What kind of no-good ruffians would break into my castle and steal my treasures?! It's that rotten Captain Syrup and that Black Sugar Gang! I'm looking out for bad guys and scavenging for coins as I track down my treasures. If I don't get them all the first time, that's OK. I can go back again and again until I find them all. Captain Syrup doesn't stand a chance against me!
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"Been seeing a lot of WL2 slander on the tl lately" as they say, "a lotta y'all still don't get it!" etc, but seriously, quit going into this forcing expectations onto it of being WL4 or Mario or Pizza Tower or whatever game you're frustrated that it isn't, and quit playing it on emulators on a big screen for hours at a time because I know somebody is doing that, this is a handheld game with saving anywhere, even including a very modern suspend feature so you can save anywhere mid-level and come back later. Wario Land 2 is something you work through over the course of a month while completing a level or two a day on the toilet, it's a slow burn, by necessity.
Slowing down the gameplay is a necessary evil to create a fun, involving platformer on the Game Boy Color, and there's a reason all the most beloved platformers on the system take a similar tack. Well, this Backloggd page is for the GB version but I'm putting this review where the most people can see it. Anyway, you fundamentally could not pull off Super Mario World or Wario Land 4 or Pizza Tower on the GBC, the former because it doesn't have the larger resolution of a console game, and the latter two because those are fundamentally informed by being able to look at the game on a widescreen platform.
Aspect ratio, FOV, and resolution are key considerations when it comes to making a platformer well-suited for its, well, platform.
I do think though if this game had came out for the SNES, people would extol its virtues in the same breath as Super Metroid, Yoshi's Island and DKC2, it's that good.
If you're sad WL2 isn't more like WL1 or WL4 due to its aspect ratio and resolution considerations, go install the brilliant Red Viper emulator on your New 3DS (or regular 3DS, but I recommend New for super-stable 3D), crank up that 3D slider, and play Virtual Boy Wario Land. You will have a fucking blast.
Super Mario Land 2 is about as core a Mario game as you can get on the system, and even it is significantly slower than Super Mario World.
The geniuses at Nintendo R&D1, led by Gunpei Yokoi, composed out of the kind of people who, just a scant several seasons ago were cranking out Super Metroid, wisely let his protege Takehiko Hosokawa take the wheel. Just don't ask what he ended up releasing in 2010. Wario is what happens when you ask the Metroid guys to create Mario for the unique needs of a 160x144 resolution handheld, this is an important consideration.
Where Wario Land 2 really opens up is when you unlock the chapter select and the game's objective of exploration and puzzling comes into focus, with managing your coin balance against the two-minigames-per-level to obtain 100%, finding the way forward, and seeking alternate paths being integral elements of the puzzle.
WL2 foreshadows WL3 by attempting to merge collectathons with 2D platformers, and in doing so creates a game where its economy is key. You're meant to be looking for every coin in every level, so that way, finding a big secret wall cache of giant coins with Wario's face on them feels like a genuine reward. You need the coins for those minigames so you can get the treasures and picture panels, so the difficulty comes not from avoiding a game over, but avoiding the fine that comes from getting hit.
I've been seeing people on here bashing this game for the immortality, but when something like Celeste or Super Mario Odyssey does it, the latter blatantly taking inspiration from WL2 specifically in how its coin system works, everyone trips over themselves to tell you how a lives system is Outdated.
Are we still doing lives discourse? idk it's been a while, both of those games came out 7 years ago, the point is, Wario's immortality is not a bad thing, it's not "too easy", it's lightyears ahead of its time, you think you might want to be game overing constantly and managing lives on your dim GBC screen but you really don't.
“Wario Land 2 is much better than any of my previous games. Why, you ask? Because in this game, I'm immortal! There's no Game Over! With multiple endings, you can play my game MANY times. Isn't that great?!”
