tl;dr play all three of these games, they are all excellent
Wario Land: Super Mario Land 3 – Fifteen GoldenCoins Treasures
As a fan of the first two Mario Land games (especially the second), I must admit that the third game is a vast improvement over the first two. Not that they’re bad! It’s just the team seemed to have figured out they needed to change up the gameplay from straightforward Mario NES-style play to better suit the blurry, lower resolution Game Boy. So, they made a game that starred Wario, the final boss from Mario Land 2, who controls slower, generally, than Mario, but his gameplay was built to account for that by being more puzzle focused, or at least less tricky in terms of platforming. Not to be pretentious, but Wario’s gameplay is a bit more cerebral than Mario – I don’t intend this to be a value judgment, just an observation based on how Wario traverses levels compared to Mario. Mario doesn’t have much of a reason to explore or slow down – I mean, he may find power ups or 1UPs, but if the player doesn’t need or care about those, they can run through a level as quickly and easily as possible to get to the next one (perhaps best exemplified by the hippo level in Mario Land 2, which is how you access the moon world – the easiest way to beat this is by grabbing the bubble at the beginning, and just holding A to float all the way to the end of the level to hit the bell, with not a single obstacle threatening Mario).
This, generally, isn’t a thing in the Wario series (with some exceptions in the first Wario game, such as using the Jet Helmet powerup, but the difficulty ceiling for this is a bit higher than many levels in Mario Land 2, where the Magic Carrot powerup allows the player to just tap A to easily float over gaps so long as they keep mashing that A button). At the most basic level, in Wario Land: Super Mario Land 3, Wario needs to not only get to the end of a level, but sometimes find a treasure behind a locked door, and sometimes have enough coins at the end to pay the “toll” to unlock the exit (by spending ten coins). The player won’t know going into a level for the first time, whether there will be a secret treasure or if they’ll have to pay the ten coin toll to beat it, so they must adjust for this by trying to collect coins to ensure they can beat the level once they reach the end, and usually by exploring nooks and crannies of the level to make sure they don’t miss any hidden treasures. This is smart game design – rather than encourage the player to just try to “survive” the level to get to the end like in the first two Mario Land games, the basic design philosophy of Wario Land is to encourage the player to explore a bit, to make sure they can beat the level. The game doesn’t explicitly say there are hidden treasures in some levels, save for a screen the player sees when they complete each level that totals all the coins the player has collected so far, along with a mysterious display labelled A through O:
Assuming the player is unaware of the significance of this screen, either because they didn’t read the manual (which explains exactly how keys and locked skull doors function, though doesn’t show this screen explicitly), or because they don’t have one, this is the only hint they get that there is more to this game than they may have initially suspected.
In any case, the game eases the player into this slowly – the first treasure the player can get is treasure “B” in the second world. This means in order to get every secret treasure, the player must return to the first world, “Rice Beach,” after advancing far enough into the second world – called “Lake Asparagus” in the manual, though “Mt Teapot” in the game itself – after having altered the world state to partially flood one of the levels in Rice Beach. Other than a quick animation on the world map of the tea pot lid closing, the game doesn’t explicitly tell the player that that old level has flooded. The hint, for the attentive player, comes when playing the level the first time, pre-flood: when beating the level, there is clearly a platform above the exit that leads over to the right, but it is not accessible (well, it is, by a somewhat tricky jump out of the quicksand to the left, but let’s assume a first time player is unaware of this). This leads to an alternate exit, which is the other hint something else is going on – the stage on the world map has a dot in it, unlike all the other levels in Rice Beach, which means there is an alternate exit. Yes, this alternate exit has nothing to do with the secret treasure in this level, but I’m trying to argue that this all points to there being more going on in this level than one might think. Once the level has partially flooded, a key and skull door are accessible, so a player returning to Rice Beach will also see the tide has come in on the world map, and that this level is possibly affected by this, so will enter the level and quickly see the obvious skull door very early in the level.
