For context: i played and completed the original release on Gamecube, previously reviewed it (more than once), but i recently played it from scratch and finished it again via the Gamecube Classics app on Switch 2, so this review is technically a rewrite, but it’s de facto new, almost completely done from scratch and rewritten/improved/revised to reflect my opinions on the game after re-revalution.
HISTORY
Wario needs no introduction, having been Mario’s Nemesis since its debut on Super Mario Land 2: 6 Golden Coins, and having not only its own peculiar platforming series, but in 2003 it also branched off into a new genre, with the peculiar mini-games compilation of the Wario Ware series, which had just debutted some months prior.
Wario World was also a peculiar case since it was not only the first 3D outing for a series that had been 2D platformers or puzzle games of sorts (including the Super Famicom exclusive Mario & Wario, and his reskin of Bomberman games, Wario Blast), but was also not developed by one of Nintendo’s internal development teams.
It was actually handled by Treasure, a beloved software house known for classics like Gunstar Heroes, Radiant Silvergun, Guardian Heroes, Ikaruga, after their collaboration with Nintendo on Sin & Punishment proved successful, that lead Nintendo R & D 1 wanting to do so again, but this time on a 3D iteration of the Wario series/franchise.
Who would turn down to opportunity to work on a 3D “Mario” game with Nintendo’s blessing, after all?
Definitely not 2000s’ Treasure, which was in a kind of identity crisis, coming off of both Sylpheed The Lost Planet and Stretch Panic/Freak Out/Hippa Linda not being well received (nor selling well either) and them basically having to take on more and more licensed tie-in work, for anything from Tiny Toons to anime series both well known (like the Bleach DS titles and the excellent Astro Boy: Omega Factor) or obscure, like a shonen series called Dragon Driver.
I would like to add that things got better for them, but while they still exist, they haven’t made a game since 2014, with the Japanese only 3DS game Gaia Crusher God, so…
Not that we have seen much in terms of Wario platformers in recent years, though the Wario Ware series is back, and presumably to stay, so i’ll count my blessings and all of that stuff.
PLOT & GRAPHICS
The premise of Wario World is a fairly simple and fitting one.
Our garlic breathed “hero” is enjoying the piles of riches and booty gathered in his castle over his many adventures (implied as there are no references to any previous titles, despite this technically being a spin-off of the Wario Land series), but little does he know that – among the golden hoard – there’s the Black Jewel, an evil gem, complete with evil eye and some hint of tentacles that accidentally make the thing look a bit like a Mario version of a Metroid.
The Black Jewel (whose name still sound kinda sorta racist) then does transform all the gold and treasure into monsters, as well as morphin the castle into 4 separate world
So Wario is forced to go on a quest to undo this mess, helped along by some elfish-gnomish creatures called the Spritelings, which originally sealed away the Black Jewel thousands of years ago, due to his ability to corrupt anyone and anything, only to have Wario unadvertedly break the seal when he stole it.
Thankfully, Wario finally manages to pummel the evil gem and lock it back into his chest for good, and the Spritelings in return rebuild Wario’s castle.
In terms of graphics, Wario World does look the part for a mid 2003 Gamecube, it does look good, even though there’s a certain roughness to the texture and the style itself it’s more akin to the other 3D game Treasure released before, the aforementioned Stretch Panic/Freak Out, as both titles indicate the software house relative inexperience with 3D games (though Wario World is already more refined), but mostly because they have the same stylistical brand of zany weirdness.
Sure, the Wario series has traded on weird shit all the time, but this doesn’t feel so much like a Wario Land game, which makes sense since both Wario World and Stretch Panic have Koichi Imamura as director, and you can tell since the absolute lunacy of weird enemies and – especially – super weirdo bosses of Wario World is cut from the same padded cell padding that birthed the uberboobed bikini women using their milkers to fly like a helicopter, as seen in Strech Panic.
It runs the gamut from thong wearing trans dino wrestlers, a possessed angel marionette, a looney magician hiding into hats, even a speedo wearing minotaur thingie that flexes his pecs and poses while dashing in a volcano stage.
