The Japanese box art for Wario World proclaims in bold letters that this is a "Powerful Wario Game" etched in its shiny golden exterior, and if nothing else, Wario does feel extremely powerful. The novelty of this game for me as an eight-year-old kid was having Wario able to piledrive dinosaurs was extremely cathartic, which was something so violent that can never be seen in a Mario game. The entire game's bizarreness from its creepy enemy design (specifically the bosses) to Wario's constantly overly animated face and animations and its weird but varied and memorable soundtrack made Wario World stick with my mind. However, I admittedly never actually finished it until today.
And I can see why now because once you get past the novel charm, this game is painfully mediocre.
Wario World feels like a mesh of ideas that never really come to fruition, from its basic lackluster combat to its level design and platforming to its collect-a-thon elements. Throughout my entire 100% playthrough, It felt like Treasure was juggling too many ideas in a game that only lasts 6 hours, which felt strange coming from a studio that puts out very mechanically focused games. So for this review, let me break down why every aspect of this game feels so flawed in its execution.
1. Combat: Wario has one button for a punch. After you hit an enemy and stun them, you can pick them up to toss, spin or piledrive them. It's very basic for a child to follow, and the enemy AI is so surprisingly passive even in swarms that you can run past them, which is a problem. To remedy this, Treasure had to constantly shove combat encounters into the player's face and make them mandatory, such as the arena sections, the weird crystal monster arena encounters, and the need for taking an object or enemy to piledrive them into puzzle room sections for entry. But the game never actually mixes up these encounters in meaningful ways, the enemies will still behave the same way, they just make enemies tankier. By the time I was into the second major section of the game, I've seen almost everything enemies had to offer, and combat started to become a chore. It's only with the game's boss fights that they offer some form of a puzzle-like strategy to them to make them engaging, but even they start to feel repetitive halfway through them and it's only made worse with their long life bars, but they just kept going (I'm looking at you, Black Crystal.)
2. Platforming: Wario World is a 2.5D platforming game, meaning Wario has a form of 3D space to walk around in but the camera remains fixed the entire time. The problem is that the perspective the camera gives you can be deceptively tricky to judge where you need to position your jumps, combine that with a lack of a drop shadow on Wario and it can lead to frustrating falls just because the camera just needs to always be centered on Wario. It also doesn't help Wario has a subtle amount of traction to him when landing, which may be a fault of overly loose controls. If they wanted to emulate Wario being so filthy and greasy he slips on his own dirty shoes, then I guess they did a good job. It also doesn't help there isn't a lack of movement options baked into the game. Wario has his shoulder charge, sure, but you're not going to use them in platforming sections unless you are trying to kill yourself. He has this jump out of a shoulder charge which the jump arc feels so pathetically short, it just felt like a missed opportunity to add some more depth into the platforming. If the jump arc was say higher while keeping the speed you get from the jump; you would've had a more risky but rewarding option to speedrun the platforming by mastering using shoulder charge jumps at key times.
3. Level Design: The best sections of the game are, ironically, the trap door sections that test the player with a quick puzzle or a platforming section because they offer a unique challenge that breaks away from the main game. (But even that comes with frustration because of the fundamental platforming issues). The main levels ask for you to collect Wario's missing treasure that's scattered around the area. You hit colored buttons and go to the colored areas to find a treasure chest to get the item, but there's more than that to obtain 100%. There are the spritelings, the crystals to unlock the boss door, the Wario statue parts too. While these are pretty satisfying to get themselves, the levels feel like chores to get through, as because of the 2.5D perspective, have to be linear treks through, missing one Wario statue on say the ice hill because you went down the wrong slide will cause you to have to get Wario on a balloon to start all the way back to the beginning, which becomes incredibly infuriating. The level I thought was the most interesting was Pecan Sands because it's a level that goes from the bottom to the top, scattering all the requirements you need around the pyramid instead, which made backtracking a non-issue, as you were going to go around the pyramid anyways. It also had the most challenging puzzle/platforming trapdoor rooms in the game which were enjoyable. But everything before Pecan Sands felt bland to get through, especially when your adventure was paused to get through one of those "required" combat sections that break the pace. Oh yeah, there's also these Unithorn Lairs that serve as a punishment if you fall off a cliff, where you are chased by these purple rhino ghosts that steal your money and you need to break boxes to find the exit, with every other box having a bomb in them. It was terrifying, but halfway through when I dropped into these, I started to roll my eyes having to go through the same escape over and over again that I honestly just wished the game gave me a game over instead.