Not all of the treasures are this cleverly hidden, of course – many are in plain sight and just involve some light exploration or some backtracking to “solve.” My point in elaborating on all this is there’s nothing that involves that much thought on behalf of the player in the first two Mario Land games (again, not a value judgment, those games are great fun). This shows the direction the series is going to eventually go by first doubling down on the puzzles in Wario Land II, then going all in on it and making it the main point in Wario Land 3.
Wario Land II –
I’d not played this game until long after enjoying the first and third game in the series, so I overlooked it a bit over the years, but it is both excellent and a clear evolutionary step between Wario Land 1 and Wario Land 3 (I’m not counting Virtual Boy Wario Land in the evolution because, while a good game, it always felt to me more as a spin on Wario Land 1 than a step forward for the series). I don’t intend to imply that Wario Land II is incomplete or incoherent or anything – far from it – but it feels exactly like a halfway point between the two games on either side of it. Like Wario Land 3, Wario is invincible, but like Wario Land 1, he does get a form of punishment if he takes regular damage here – he loses coins rather than regress to a small, mostly useless form like in the first game. This is a punishment because Wario needs coins to play minigames to collect the hidden treasures in Wario Land II, rather than find a hidden key to unlock a door. His small form from the first game is still present in Wario Land II, but it’s more of a status change than a punishment, which is the form of gameplay that gets expanded on even more in Wario Land 3 (though small Wario isn’t present in that game).
So, status effects – when Wario takes a certain kind of hit from certain enemies, he gets temporary abilities that allow him to solve small platforming puzzles, or break certain bricks, for example (being turned into small Wario allows him to jump much higher, though this isn’t used all that much and is dropped completely in the third game, as mentioned above). So, if Wario takes fire damage, he begins running around while on fire and eventually is completely engulfed in flames for a brief period, which allows him to break fire bricks. The skill involved with breaking these fire bricks is usually controlling Wario precisely as he sprints about somewhat chaotically so he enters the temporary engulfed in flame state near the fire bricks the player wants to break, since until Wario is totally engulfed in flames, those fire bricks are unbreakable. This is one example of how puzzles have evolved from simple “find the key and get to the door” puzzles in the first game to a series of platforming and thought-provoking challenges, often layered on top of each other in a single level, to find the secrets hidden in Wario Land II. Unlike the first game, each level has a hidden treasure, too, hinted at by the screen the player sees upon completion of a level, where if the player hasn’t found a treasure, a tied bag will tantalizingly shake as though something is in it on the lower right of the screen, telling the player they missed something within. This rules! It’s a little more on the nose than the Rice Beach/Mt Teapot world map shenanigans in the first game, but I don’t see a problem with that, especially since Wario Land II doesn’t have a world map (…sort of. At least, the first time through, it doesn’t. I’ll get to this in a bit). So, the game is pretty clear right away that, in addition to the forward momentum of just getting through the game to “beat” the final level and see the credits, there’s hidden stuff in each level.
Now, to actually collect the treasure, you have to complete a mini game. This minigame costs, at minimum, 50 coins to attempt, and at maximum, 200 coins per attempt. It’s a matching game, in which the player is shown an enemy sprite and must match it to it’s twin with one of eight selectable boxes, which briefly flash images for different lengths of time (the more coins you pay, the longer these images will be visible to the player). This means that, in addition to searching the level for the hidden minigame door, the player must collect enough coins to be able to complete the minigame, so Wario Land II has more going on in a single level than just “find the exit.” It is this minigame, however, along with the second minigame when completing a level, that I find to be a mistake in both this game and it’s immediate sequel. It’s true that the first game in the trilogy had a sort of “random” gambley type minigame in which Wario could double or halve his coin total at the end of each level, but it was optional, even if coin total determined the ending. The player could completely avoid it, though, and just replay levels to collect coins in order to get the best ending if they so chose, but the minigames in Wario Land II and 3 are unavoidable in order to get the best endings, and, in my opinion, do not fit with the rest of the games being cerebral puzzle platforming. They’re just… randomized match two games (or in the case of the other minigame, a “image guessing” game. Wario Land 3 is a slightly different story, but is also problematic for reasons I’ll get to later).