To say nothing of equal weird regular enemies, from boxed animals in circus cages, living dinosaur bones-stoplight hybrids, flying blades with eyes, sentient wall monsters, and so on.
It’s zany madness and it oddly fits Wario as a series and character, this is the kind of weird that would usually be featured in the mainseries, so no complains about that, nor about performance in general, it runs fairly well at a solid framerate for the era.
Sound is excellent too, with some nice, memorable tunes that fit the bizarre gaggle of locations and weird obstacles, the overall zany tone… aside from the pause menù music, which has Wario obnoxiously make annoying childish sounds over carillon music (so much that if you leave the game on the pause menù it will stop singing “NYAHAH NI HA NEE YAH” after a hour and Wario itself will apologize).
Yes, it a deliberate strategy to annoy you into pausing the game less as possible (or turn down the volume), and it is memorable, i’ll give it that, though, pause menus should be quiet, and this no Battletoads pause music.
That said, sound effects are pretty good, but you’ll end up wishing they made Charles Martinet record more one liners as Wario, since he has a limited catchphrases pool the character spouts after defeating an enemy or destroying an obstacle, hence after a while you’ll keep hearing the same ones being repeated, be it the classic “Have a rotten day!” line, “Get Outta Here” and a couple others.
GAMEPLAY & LEVEL DESIGN
If you were expecting for Wario World to be a 3D translation of either the first Wario Land, the VB title or its more puzzle focused sequels on Game Boy Color, you would have made an educated but ultimately incorrect guess.
Treasure’s game looks more to the traditional 3D platformer formula as established by Super Mario 64 and the genre as a whole when it transitioned into the third dimension back in the late 90s…. kinda.
Sure, the game having a small hub world from where to access the worlds and the levels it’s familiar stuff, but the levels themselves are not played in the collectathon style of SM 64 or Banjo Kazooie, you don’t enter a world which has multiple missions tied to specific main collectables needed to unlock the next set of levels and progress the story.
The levels themselves are more linear and the camera angle is basically fixed, more akin to the old 2D sidescrollers, though you’ll need a certain amounts of red gems to access the exit leading to the level boss, which start off in the open but soon are exclusively found in the many trap doors leading to challenge rooms, offering puzzles, prospective tricks, or straight up pure platforming challenges, which do remind one of the “FLUDD-less” sequences in Super Mario Sunshine.
Each world has two levels and a final “area boss” which nets you a key needed to open the final boss fight, and unlocks the next area, so while the hub makes it look like you can access the worlds as you please, you can’t, heck, even in each world you can’t access its second level before you beat the first one.
So it’s a mostly linear affair, in terms of progression, and while the levels themselves eventually become a bit more open, with their mostly linear design and reliance on bonus rooms where to hide half of the collectibles, they do feel a lot more old fashioned that one might expect.
In terms of gameplay, even if this isn’t a Wario Land game per sé, Wario retains most of his expect moves: he can jump, throw enemies, do his classic shoulder tackle, do a butt stomp, hang on sticky spheres, but here he gets some new moves, which includes a “vacuum” ability to attract/suck up nearby coins and items and a couple of “Mad Moves” (as the game calls them), basically a SM64 “so long Gay Bowser” rotating throw and a piledriver.
These two abilities are also used for platforming and puzzles, as you can grab an enemy and swing him around to elevate some platformers, throw some at specific walls (like magnets on iron coated surfaces) to make platforms, piledrive stalagmites to make platforms, or enter some bonus room that won’t open unless you grab a stunned enemy and piledrive them onto the room’s trap door.
Also, Wario has a simple three-hit punch combo to pummel enemies and often stun them for usage as weapons, platforms or activating devices, which leads to the game also kinda being a brawler of sorts, since there are more enemies to deal with, the camera angle often feeds into that, and you’re often forced into small arenas where you have to survive 1-2 minutes some waves of enemies, often with some colums or objects you can swing around or use as piledriver material on your foes.