—Wario, Wario Land II
Maybe I'm biased on how good this game is because it was a formative game for me in my early childhood, one of the games that really made me fall in love with the medium for life, but god damn it, there's something brilliant about the way the game's portrait-matching minigame and number-matching minigame, henceforth referred to as "Portraits" and "Numbers" not only feed into the game's monetary distribution but also encourage neurological development of important skills in children and adults. They seize on the brain's underlying nature as a difference engine, with both asking you to make split-second comparisons, and asking your prefrontal cortex to weigh your chances of success against Wario's bank account.
I was wracking my brain for a minute here trying to think of what they remind me of, when it hit me, they remind me of gameshows, or more specifically, Wheel of Fortune. Would you like to buy a vowel? The looping musical ditty shared between the two has a tone that reinforces this comparison.
Portraits shows you an enemy portrait, and asks you to match it to one out of a lineup of enemy portraits, but only for a split-second, and you can elongate that split-second by paying a slightly higher fee to play, with three difficulty levels, and you find it by finding a hidden door within a level, usually near the halfway point. If you do it wrong, you can play it again immediately however many times it takes, but it'll cost you that fee each time until you succeed.
Numbers you'll play at the end of a level no matter what, and it tasks you with identifying a hidden number behind nine panels that are steadily revealed by draining your wallet a little more with each panel revealed, until you're like "okay, I know which number this is, you don't need to keep charging me an additional fee each time to unveil more panels". You can pace how fast the panels are revealed, at least at first, until the game decides you've done this successfully enough times that it can take off the training wheels and stops revealing the panels in turns and starts revealing the panels automatically until you give it the okay to stop. If you don't manage it, you'll need to replay the level for another shot, but it's usually a pretty quick shot to the end.
The interplay between both of these minigames gives you reason to explore every level to its fullest, take your time, value your money like Wario actually would, and backtrack at the end of a level to make sure you were comprehensive.
And the alternate paths! My god, the alternate paths. When describing this game to my peers, I've often facetiously said "more choices with consequences than Mass Effect", but for a Game Boy Color game from 1998 it sure can feel like that sometimes. One of them is so brilliant in its simplicity I hesitate to mention it in this review, but if you know you know, and other reviews will gladly give it away. Finding it organically as a kid was an incredible moment that ensured I would fall in love with the possibilities inherent to the secrets of video games for the rest of my goddamn life.
You find a secret path in a single level and a new route opens up on the big flowchart, leading you to an entirely new ending that will diverge you in tone and setting from the main path, which you could easily be excused for believing was the whole game. This happens several times. A cave system, a factory, a haunted house, fucking ATLANTIS! As Wario himself tried to tell you above, if you simply contented yourself with letting the credits roll once, you didn't really play the game.
This was a launch title! Nintendo really made quite the clever tactical move by repurposing an already-in-development b/w Game Boy title to serve as an extremely impressive debut for the Game Boy Color, with pictures of its colorful Factory and Cave levels emblazoned across the back of the system's box, right next to Link's Awakening DX.
And there's a pretty diabolical final level known as The REALLY Final Chapter laying in wait for anyone courageous enough to wrangle the game's economy, hit every wall they think might be hiding coins stuffed inside, and use their brainpower to unveil the golden path.
Remember, you only need the Numbers minigame to get said final final chapter, by gathering all the picture panels. You can win it every time if you exercise humility and let it expend your coins to the point you are absolutely certain you know what number you need to guess. That way, you'll never have to replay a level. The treasures from the hidden doors within each level are more for Wario's ego so you can get the best ending.
Oh, and I don't want to wrap this up without remarking on how this game coins Wario's iconic transformation system from taking damage, serving as a similar bolt of inspiration to the brain in a sophomore entry as Kirby's copy abilities in his titular Adventure, but tying into his trademark immortality by serving as a delightful alternate consequence for getting hit instead of losing money.
Not sure how to end this review other than by saying that, as a young child, this game kindled my love for the medium and my imagination of the way games can break out of their preconceived notions of where you think they might be taking you more than any other game.