4. Not enough implementation: My main issue with this game was that Treasure felt like they were focusing on ideas that didn't make the game more enjoyable but instead repetitive, for example, the combat arenas, and discarded too many interesting ideas this game did have. I remember this one section in world 3 where there were these magnet enemies that you had to knock out and then can throw them to stick on these metal parts of the wall where you can then jump on them to get through. It was a neat idea, but the issue was that was the only time it was used. Like I'm sorry, but really? You had to have a team of animators to model this one enemy and programmers to get the mechanic to actually work and you used it for one section of the game? It felt like such missed potential where in a better game would be a central focus. In fact, grabbing stuff in unique and interesting ways in a level to solve puzzles was in a Treasure game before, and it was called Mischief Makers, and it was a more compelling game because that was the main center point, for as many problems as that game had, I say it was more interesting than Wario World because of it's commitment to that mechanic.
The problem with Wario World is that it feels like a jack of all trades but a master of none. It doesn't know if it wants to be a game about enemy encounters with basic combat, a mediocre 2.5D platformer, or a collect-a-thon with limiting levels, so what you get is a 6-hour game that doesn't have the time to flesh out the ideas it set up. This all accumulates to an anti-climatic final boss that was nerfed in the North American release to have fewer phases, where you circle around an arena 5 times to get spritelings to attack the boss for you as it keeps shooting lasers at you so then you can piledrive it, over and over again until it's insanely long health bar goes away. This absurdly repetitive design of this one boss reminded me of the whole game. Overly simple, repetitive, and dull, and I only completed the game just so I can say that I actually finished it 100% and never play it again.
This may be a "Powerful Wario Game" because you can piledrive dinosaurs, but Wario World feels weak in almost everything else.
And I can see why now because once you get past the novel charm, this game is painfully mediocre.
Wario World feels like a mesh of ideas that never really come to fruition, from its basic lackluster combat to its level design and platforming to its collect-a-thon elements. Throughout my entire 100% playthrough, It felt like Treasure was juggling too many ideas in a game that only lasts 6 hours, which felt strange coming from a studio that puts out very mechanically focused games. So for this review, let me break down why every aspect of this game feels so flawed in its execution.
1. Combat: Wario has one button for a punch. After you hit an enemy and stun them, you can pick them up to toss, spin or piledrive them. It's very basic for a child to follow, and the enemy AI is so surprisingly passive even in swarms that you can run past them, which is a problem. To remedy this, Treasure had to constantly shove combat encounters into the player's face and make them mandatory, such as the arena sections, the weird crystal monster arena encounters, and the need for taking an object or enemy to piledrive them into puzzle room sections for entry. But the game never actually mixes up these encounters in meaningful ways, the enemies will still behave the same way, they just make enemies tankier. By the time I was into the second major section of the game, I've seen almost everything enemies had to offer, and combat started to become a chore. It's only with the game's boss fights that they offer some form of a puzzle-like strategy to them to make them engaging, but even they start to feel repetitive halfway through them and it's only made worse with their long life bars, but they just kept going (I'm looking at you, Black Crystal.)