Again, some of Treasure’s “DNA” showing, and you’re rewarded by killing as many enemies as you can via bonus gold at the end of the level’s result screen, but while pummelling enemies is satisfying in itself and piledriving them is always fun, one wished they committed more in this department, by either giving Wario a more proper beat em up movelist to upgrade and expand over the course of the game, or give him more “Mad Moves”, or actually have more variety of enemies that you face, as for the most part you’ll be fighting the same 3 enemy types obviously reskinned for each world.
While each world does have new enemies, few are actually new and most are reskins of the same basic enemies seen in the first world, like so obvious it almost feels like they’re playing a joke, since even the mid tier enemies reskins of the triceratops go on all fours, even if they reskinned it as a clown or a Jason Vorhees humanoid it will go on all fours to charge at you, to say nothing when they just reskin the dinosaurs and artillery turtle as skeletal dinosaurs.
It becomes very repetitive fast, and maybe it would have more tolerable if the enemies were more challenging and the arenas less frequent, they are not so constantly featured to be proper annoying, but enought to make it clear to be added as a cheap way to pad out the levels a bit more, even with the few special wrestling moves these arenas are easy button mashing work.
It is kinda weird when often some barriers and doors do fight back or take more hits to tear down than the regular enemies.
The bosses do fare better, you’d expect as much from a company like Treasure, known for its creative boss fights with weird, outlandish designs, though the game is a mixed bag in this regard as Stretch Panic was: some are quite good, some are a bit too easy, some are ok or decent but feel stretched out a bit, and it doesn’t help the final boss is a piss easy chore that is more time consuming than anything else due to the number of hits necessary to take him down.
Even outside of combat, you’d wish they were more moves, like, maybe have Wario able to do a Klonoa-style double jump that uses a grabbed enemy, use the Kirby style “vacuum ability” for anything else than picking up coins, or maybe more creative uses of those two “Mad Moves” would have helped make the level design go from decent-good to proper good or better.
Speaking of, the same goes for the controls, which are decent but there’s some slippery momentum to Wario, which becomes more noticeable in the harder platforming challenges, it’s not bad, but it’s not proper good, and it’s for the better to have Wario do an automatic ledge grab manouver, even though sometimes (especially in the later levels) it feels arbitrary how he grabs onto some ledges bu t not all ledges.
Yet it is not a major issue for reasons we’re covering in the next section.
DIFFICULTY & LENGHT
Despite having some very traditional design choices in terms of level design, Wario World doesn’t have a lives system, but instead when you die you can continue on the spot by paying some gold, which you collect and obtain from defeated enemies as well,
The problem is that they never considered the implications of such an arcade style continue system, so even boss battles that would offer some challenge are mosty trivialized since you can continue from where you died even on those, instead of the game restarting the boss battle from scratch, hence the overall difficulty goes into the lower end of “moderate”, not too punishing or frustrating.
Yes, they made so that the further in the game you are, the more gold you need to resurrect/continue on the spot, which is fine in theory, since the system makes the coins collecting have a purpose (outside of buying garlic health pickups from the weird vendor that appears in the levels) but doesn’t force you to grind for it just to keep some indirect means of getting continues/1UPs, its fairly easy that even without much trying you’ll easily accrue so much gold over time that you simply won’t need to go back and grind for it.
if the game was made today the amount of money required to continue on the spot would have been scaled to increase every time you die… okay, maybe that would have been so for a very hard difficulty setting, but you can easily imagine it.
Again, this system is fine for the levels themselves, but simply should have been suspended and make you pay the fee to retry the boss battle from scratch, maybe ask a bit less if they’re not the world’s area boss.
One thing i honestly could have done without its the “Unithorn’s Lair”: instead of punishing people for falling into chasms or just falling off with a game over or a health reduction, you’re sent to the dungeon. Not a Gachi dungeon, but a place where the water/liquid pools take away money on touch, and so do the “unithorn” ghost thingies that chase you, bite or push you into the wallet emptying water, and to get out you have to find a spring to sent you back to stage… which can be hidden under any of the many crates, and if they don’t hide the escape spring, they house a bomb.