I know I'm far from objective, I have an extremely rare GBA-era official cutout of Spring Wario on the wall behind me. I mean, for crying out loud, as a small ""special needs"" child with a pathological aversion to vegetables, Wario ingratiated himself enough with me to develop a lifelong adoration for garlic. I still don't eat any of Mario's food, fuck him!
Designers are still cribbing lessons from Wario Land 2 to this day, whether they realize it or not. Everyone slobbers all over Super Metroid, nods with approval at Metroid Fusion (directed by the same guy as WL2), and is all ready to write over 600 PAGES for a literal actual book on the design brilliance of Wario Land 4 but fails to acknowledge the sublime intelligence behind the missing links, the two best games on the Game Boy Color that aren't the you-know-what games.
I'll probably have to write something like this for Wario Land 3 because that one is also woefully misunderstood, taking the lessons learned in Wario Land 2, upping the graphical and color fidelity immensely now that they're making a clear cart game for only the GBC instead of both a gray cart for the GB and a dual-compatibility black cart for the GBC like WL2 did, and using the new horsepower afforded to them to craft a much more nonlinear, even more surrealist game with a beautiful world map, doohickeys opening up new paths in the overworld akin to an adventure game, honing WL2 to create the finest 2D approximation of Super Mario 64 that ever was, while still honoring Wario's own unique, anti-conformist, contrarian DNA.
See you then!
Slowing down the gameplay is a necessary evil to create a fun, involving platformer on the Game Boy Color, and there's a reason all the most beloved platformers on the system take a similar tack. Well, this Backloggd page is for the GB version but I'm putting this review where the most people can see it. Anyway, you fundamentally could not pull off Super Mario World or Wario Land 4 or Pizza Tower on the GBC, the former because it doesn't have the larger resolution of a console game, and the latter two because those are fundamentally informed by being able to look at the game on a widescreen platform.
Aspect ratio, FOV, and resolution are key considerations when it comes to making a platformer well-suited for its, well, platform.
I do think though if this game had came out for the SNES, people would extol its virtues in the same breath as Super Metroid, Yoshi's Island and DKC2, it's that good.
If you're sad WL2 isn't more like WL1 or WL4 due to its aspect ratio and resolution considerations, go install the brilliant Red Viper emulator on your New 3DS (or regular 3DS, but I recommend New for super-stable 3D), crank up that 3D slider, and play Virtual Boy Wario Land. You will have a fucking blast.
Super Mario Land 2 is about as core a Mario game as you can get on the system, and even it is significantly slower than Super Mario World.
The geniuses at Nintendo R&D1, led by Gunpei Yokoi, composed out of the kind of people who, just a scant several seasons ago were cranking out Super Metroid, wisely let his protege Takehiko Hosokawa take the wheel. Just don't ask what he ended up releasing in 2010. Wario is what happens when you ask the Metroid guys to create Mario for the unique needs of a 160x144 resolution handheld, this is an important consideration.
Where Wario Land 2 really opens up is when you unlock the chapter select and the game's objective of exploration and puzzling comes into focus, with managing your coin balance against the two-minigames-per-level to obtain 100%, finding the way forward, and seeking alternate paths being integral elements of the puzzle.
WL2 foreshadows WL3 by attempting to merge collectathons with 2D platformers, and in doing so creates a game where its economy is key. You're meant to be looking for every coin in every level, so that way, finding a big secret wall cache of giant coins with Wario's face on them feels like a genuine reward. You need the coins for those minigames so you can get the treasures and picture panels, so the difficulty comes not from avoiding a game over, but avoiding the fine that comes from getting hit.
I've been seeing people on here bashing this game for the immortality, but when something like Celeste or Super Mario Odyssey does it, the latter blatantly taking inspiration from WL2 specifically in how its coin system works, everyone trips over themselves to tell you how a lives system is Outdated.
Are we still doing lives discourse? idk it's been a while, both of those games came out 7 years ago, the point is, Wario's immortality is not a bad thing, it's not "too easy", it's lightyears ahead of its time, you think you might want to be game overing constantly and managing lives on your dim GBC screen but you really don't.
