something about playing this game on virtual console non-stop for 24 hours straight during the summer of 2009 as a sixteen year-old taught me a valuable life lesson.

i learned how to scam the exhaustion system in the game. if you work late enough in the day, time will eventually stop in the early morning (i believe 5am to be exact).

once you reach this point, the only limiting factor you have is your stamina, which can be continually increased by visiting the hot springs in the mountains outside your farm or eating specific foods. by doing this repeatedly, you can lock into this cycle: tend to your farm until your virtual self collapses, go to the hot springs and wade around for a few seconds, and then repeat this cycle until you complete everything you need to.

i did this for two in-game years, until i had what i considered to be the ultimate farm. however, my farm required too much upkeep every day to keep everything happy. i had so much money that it became meaningless. i had spent so much time each day farming that i had NEVER ONCE EVEN TALKED TO ONE OF THE BACHELORETTES.

i couldn't garner the affection of one of the girls in a measly six months. it had to be earned over time. i would be alone in a decaying farm when my father showed up to evaluate me six in-game months later. i supposedly had everything that i thought i had wanted, only to see it crumble before me. i cried and turned off the console. in this moment i realized that capitalism makes fools of us all.

five stars.

A truly horrendous game. They got the "South Park" part of it right to be fair, with unique weapon types to this game, like snowballs being your regular weapon, dodgeballs that act as good indoor weapons due to bouncing off walls, nerf guns for rapid fire, Terrance and Phillip dolls for poison grenades. The humour is pretty good for what you'd expect from that era of South Park.

But as a game it is so BAD. The first and worst is the controls. The movement is so unbelievably sensitive, making trying to actually aim at anything near impossible, which became a huge problem in boss fights that only have a tiny area you can actually damage, or air-borne enemies, or skinny enemies like the aliens. I honestly gave up on the alien stages because trying to hit a target like that, with these controls, while they could fire off their projectiles that ate at health was just too much when the levels have no checkpoints.

Speaking of no checkpoints, the levels just feel like they drag forever. Not helped by the fact that the level design is pure ass and the only gameplay is to fight the exact same hordes of enemies over and over. Literally you start a level, move forward a few feet and fight a few mooks and a tank, walk a few more feet and do the same. It's so boring, repetitive and the bland aesthetics don't make it any better.

Sound design is also terrible, with the same character stock phrases said over and over.

If the controls were any better I could probably have at least played this to the end, but as the game got harder the controls just became too much of a handicap.

Accidentally skipping this game and playing half of Wario Land 2 first was probably the biggest reason its not half a star higher at least. Not to say its a bad game, its not great but at the very least it introduces aspects we would later see in the follow up, while polishing a lot of rough edges about Wario Land 1's design. Technically, the game looks fantastic in part because of Virtual Boy's decision to go widescreen. All the sprite art looks excellent even today and the game feels way less claustrophobic compared to Wario Land 1, even though the sprite is proportionally the same size vertically.
It also introduces the more puzzle box concept the series is actually known for, every level requires you to go off the (typically) left-to-right straight forward path that the exit is located on to find the key to open the way out. Unfortunately the level design is uninspired and half baked compared to its sequel, jumping between the front and back layers is very gimmicky and is never used to accomplish anything that the already present doors can't, though it is generally nicer to be able to see multiple rooms at the same time. And the secret hunting generally boils down to hitting conspicuous blocks and exhausting every door and jump, and very little actual puzzling.
Clocking in at around 2 hours, and with unpolished level design it was feels rushed out the door to cut their losses seeing as the writing was on the wall for the virtual boy's fate. The game's status as the missing link between Wario Land 1 and 2 (which otherwise feels like a strange massive leap in design) makes it an important formative moment in the series nonetheless and worth a play if you're a big Wario Land fan.