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.
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.