“Wario Land 2 is much better than any of my previous games. Why, you ask? Because in this game, I'm immortal! There's no Game Over! With multiple endings, you can play my game MANY times. Isn't that great?!”
—Wario, Wario Land II
Maybe I'm biased on how good this game is because it was a formative game for me in my early childhood, one of the games that really made me fall in love with the medium for life, but god damn it, there's something brilliant about the way the game's portrait-matching minigame and number-matching minigame, henceforth referred to as "Portraits" and "Numbers" not only feed into the game's monetary distribution but also encourage neurological development of important skills in children and adults. They seize on the brain's underlying nature as a difference engine, with both asking you to make split-second comparisons, and asking your prefrontal cortex to weigh your chances of success against Wario's bank account.
I was wracking my brain for a minute here trying to think of what they remind me of, when it hit me, they remind me of gameshows, or more specifically, Wheel of Fortune. Would you like to buy a vowel? The looping musical ditty shared between the two has a tone that reinforces this comparison.
Portraits shows you an enemy portrait, and asks you to match it to one out of a lineup of enemy portraits, but only for a split-second, and you can elongate that split-second by paying a slightly higher fee to play, with three difficulty levels, and you find it by finding a hidden door within a level, usually near the halfway point. If you do it wrong, you can play it again immediately however many times it takes, but it'll cost you that fee each time until you succeed.
Numbers you'll play at the end of a level no matter what, and it tasks you with identifying a hidden number behind nine panels that are steadily revealed by draining your wallet a little more with each panel revealed, until you're like "okay, I know which number this is, you don't need to keep charging me an additional fee each time to unveil more panels". You can pace how fast the panels are revealed, at least at first, until the game decides you've done this successfully enough times that it can take off the training wheels and stops revealing the panels in turns and starts revealing the panels automatically until you give it the okay to stop. If you don't manage it, you'll need to replay the level for another shot, but it's usually a pretty quick shot to the end.
The interplay between both of these minigames gives you reason to explore every level to its fullest, take your time, value your money like Wario actually would, and backtrack at the end of a level to make sure you were comprehensive.
And the alternate paths! My god, the alternate paths. When describing this game to my peers, I've often facetiously said "more choices with consequences than Mass Effect", but for a Game Boy Color game from 1998 it sure can feel like that sometimes. One of them is so brilliant in its simplicity I hesitate to mention it in this review, but if you know you know, and other reviews will gladly give it away. Finding it organically as a kid was an incredible moment that ensured I would fall in love with the possibilities inherent to the secrets of video games for the rest of my goddamn life.
You find a secret path in a single level and a new route opens up on the big flowchart, leading you to an entirely new ending that will diverge you in tone and setting from the main path, which you could easily be excused for believing was the whole game. This happens several times. A cave system, a factory, a haunted house, fucking ATLANTIS! As Wario himself tried to tell you above, if you simply contented yourself with letting the credits roll once, you didn't really play the game.
This was a launch title! Nintendo really made quite the clever tactical move by repurposing an already-in-development b/w Game Boy title to serve as an extremely impressive debut for the Game Boy Color, with pictures of its colorful Factory and Cave levels emblazoned across the back of the system's box, right next to Link's Awakening DX.
And there's a pretty diabolical final level known as The REALLY Final Chapter laying in wait for anyone courageous enough to wrangle the game's economy, hit every wall they think might be hiding coins stuffed inside, and use their brainpower to unveil the golden path.
Remember, you only need the Numbers minigame to get said final final chapter, by gathering all the picture panels. You can win it every time if you exercise humility and let it expend your coins to the point you are absolutely certain you know what number you need to guess. That way, you'll never have to replay a level. The treasures from the hidden doors within each level are more for Wario's ego so you can get the best ending.
Oh, and I don't want to wrap this up without remarking on how this game coins Wario's iconic transformation system from taking damage, serving as a similar bolt of inspiration to the brain in a sophomore entry as Kirby's copy abilities in his titular Adventure, but tying into his trademark immortality by serving as a delightful alternate consequence for getting hit instead of losing money.