Yeah, it’s honestly just a waste of time to have the player forced to do this everytime you fall out of bounds, and given you end up with so much gold, it would have been more fitting to just inflict some damage on Wario’s coin purse without the entire thing to punish them instead of this dungeon sub-section.
Wario World is a short game, undeniably, even for 2003 it’s a surprisingly short affair, with 8 regular levels split in 4 worlds, with a boss fight for each level and one world/area boss, plus a final one, and you can finish it in like 6 hours.
Given the game does have some issues in variety and often can feel repetitive, one would be almost tempted to see it not having a 5th world being for the best…. BUUUUT yeah, maybe a 5th world and more enemy variety would have been welcomed, even with the various levels compacting two themes/platform biomes archetypes in one in order to make them bigger and more expansive, though that still doesn’t shake off the feeling of this being a rushed production, a “demo game” of sorts, as it feels at least 30 % of content is missing.
It doesn’t help that the more you progress, the more “optional” red crystals are required to even access the level’s boss, with the last two stages basically asking to almost complete them in order to progress. Not a big issue since the level design encourages looking out for the bonus rooms and often makes most visible so you know you can get to them if you want, but it is also a classic tactic to pad out the playtime, even if you just wish to finish the game and not complete it, which i assume is what most people wanna do the first time around.
That said, there is a decent amount of collectables to be found in the levels, with switches that make treasures appear in their color coded chests, pieces of golden Wario statues that increase health by half a hearth piece, and the aforementioned Spritelings in cages, often found in the bonus rooms.
So it’s not devoid of replayability, but even so it will just means it takes 9/10 hours (at best) to complete it, and like the similarly short original Luigi’s Mansion, there are different endings to see that depend on your “score”, this time around not so much the money you can find (ironically enough), but the number of Spritelings you can rescue before facing the final boss, which determine how good of a castle they rebuild for Wario at the end.
If you get all treasures in a level, you can unlock a mini-game or more from the original Wario Ware Inc. as demos to play on a GBA via the GC to GBA link cable, but it’s a novelty that felt very much so and basically became even more obsolete as few months later they release an expanded port of the original Wario Ware with extra party modes on Gamecube, Wario Ware: Mega Party Games.
OVERALL EVALUATION
Wario World is a peculiar one.
It’s an interesting if odd 3D platformer that still feels somewhat 2D due to its level design, and even if not handled by a Nintendo internal team, it has Treasure’s brand of bizarre, zany and weird inject into it (specifically the one seen 2 years prior in Stretch Panic), one that does gel with Wario’s brand and persona, so it does feel like a Wario game but also its own thing, detatched from the Wario Land series in either its first outing or the puzzle focused sequels, more akin to an old school sidescroller brawler at times, given the emphasis on button mashy combat, with a couple of wrestling moves for fun.
This is fun but also weird for a Wario game to do, especially since it’s not really that hard or challenging, the combat system is very simple, the enemies still more the obstacles they usually are in a platformer, coming in a handful of variety and often obvious reskins, with the bosses usually faring better, even if they too feel like a mixed bag, despite their creative, bizarre designs.
It’s fun and can have some genuinely fun and challenging moments, some tricky but satisfying Super Mario Sunshine-esque bout of pure platforming, some good fights and satisfying challenges to tackle, it can be quite good, it controls well…. though they are frustratingly one touch away from being good, with some slippery momentum at times, and while there are some nice ideas and creative uses of the puzzle elements for platforming too, it still somehow feels like its running on fumes fairly quickly too despite its short lenght, that is both making its best with his limited set of systems and yet can feel lazy and repetitive, while also making one wish it either had more ideas, enemy variety, a better combat system and-or more content to further hone its “tools”.
It’s hard to shake the feeling it was a rushed production, that Wario World it’s almost half the game it was meant to be, and while now it being available on the Gamecube Classics app on Switch 2 makes one sidestep the price question (since the Gamecube copies are quite pricey, as is for most first party Gamecube titles nowadays on the second hand market), i do understand how most review s of yore recommend it as a rental (remember renting physical videogames?), since even for the time it was a short one to finish, and even completing.
