Wario Land II
Wario Land II is a side-scrolling platform game developed by Nintendo and originally released for the Game Boy in 1998. This game has special advantages when played on the Super Game Boy attachment that lets you play Game Boy games on the Super Nintendo Entertainment System, like added color and a unique border. Wario Land II was the last first-party game released for the original Game Boy, but it was later ported to the Game Boy Color. It’s mostly the same game on the Game Boy Color, just with a lot more color. The Game Boy Color version can’t be played on the Super Game Boy, though. Wario Land II is the second game in the Wario Land series, which started with Super Mario Land 3: Wario Land. Wario initially wasn’t popular enough to have a game named after him, so Nintendo used Mario’s name to help sell more copies. It worked, apparently, because by Wario Land II, Wario was popular enough to have a game’s title entirely dedicated to his name. Wario Land II is a very unique game, even when compared to the previous Wario game. It’s also quite good, arguably the best Wario game of them all, though it doesn’t seem to get a lot of recognition.
Having gotten filthy rich in the previous game, Wario now owns his very own castle. All was well for a time, but things soon go awry for the big W. One early morning, when Wario was still fast asleep, a gang of thieves snuck into his castle. These thieves are known as the Black Sugar Gang, and they’re led by a saucy female pirate named Captain Syrup. Wario caused trouble for these thieves in his previous adventure, so they wanted revenge on the greedy guy. The thieves steal Wario’s treasure, on top of doing plenty of other devious things, like flooding the castle by leaving the tap on. Wario wakes up to the sound of his alarm clock and soon realizes that he was robbed. This obviously enrages him, so he sets off on a grand quest to recover all of his treasure, and then some. And that’s the plot. The cutscenes in this game all have no dialogue, so everything is communicated through actions rather than text. There aren’t many cutscenes beyond the one at the intro, but they’re all short and sometimes comical. While Wario Land II doesn’t take its story too seriously, it actually employs really good storytelling techniques that more games should adopt.
Most of the moves from the first Wario game make their return here, like Wario’s trademarked shoulder tackle and his trusty butt stomp, plus he’s able to pick up and throw enemies. The man is amazing. What’s truly amazing, however, is that Wario is completely invincible in this game. There’s no health bar, no lives, and no Game Over screen. Wario is capable of taking an unlimited amount of punishment from any foe or hazard without ever kicking the bucket, but that’s not to say that it won’t hurt. Getting hit by harmful stuff like spikes will still cause a minor inconvenience to Wario by knocking him back a bit. I’m not sure what the plot explanation is for Wario’s newfound immortality, but it makes for a vastly different experience. So if you can’t die, then where’s the main challenge of the game? Well, you lose coins every time you get hit, and coins are needed to earn some of the game’s optional prizes. In addition to that, some puzzles and bosses need to be repeated if you fail them, much like any other game. That means there is still an element of challenge to the game, but it’s not nearly as punishing as most other games. Not many games make their protagonist invincible, making Wario Land II truly unique.
Every level has its own objective, and there are a lot of levels. As a matter of fact, there are fifty of them. The objectives aren’t always the same thing, though many of them merely consist of getting from point A to point B. What awaits you at point B, however, could be just about anything. In the first level of the game, Wario’s objective is to destroy his alarm clock, which is heard ringing in the background. That’s what I do in the morning, too. The second level is all about Wario turning off the running tap water in his castle, so he can undo the flooding that was done by the thieves. What’s brilliant about Wario Land II is that some levels have alternate methods of being completed, and completing a level in a different fashion usually unlocks new levels. Here’s a little secret to illustrate my point: the normal objective of the first level is destroying the alarm clock, but you can actually sleep in to beat the level. Is that genius or what? Generally, the level design in Wario Land II is more about exploration than totally linear action. The choice of completing a given level in multiple ways isn’t always present, which does mean you’re sometimes forced down a linear path of levels, even if the levels themselves are designed in a nonlinear fashion. However, the game does have multiple branching level paths, and these paths will lead to multiple endings. There is a level select screen that you gain access to at some point, so that allows you to replay any level you want in order to get all the endings. It’s a task worth doing, because the game has a lot of levels and they all range from good to great.
Many levels in the game feature puzzles that involve altering Wario’s condition in comical ways. Some of these conditional changes may seem negative at first, but can be necessary to solving a puzzle, although sometimes the conditions really are negative and only serve to impede your progress. Whether they’re helpful or not depends on the situation. If Wario is squished by certain heavy objects, he will become as flat as a pancake, which allows him to get through narrow passageways, on top of being able to gently float downwards like a leaf. To get out of this condition, he needs to be stretched back to normal by certain bats that will pull on his head. If Wario eats a cake, he’ll become extremely fat, rendering him incredibly slow, but allows him to smash through normally unbreakable blocks. Wario gets back to normal by, quite literally, doing exercise. If stung by a bee, Wario’s face will inflate to gargantuan proportions and he’ll be able to slowly fly in the air like a balloon. Some wizards shrink Wario down to size with magic, temporarily cursing him with a tiny state. Wario can even become a zombie in this game if he’s bitten by one. Also, it’s possible for him to get drunk, but this was kind of censored in the North American release. There are plenty more conditions, all with their advantages and disadvantages, and they’re all humorous to some degree.
On top of levels having secret objectives that lead to alternate paths and different endings, there are also optional treasures to collect. There is exactly one treasure per level, and the treasures are held within special bonus rooms. These bonus rooms have a simple mini-game to play in order to win the treasure, but the catch is that you need to pay coins to play the game. The more coins you pay, the easier the game gets. This is where the game’s challenge comes into play. Despite being totally indestructible, Wario does lose coins every time he’s hit, and he won’t be able to collect the treasure if he can’t foot the bill to play the mini-game. It’s not a problem in the early levels of the game where coins are plentiful and dangers are few, but it is later in the game when hazards become incredibly hard to avoid. That means you’ll actually have to play well and avoid getting damaged if you want to get all the treasures successfully. The other thing you can do is get bits and pieces of a secret treasure map that eventually unlocks the game’s final level, and therefore, final treasure. After every level, you play a mini-game to get the chance at winning a map piece. It’s a fairly simple mini-game where a slightly obscured digit is shown and you have to guess what digit it is. There are as many map pieces as there are levels, so this is a task that will take you the whole game to complete. Wario Land II is not lacking in replay value, that’s for sure.
Wario Land II is almost too good to be true. This tiny cartridge is filled to the brim with content; it has a ton of levels, many multiple endings, and lots of optional treasures to collect. All this results in a game that can last you many hours, way more hours than any side-scrolling game normally would. On top of all that, it has some of the best graphics and music that the Game Boy is capable of. The only hitch is that some people might be thrown off by the no death thing, but it’s not really a problem, as the game can still be quite challenging. Wario Land II is one of the best Game Boy games with relative ease, and also one of the best games in the Wario Land series.