Not sure how to end this review other than by saying that, as a young child, this game kindled my love for the medium and my imagination of the way games can break out of their preconceived notions of where you think they might be taking you more than any other game.
I know I'm far from objective, I have an extremely rare GBA-era official cutout of Spring Wario on the wall behind me. I mean, for crying out loud, as a small ""special needs"" child with a pathological aversion to vegetables, Wario ingratiated himself enough with me to develop a lifelong adoration for garlic. I still don't eat any of Mario's food, fuck him!
Designers are still cribbing lessons from Wario Land 2 to this day, whether they realize it or not. Everyone slobbers all over Super Metroid, nods with approval at Metroid Fusion (directed by the same guy as WL2), and is all ready to write over 600 PAGES for a literal actual book on the design brilliance of Wario Land 4 but fails to acknowledge the sublime intelligence behind the missing links, the two best games on the Game Boy Color that aren't the you-know-what games.
I'll probably have to write something like this for Wario Land 3 because that one is also woefully misunderstood, taking the lessons learned in Wario Land 2, upping the graphical and color fidelity immensely now that they're making a clear cart game for only the GBC instead of both a gray cart for the GB and a dual-compatibility black cart for the GBC like WL2 did, and using the new horsepower afforded to them to craft a much more nonlinear, even more surrealist game with a beautiful world map, doohickeys opening up new paths in the overworld akin to an adventure game, honing WL2 to create the finest 2D approximation of Super Mario 64 that ever was, while still honoring Wario's own unique, anti-conformist, contrarian DNA.
See you then!
While the first Wario Land game was just a heavier, slower-paced Mario platformer which I really enjoyed, Wario Land II does it's own thing by becoming a puzzle/adventure game with platforming elements that feels like a great idea, but with the way the structure of the game works, the execution could have been better.
With this being an adventure game, you cannot die. Levels being designed as a point A to B with platforming challenges are gone and now you're given bigger open maze-like levels with branching paths to find treasures and coins before reaching the goal of the level. What brings this closer to an adventure game is that you cannot die. Enemies are just an obstacle that inconvenience you and sometimes make you lose coins if they attack you. Coins are needed to unlock treasures and the map which is only required if you want to go for the 100% - which is the big problem of this game.
Pretty much the only way you can enjoy this game is if you do go for the 100%, because if you just go straight for reaching the goals, then there is no challenge or obstacle, which makes it extremely boring. There's no point of dodging enemies to save your coins since you won't be getting treasures, and you can just brute force your way through everything. There's no point to exploring since the only reward from exploring is more coins and treasures. So yeah, if you aren't going for the 100%, basically you are emitting everything that makes this game enjoyable.
Besides that my other big issue is just the level design and structure. When going for the 100%, you need to find the treasure room which can be easily missed if you don't go search every nook and cranny of the level, and sometimes you can accidently reach the goal and miss the treasure which you'll need to start the whole level again to get. And some of these levels are just super frustrating as some of these enemies massively inconvenience you having you repeat sections over and over again.
One thing I like that Wario Land II does achieve is the charm of Wario. I think this is the first game where Wario's greedy disgusting personality shines and you can see it through all the animations, cutscenes and situations he is placed in. The charm is great and you can see why Wario has a lot of fans as a character. This is clearly something they keep up with the Wario games going forward.
I first enjoyed what Wario Land II had going for it. But once I almost everything in this game is designed to inconvenience you and waste your time, it left a bad taste in my mouth by the time I finished it. I don't mind the puzzle/adventure-ness of the game, but I just hope it can be executed much better in the later games. I can still see why a lot of people really enjoyed this one, but it's not for me.
With this being an adventure game, you cannot die. Levels being designed as a point A to B with platforming challenges are gone and now you're given bigger open maze-like levels with branching paths to find treasures and coins before reaching the goal of the level. What brings this closer to an adventure game is that you cannot die. Enemies are just an obstacle that inconvenience you and sometimes make you lose coins if they attack you. Coins are needed to unlock treasures and the map which is only required if you want to go for the 100% - which is the big problem of this game.
