A pretty ambitious platformer being held back by the limitations of the Game Boy. Unavoidably kind of a comedown from VIRTUAL BOY WARIO LAND because of how good that felt to play - now we're back to chunky, clunky GB movement and simplistic animation.

Within their limitations, though, they went all out. Loads of moves, mechanics, minigames, secrets, and so many coins to get, it feels borderline predatory. Someone looking to really dig into this would be richly rewarded (branching storyline! new levels and endings on every path!), but I found myself not really wanting to invest. I was compelled to engage with the Virtual Boy game to its absolute fullest because it felt so good to play. Here, the moment-to-moment action was kind of dull to me by comparison. The Kirby-lite transformation stuff didn't do much for me, and some of the challenges are designed to be annoying because Wario can't die now and they need to punish you somehow for goofing up. (Not sure if I love that particular tradeoff.) At some point it started to feel like going through the motions.

Crazy that the Game Boy's life was so long that they were making bigtime franchise games for it next to, like, the release of the Dreamcast. This is still some admirable stuff! Pushing it a bit, though.