A more fleshed out and forgiving game when compared to the first Wario Land, and offers something I could only describe as 'slice of life' platforming in the early worlds of the game.

The addition of status effects and breakable secret walls opens so many doors when it comes to designing a game around exploration. This game rewards exploration by simply making it fun. With the amount of exploration possible, it would make you believe that it's only gratifying in a 100% runthrough but truthfully, the game was great even though I collected half of the treasures.

Also the minigames were cute too :)

The levels that are more tailored to Wario's unique moves than 1, but I couldn't stand the game's changes to progression and treasure collection. Cutting the main campaign in half makes the initial run feel really dry, and I didn't enjoy exploration enough to want to get all the treasures and map panels, and levels as a whole get too gimmicky to want to revisit. Even the side worlds kinda drag. It's a shame too, cause every other change to 1's formula is for the better and ups the ante on Wario's appeal. Hopefully 3 and 4 will be closer to my tastes.

It's a bizarre decision to make your platforming character literally immortal, but I am absolutely down with how well this change fits exploration and collection. This new approach makes it so much less frustrating to experiment with your surroundings when taking hits just means losing some coins instead of restarting a stage. The exploration itself feels so good as well, with Wario making the most of smashing walls and throwing enemies through bricks. I do wish that the collected treasure is used for a wider variety of mini-games, but both of them are pretty intense whenever they pop up. I couldn't think of a much better game to represent this superhuman schmuck and it's possibly the best Game Boy Color game I've played.

At one point while playing this brilliant shit, I almost burst into tears because I got suddenly hit with a powerful memory of being 10 years old, on holiday in Gran Canaria. Playing a Game Boy Color I got from a dodgy shop for what must have been £30. A truly good and happy time in my life.

It wasn't even this I was playing back then. It was some 32-in-1 nonsense. But this smelly garlic man reached through time and brought joy from 22 years ago roaring back into me for just a moment. Thank you, you fat fuck.

I realllly wanted to like Wario Land II. I was fine with the first one and Wario Land: Shake It is one of my favorite games of all time. The problem is that this one is just so...tedious. Maybe Wario Land is supposed to be extremely aggravating and I happened to play the oddball of the series first. Fully willing to admit that I was constantly getting hit and never getting used to the way Wario moved, so I can say that part of my frustration came from just not playing the game well. But even when accounting for that, some of the levels (especially the later ones) just got boring to play after the amount of times I had to redo sections to either look for treasure or just simply complete them. The branching path system displayed at the end of the game definitely was a surprise, I didn't expect a Gameboy game to have such a vast amount of content, but with the previously mentioned flaws, I didn't feel any incentive to go back and look for the rest of the unlockables and levels. Am I bad at this game? Yeah, probably. Is that likely hindering me from enjoying the game to its fullest? Definitely. Is it still pretty dated and flawed? I would say so, yeah.

> me 6yo at a party with my parents
> there's this annoying kid 6yo around me
> yes I was 6yo and found other kids annoying already
> he asked me to play on my gameboy
> i was like "OK but only when I lose"
> you never lose on Warioland 2.
> fuck off kid.

This is unironically one of the greatest platformers ever made and should be seen as a prime example of good game design in not only 2D platformers, but video games in general.

This is a gigantic improvement over the already really good Wario Land. Yeah, sure, you can't die in this but that doesn't make it baby levels of easy. You lose coins when you're hit and you need the coins to be able to get all the treasures and 100% the game so it can be more challenging than you think when it comes to completion. And yeah, sure, the controls are a little weird compared to the first but the levels, while definitely pretty gimmicky, are so expertly designed around these controls that they make the controls feel natural, and they almost remind of puzzle platformers with how cleverly thought out they are. It's the kind of game that doesn't think the players are braindead morons, it uses the level design to make the player think and teaches the player how to play without saying anything and I think that's some awesome shit right there.

This game is a masterclass of good game design and I can't praise it enough. It might be designed with 100% completion in mind but that doesn't make it less stellar. From what I heard Wario Land 3 seems to be the fan favorite and I will be mind-blown if it ends up being better than Wario Land II. Can't wait to check that out!

Out of all the Wario Land games, II upsets me the least and honestly that's what I love about it. See Wario games tend to have a habit of not actually giving Wario lives, but rather puzzles, power ups, or other types of obstacle blocking to push you back to where you started and try again. A lot of the Wario games require to try and try and try again otherwise you can't unlock certain areas or power ups. Wario Land II however, opts to make each choice you make in this something that can affect the ending and route you take throughout the game. Instead of having to solve where to go, you simply find an exit and go to the next level, there are plenty of treasures to find throughout as well as earn at the end of a level, and the game makes it very aware that it should be played over and over again.

While I certainly understand that Wario Land 3 and 4 warped the series into the treasure hunting, puzzle solving, grind fest that we know Wario Land today, II still had a lot of ground work to make and honestly I prefer this compared to the frustration the other style gets me. Being able to simply go through a level without worrying about a path to take or explore is honestly very soothing to me, and then adding the complexity of different routes and story endings makes for a rather ambitious title.

In the end though, Wario Land II is the odd ball in the series, but something you can tell laid the ground work on what the rest of the series was going to be.