Wario Land 4

What’s up gamers it’s time for another 351ELEC Game of the Moment, and that means I’m going to move a game I was going to play anyway from the “unplayed” category in my backlog up to the top, and also it took me a bit to finish it so they moved on to the next game before I finished, so I’m a slowpoke. So here we have Wario Land 4, the 4th of the Wario Land series that is often talked about as being quite nice, and this GBA iteration in particular talked about as being just very high quality overall…

Am I allowed to play this game without having any experience with prior Wario Land games first, just WarioWare which I know is entirely different? I never even got that far when I played Super Mario Land 2: 6 Golden Coins back in the day. What if I miss out on the important Wario lore? What if I don’t know who Wario is? What if the ending of the last game is that Wario is on a boat which gets blown up, and I have that ending spoilt for me by the opening of Wario Land 4 having Wario in a coma in a hospital? Okay, so that is not the opening of Wario Land 4 at all.

The opening of Wario Land 4 is just that “Pyramid Discovered” counts as a news story, so Wario drives over there in this car that apparently he has and has always had (even though he almost ran over a cat and is therefore clearly a negligent driver), presumably because he wants to steal stuff from there, like some kind of white historian. He sure isn’t there to respect the dead people buried there. Anyway Wario gets distracted by a cat (or something ???) and falls down a hole and doesn’t break all his bones, and the pyramid is… spooky, somehow, and I guess has portals in it, and uhh… has hieroglyphs depicting tutorials explaining the basic controls?

Hot take out of the way: Wario Land 4 is a metroidvania. I know many will protest for many reasons, but you cannot stop me calling it a metroidvania. It is not illegal for me to call it a metroidvania. You can’t call the cops to arrest me for saying that, they will tell you that’s not a real crime and to stop wasting police resources. You can’t make me un-say it.

Wario Land 4’s engine was actually reused later for Metroid: Zero Mission and Metroid Fusion, and it kinda shows. It really gave me similar vibes at the start to a Metroid game, lots of inexplicably neatly organized square blocks for me to break, lots of crawlspaces that are precisely one “tile” high somehow, the way the rooms are sort of smaller sometimes-scrolling-a-bit rooms that connect together in all kinds of directions instead of just one big scrolling level with some side rooms like a 2D platformer, even the dash animation looks very similar to Samus’s speed boost animation in the GBA games. The only real difference is that you have 4 worlds with 4 levels (and 2 worlds with 1 level), and each of those levels is like a mini-Metroidvania world instead of just one big interconnnected world, and you have all your abilities from the start (or acquire them temporarily) and therefore your progress is not gated by “unlocking” abilities. Sure, that’s not exactly how the genre works, but who says genres have to be rigid?

Anyway. Wario Land 4 really is well animated. There’s just so much detail to everything, like they hand-picked only the finest programmers and animatiors and graphic designers who were fed only the finest organic… game developer food. There’s a lot of love in all of it, the sound effects are great, the music is great and high quality and even shows in some places (like the title screen) that the GBA, with Nintendo’s default sound driver, could have vocals in the music if you were into that sort of thing (and were willing to trade off cartridge space and memory and whatever else is required). If there was a need for just one game to show off the capabilities of the GBA, I would actually consider this, even though some would not because it’s “only” a 2D game. But I think it’s a lot nicer looking than those FPSes that either look horrible from the low resolution or run at a toaster framerate or both. It’s full of a weird quirky charm that I like, with lots of weird shit that seems out of place.

The gameplay though… what I know about the Wario Land series previously is things like how Wario is too lazy to die. I like that idea a lot! Not in this game. He has a health bar, so apparently he… became bothered to die? Potentially? Huh? Who thought that was a good idea? It doesn’t end up being the worst thing, but I am not convinced it was necessary. It just seems like some exec thought Wario Land 3 was too “weird” and non-standard, and they needed to make it more of a 2D platformer for some reason, but I’m not sure they ever need to. The other thing is that I know the Wario Land games are geared towards exploration. Cool! I like going through a level and finding all the secrets! Only one problem. Wario Land 4, despite having exploration, doesn’t actually like you exploring.

The other thing that apparently wasn’t in previous Wario Land games and they added here was a timed sequence at the end of every level. You have to step on a frog switch to open up the exit to the level, and doing so starts a timer where you lose if it runs out, so you have to rush back to the exit, going back the way you came. That seemed pointless enough to me, but also there are frog blocks that open up new passageways after the frog switch is pressed, or some that close off. That sounds great, right? Buuuut: Sometimes, one or more of the 4 gem shards you have to collect in each level are only obtainable after you’ve started that timer. Some levels, the key (oh yeah you gotta collect a sleeping bird with a key for a nose) to the exit is unobtainable until after the frog switch.

This honestly just isn’t very fun at all. I HATE exploring under pressure. If you want me to just platform under pressure, sure, I guess. The time limits aren’t really that strict, and it’s only one or two times I actually ended up running out of time. It’s just not a fun experience when exploration in video games, IMO, is about taking your time and having a look around, looking for side routes that you can take and where you can jump to. There was a lot of potential here and they just blew it! It honestly feels like some exec felt that it was impossible to enjoy a game without pressure? Like I get some people are into that, but why couldn’t they just play some other game instead and leave Wario Land alone? If that wasn’t a thing, the levels that I ended up having a problem with would pretty much all be fine. Although mention has to go to that fridge level for having a weird endless loop that I had to look up a guide for, and that set me back from making progress for a while (it didn’t help that the graphics blended in too well, and I didn’t realise the chain link things were actually ladders and not just background decorations).

Strike 3 is that while the controls and movement in this game feel really good and natural… throwing does not. I dunno what’s really up with it, but half the time if you want to pick up an object that’s falling down so you can throw it, 70% of the time it’ll just bounce off Wario’s head for some reason. Is it because I breathed on the dpad the wrong way? I feel like if it’s some input I did wrong, that’s more a sign the inputs aren’t intuitve enough. Everything else indicates that I should be able to do what I was doing, stand under the thing and Wario will pick it up. And then if you want to throw it upwards, that also sucks. 90% of the time, and these are not real statistics and I’m quite aware but it’s very frustrating, Wario will look upwards and then throw it sideways. Aggghh!!! Also every single boss fight except the first one is based around catching and throwing things back up at the boss. Argghhhh!!!! I am very sure that someone will try to tell me it’s my fault, and it seems to be that you have to be holding up after the throw? But that just kinda feels shit. Am I supposed to just frickin hold up the whole time, for several seconds? It’s unintuitive to remember to do that, and also just not really a good idea in a fast paced boss battle.

I really wanted this game to be one of my favourites, because it looked like it was a recipe to be a winner, with its graphics and presentation. This just wasn’t it chief. Too many flaws for me. Too many moments where I came close to just giving up. I can’t discount the attention to detail in this game though, and there’s just quite a few levels that are simply pretty dang fun… maybe I’ll call it above average for now. It’s definitely not a bad game after all but I would just never bother trying to get all the CDs or play it on Hard mode, I think. Maybe I’ll play Wario Land 5 and see if that’s any b- ah, fuck.