam alguma alteração no mundo do jogo, que se passa dentro de uma caixinha de música)

sim, é isso mesmo. Wario Land 3 é um isekai onde o Wario precisa reconquistar seus poderes pra progredir pelas fases, e é engraçado como o jogo ignora toda a proposta do Wario Ser Um Viciado Em Moedas porque toda a riqueza material dele tá na busca pelos tesouros.

conceitualmente? esse jogo é genial. Mas sua genialidade me cansa -- pensar que, mesmo com sua liberdade de atravessar entre as fases, tudo em relação à progressão mecânica envolve uma série de atividades ordenadas de uma forma extremamente burocrática que parece que não acaba nunca...

...felizmente ainda é Wario! bom jogo, fico feliz que esse jogo exista e seja dessa forma mas fico feliz também que não vou mais precisar joga-lo.

I’m a pretty big fan of the Wario platformers, having played through all of them at least once at some time or another. WL3 has always been the one I’ve never really liked very much. When I was younger, I grew up on Wario Land 1 and 4, and then when I was a bit older I played 2, so 3 was the last I played of the original 4, and I was much older when I did. They recently added Wario Land 3 to the Switch Online GameBoy service, and after talking to a friend who was playing it for the first time and really loving it, I decided it was about time to give another go at what I considered the black sheep of the Wario Land quadrilogy. I was hoping if I went into it with an open mind and didn’t just expect it to be like the other three, that maybe I could find some of the enjoyment my friend was having. It took me around 10-ish hours to play through the Japanese version of the game with fairly liberal rewind feature use.

Wario Land 3’s story is pretty simple and straightforward. Rather than fighting with his main rival of the past two games, Captain Syrup, Wario is instead this time trapped in a music box. His plane crash lands in a forest where he finds a cave. Inside it is a weird music box that, after inspected, sucks him inside of it. Once he’s there, the protector god of the land tells him that he can only let Wario back out into the real world once he collects the five music boxes of the world, and of course Wario can keep any treasure he finds in the meanwhile. Not one to turn a nose down at treasure, Wario sets to work at finding those music boxes to get his freedom and his payday. It’s a simple story that works just fine, although it does get kinda weird, even for a Wario game, by the end, for my money. It’s a perfectly serviceable story that does a fine job of facilitating the action of the game. And what action of the game it is.

WL3 is largely taking a further step forward from the design of Wario Land 2, where you once again are exploring stages for treasures but lack a healthbar. Instead, getting hit just sends you back. Whether that’s a punch from an enemy with really mean knockback that throws you down a pit, or setting you on fire or inflating you up in the air to fail the platforming challenge you’re on in some other way, it’s a different way of getting hit making the player lose progress than a game with a traditional damage and lives system. However, this operates much differently than it does in WL2, as instead of more linear stages with a treasure hidden in each, WL3 is more of a Metroid-style game, where the treasure is the endpoint of each stage. Opening that treasure will more often than not give a kind of key item that, rather than granting a move, will just open new paths to explore in other levels. Each stage has four of these treasures to find, so you end up going to each stage at least four times. That is, if you can remember what does what.

Collecting one of these key items (be it just an effective key for a lock or a new power for Wario) brings you to the map screen where shining stars will indicate the levels that have changed content so Wario can now progress to the point he can find a new bit of treasure in them. However, they only show you this once, so if you miss it or forget it, you’re gonna be stuck wandering around hoping you can bump into whatever treasure will allow you to progress next. I distinctly remember as a kid just how easy it is to spend AGES lost in this game hunting for the next place to go (even speaking to several other friends who’ve played this game in the past, they didn’t even realize the star mechanic was a thing in the first place, and I doubt I did as a kid either). While it not being obvious where to go next is hardly much of a critique when the game DOES tell you were to go, effectively, it doesn’t help all of the other issues the game so often has.

Wario controls a bit worse than he did in 2 (I also just replayed after this 2, so I say this with a high degree of confidence). He moves more stiffly and less easily, and it just makes progressing through levels feel more difficult than it seems it should be. On top of that, Wario also has such a similar move set to WL2, down to even how his sprite looks. Or at the very least, he ends up with almost the same move set. To make it a game like Metroid, they need powerups and new moves for Wario to have, but in lieu of thinking of up any new moves for him, they just stripped out nearly his entire move set and hid them inside treasure chests. Holding up to jump higher, picking up enemies, ground pounding, breaking blocks with your head, and even swimming have all been taken away from his base moveset. It makes his already awkward controls even more strange, and replaying the same levels even more cumbersome.

And that’s the real critical weight of the issues with WL3. In isolation, a lot of them aren’t great ideas, but together they make a whole even weaker than the sum of its parts. A stage-based Metroidvania isn’t a very good idea at the best of times, and these short, nonlinear levels are made even more of a chore to go and re-go through with how often your no-health-system knockbacks force you through parts of them over and over within one playthrough. All of that combined with those muddier-than-usual controls makes for an experience that usually ranges between dull and frustrating, certainly compared to the other Wario Land games of the late-GameBoy era.

The presentation is quite nice, at least. Sprites are colorful and expressive, and the music is full of Wario-y goodness as usual. The sprite and animation work in particular are really flexing the power of what a GBC-exclusive game could do with the big pretty sprites, and the look of the game holds up really well all these years later.

Verdict: Not Recommended. While I don’t quite have it in me to call Wario Land 3 a bad game, I do have it in me to call it the weakest Wario Land game by a significant margin, and not really worth your time. It’s clunky and frustrating enough and its sequels are superior enough that I don’t think it’s particularly worth playing these days. There are so many much better games in this genre, some of them also being Wario Land games themselves, that I don’t really think Wario Land 3 is all that worth playing, even through the convenience of the Switch Online GameBoy service.