Pretty much the only way you can enjoy this game is if you do go for the 100%, because if you just go straight for reaching the goals, then there is no challenge or obstacle, which makes it extremely boring. There's no point of dodging enemies to save your coins since you won't be getting treasures, and you can just brute force your way through everything. There's no point to exploring since the only reward from exploring is more coins and treasures. So yeah, if you aren't going for the 100%, basically you are emitting everything that makes this game enjoyable.
Besides that my other big issue is just the level design and structure. When going for the 100%, you need to find the treasure room which can be easily missed if you don't go search every nook and cranny of the level, and sometimes you can accidently reach the goal and miss the treasure which you'll need to start the whole level again to get. And some of these levels are just super frustrating as some of these enemies massively inconvenience you having you repeat sections over and over again.
One thing I like that Wario Land II does achieve is the charm of Wario. I think this is the first game where Wario's greedy disgusting personality shines and you can see it through all the animations, cutscenes and situations he is placed in. The charm is great and you can see why Wario has a lot of fans as a character. This is clearly something they keep up with the Wario games going forward.
I first enjoyed what Wario Land II had going for it. But once I almost everything in this game is designed to inconvenience you and waste your time, it left a bad taste in my mouth by the time I finished it. I don't mind the puzzle/adventure-ness of the game, but I just hope it can be executed much better in the later games. I can still see why a lot of people really enjoyed this one, but it's not for me.
This ran on the friggin' Gameboy? Are you kidding me?
This game has basically defined all of the main quirks of the Wario series: unkillable protagonist, slow-paced and exploration-focused level design, coin hoarding, varied level objectives, and of course, power-ups that are basically just physical abuse on the poor Wario.
It's safe to say that this game is packed to the brim with personality, and it's quite incredible to see what this team could come up with for this weird little offshoot of the mario land series.
And then you get to the end, and you discover that you have barely played half of the game, that there were branching paths with secret endings, and that you missed all of them (or at least I did). That is mind blowing. This game ran on a gameboy, this is absurd.
That said, I think the mechanics still have to hit their stride, some levels are quite underwhelming (the chicken level comes to mind), and the plethora of content makes the game a bit bloated for my taste.
I still prefer the first Wario Land, with its more traditional level structure and game progression. It just felt more refined to me, and that's because it "just" put twists on the extremely solid fundamentals of Mario-style platforming. This second installment is a lot more experimental, and it sometimes stumbles for that, sort of paying the price for all of its ambition.
One thing is for sure: I can't wait to see how the team is going to improve on the sturdy groundwork that they laid with this game.
This game has basically defined all of the main quirks of the Wario series: unkillable protagonist, slow-paced and exploration-focused level design, coin hoarding, varied level objectives, and of course, power-ups that are basically just physical abuse on the poor Wario.
It's safe to say that this game is packed to the brim with personality, and it's quite incredible to see what this team could come up with for this weird little offshoot of the mario land series.
And then you get to the end, and you discover that you have barely played half of the game, that there were branching paths with secret endings, and that you missed all of them (or at least I did). That is mind blowing. This game ran on a gameboy, this is absurd.
That said, I think the mechanics still have to hit their stride, some levels are quite underwhelming (the chicken level comes to mind), and the plethora of content makes the game a bit bloated for my taste.
I still prefer the first Wario Land, with its more traditional level structure and game progression. It just felt more refined to me, and that's because it "just" put twists on the extremely solid fundamentals of Mario-style platforming. This second installment is a lot more experimental, and it sometimes stumbles for that, sort of paying the price for all of its ambition.
One thing is for sure: I can't wait to see how the team is going to improve on the sturdy groundwork that they laid with this game.
this game proves wario can beat goku
Already from the start, it gives you non-branching paths, providing you with fun and varied levels that don't lose steam. Controlling Wario is very entertaining indeed.
fun sometimes