Even that aside, it’s frustrating because Wario World it’s fun, it is, its highs are quite good, but it’s low are old fashioned bouts of repetition, it’s a decent-to-good game that hinges on being outright good, but is held back by some bad design choices, some undermining the otherwise not so moderate difficulty, some in place to try and tarp over the fact it’s quite short for a 3D platformer.
And yet misses being “short & sweet” due to some untapped ideas and the aforementioned repetition that creeps in despite the short lenght, so it’s frustrating, being so close to a proper minor classic, one that fans of the genre will enjoy a lot (just don’t expect a internally developed Nintendo platformer level of quality), even if most likely will be left wanting for more, and not necessarily in a good way.
Kind of a pity, as the first 3D platformer outing of Wario is solid yet could have easily been better.
LEGACY
While the game sold decently enough to enter the Player’s Choice label, and reviewed mostly well, Wario World still stands out as an odd garlic laden only child, both in the bigger Mario franchise and its own series of platforming titles, as there wouldn’t be any Wario platformers for 4 years, with Wario Master Of Disguise for the DS in 2007 and then Wario Land Shake It/The Shake Dimension for Wii in 2008 being the last ones we would ever get.
For whatever reason (since it kept making Yoshi and Kirby games in the traditional 2D fashion regardless), Nintendo embraced more the Wario Ware series as the Wario representation, and even that felt forgotten until they proper resurrected it with a new entry, Wario Ware: Get It Together for Switch back in 2021, and then made another one, Move It, in 2023, also for Switch.
While Nintendo never felt ignorance about Wario World, it still felt like the red-headed stepchild of the Wario Land series, the odd duck, and as such it naturally become somewhat of a “hidden gem” (which isn’t quite the case for me), one for Youtubers and reviewers to feature in “forgotten Gamecube games” lists and such, hoping that maybe one day it would get a re-release.
Which it did, since last December Nintendo shadowdropped it on the Gamecube Classics app, not that i ever though it would get a rerelease at all, as – in all honesty – there are better platformers on Gamecube, sorry, there’s simply plenty of better ones on the “Cube”, but it’s a choice no one saw coming and it help more people experience the game for themselves, so unexpected but nice.
Doesn’t seem that Nintendo is in a hurry to make either a new Wario Land title or take another crack at a 3D Wario platformer themselves, since in 2 weeks and a half we’re gonna get the Virtual Boy Classics app thingie, hence there’s gonna be the first official PAL release for the Virtual Boy Wario Land game (and any VB games, since the thing never made it to PAL regions back in the day), and i’m a masochist enough to have preordered the entire replica console, not just the 3D glasses.
Though honestly i wish they did, they’re never gonna make “Waluigi’s World” to keep the joke going, but i think they could make an interesting and distinct 3D platformer for Wario with modern sensibilities, i dunno, mix it with some gestional mini-games relating to gold or micromanaging, i feel there’s potential for something unique, but until either Nintendo or one of its second party studios find an interesting gimmick or pitch, “Wario World 2” won’t happen.
This one had potential but kinda came short of being great.
OTHER VERSIONS
As most of you already know, the Japanese version has a fixed/proper final boss battle with actual phases, guess Treasure found time to fix for that later release.
Aside from that, the rerelease via Gamecube Classics app/service on the NSO (which needs the Expansion Pak subscription tier) on Switch 2 is so far the first and only rerelease of the game, not much to say besides that it plays fine, and since all emulated Gamecube games are given a resolution boost, so they immediatly look more hi-res than the originals.
I basically finished the game again on Switch 2 (while playing in handheld mode all the time) and never had an issue or a crash, loading i don’t remember being an issue at all and sure isn’t here, though obviously you can’t connect the game to a GBA to try some of the minigames offered in the very first Wario Ware Inc. game.
Not really a loss since the original Wario Ware debut game is available on the GBA Classics app, among other options.
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