2. Platforming: Wario World is a 2.5D platforming game, meaning Wario has a form of 3D space to walk around in but the camera remains fixed the entire time. The problem is that the perspective the camera gives you can be deceptively tricky to judge where you need to position your jumps, combine that with a lack of a drop shadow on Wario and it can lead to frustrating falls just because the camera just needs to always be centered on Wario. It also doesn't help Wario has a subtle amount of traction to him when landing, which may be a fault of overly loose controls. If they wanted to emulate Wario being so filthy and greasy he slips on his own dirty shoes, then I guess they did a good job. It also doesn't help there isn't a lack of movement options baked into the game. Wario has his shoulder charge, sure, but you're not going to use them in platforming sections unless you are trying to kill yourself. He has this jump out of a shoulder charge which the jump arc feels so pathetically short, it just felt like a missed opportunity to add some more depth into the platforming. If the jump arc was say higher while keeping the speed you get from the jump; you would've had a more risky but rewarding option to speedrun the platforming by mastering using shoulder charge jumps at key times.
3. Level Design: The best sections of the game are, ironically, the trap door sections that test the player with a quick puzzle or a platforming section because they offer a unique challenge that breaks away from the main game. (But even that comes with frustration because of the fundamental platforming issues). The main levels ask for you to collect Wario's missing treasure that's scattered around the area. You hit colored buttons and go to the colored areas to find a treasure chest to get the item, but there's more than that to obtain 100%. There are the spritelings, the crystals to unlock the boss door, the Wario statue parts too. While these are pretty satisfying to get themselves, the levels feel like chores to get through, as because of the 2.5D perspective, have to be linear treks through, missing one Wario statue on say the ice hill because you went down the wrong slide will cause you to have to get Wario on a balloon to start all the way back to the beginning, which becomes incredibly infuriating. The level I thought was the most interesting was Pecan Sands because it's a level that goes from the bottom to the top, scattering all the requirements you need around the pyramid instead, which made backtracking a non-issue, as you were going to go around the pyramid anyways. It also had the most challenging puzzle/platforming trapdoor rooms in the game which were enjoyable. But everything before Pecan Sands felt bland to get through, especially when your adventure was paused to get through one of those "required" combat sections that break the pace. Oh yeah, there's also these Unithorn Lairs that serve as a punishment if you fall off a cliff, where you are chased by these purple rhino ghosts that steal your money and you need to break boxes to find the exit, with every other box having a bomb in them. It was terrifying, but halfway through when I dropped into these, I started to roll my eyes having to go through the same escape over and over again that I honestly just wished the game gave me a game over instead.
4. Not enough implementation: My main issue with this game was that Treasure felt like they were focusing on ideas that didn't make the game more enjoyable but instead repetitive, for example, the combat arenas, and discarded too many interesting ideas this game did have. I remember this one section in world 3 where there were these magnet enemies that you had to knock out and then can throw them to stick on these metal parts of the wall where you can then jump on them to get through. It was a neat idea, but the issue was that was the only time it was used. Like I'm sorry, but really? You had to have a team of animators to model this one enemy and programmers to get the mechanic to actually work and you used it for one section of the game? It felt like such missed potential where in a better game would be a central focus. In fact, grabbing stuff in unique and interesting ways in a level to solve puzzles was in a Treasure game before, and it was called Mischief Makers, and it was a more compelling game because that was the main center point, for as many problems as that game had, I say it was more interesting than Wario World because of it's commitment to that mechanic.
The problem with Wario World is that it feels like a jack of all trades but a master of none. It doesn't know if it wants to be a game about enemy encounters with basic combat, a mediocre 2.5D platformer, or a collect-a-thon with limiting levels, so what you get is a 6-hour game that doesn't have the time to flesh out the ideas it set up. This all accumulates to an anti-climatic final boss that was nerfed in the North American release to have fewer phases, where you circle around an arena 5 times to get spritelings to attack the boss for you as it keeps shooting lasers at you so then you can piledrive it, over and over again until it's insanely long health bar goes away. This absurdly repetitive design of this one boss reminded me of the whole game. Overly simple, repetitive, and dull, and I only completed the game just so I can say that I actually finished it 100% and never play it again.
This may be a "Powerful Wario Game" because you can piledrive dinosaurs, but Wario World feels weak in almost everything else.
SLAMTUCKER
1 year ago