Still, giving the player multiple objectives in a level is an evolution of what was going on in the first game, so in addition to collecting coins and looking for hidden treasure, the player must also find the exit, which itself is usually a puzzle of some sort as well. This is great! It’s very fun and the levels are cleverly designed to give the player multiple ways to traverse them, usually hidden behind changing Wario’s status to get to areas otherwise inaccessible.
The last thing I want to discuss is the level layout, which the player doesn’t see until they complete the game for the first time. There are fifty levels in Wario Land II, and they branch out from each other in different ways. This is the screen players use to navigate the different levels after beating the final boss for the first time:
Each level shows whether or not a treasure has been collected or not, and whether part of the final treasure map collected at the end of each level has been completed, too. But Wario Land II’s final, coolest trick (in my opinion), is laid bare here: there are some levels that have alternate ways of beating them, and unlike the first Wario Land, they aren’t always “find the hidden exit door.” The most interesting one (again, in my opinion), is in the very first level. The game starts by having the Syrup gang infiltrate Wario’s castle and stealing his treasure, but also by flooding his basement and hiding an annoying alarm clock that Wario has to shut off. However, if the player lets Wario continue sleeping by not pressing any buttons when they take control of the game, the Syrup gang will get impatient and come pick up Wario off his bed, carry him outside, and then the game starts from there, with a completely different end goal of re-infiltrating his own castle. This is displayed in the image above by that top most fork in the levels. I love this – it is yet another puzzle layer in addition to the already mentioned ones above. As you can see in the above image, there are several forks in the game, and plenty to do even after you beat Captain Syrup the first time. This structure is – in my opinion – improved upon in Wario Land 3, but in a different way than expected.
Wario Land 3 – Wariotroidvania?!
I realize, going into this part of my post, that I’m about to argue against what I perceive to be the standard TT/Retronauts opinion of this series – that Wario Land II is the best, rather than 3, as I’m about to make the case for. To be, again, clear – all the games are fantastic and worth playing. What follows is why I think Wario Land 3 is the best game in the series.
Wario Land 3 is a series of puzzle boxes. Literally. The entire game takes place in a miniature world in a music box, which itself contains five music boxes Wario must collect to beat the final boss and escape his tiny prison. Each level contains four treasure chests, each locked with a key of the same color that Wario must find first to unlock each one. The level ends and Wario returns to the world map when he collects one of these treasures.
These treasures are the point of the game. They serve various functions – some are power ups (Wario doesn’t start with all of his abilities from the first two games, here, he must earn them all back to progress through the game – more on this later), some unlock various routes on the world map and change things within the levels themselves sometimes, and others are just collectables. Each and every level is a usually dense layer of puzzles the player must solve, usually by finding a key and finding the route to the corresponding treasure chest of the same color. The game lets the player figure out whether or not they can progress in a given level – the only hints the player gets are at the end of a level when an animation plays on the world map to show what levels have changed, or if they go to the temple and ask the “mysterious figure” for guidance, he’ll tell them where to go next. This is nice because it means the player can’t really get “lost” – the player may be unable to figure out the puzzle in a given level, and the mysterious figure may only point to one level, but the player can go to any level they like at any time, and try to solve various puzzles to progress. Exploring is necessary to get 100% - not every treasure chest is required to beat the game, so roughly 30 of the 100 in the game are entirely optional.
The reason I prefer Wario Land 3 to II is the structure – it’s pseudo-Metroidvania. I say pseudo because the game is still split into discrete levels rather than one giant overworld, but other than that, the player still collects abilities and slowly unlocks more levels and paths through levels as they unlock more treasure chests. I can understand why someone might be annoyed, after two games of having all of Wario’s abilities right at the beginning, that they can’t say, pick up enemies right away. But to me this offset by the deliciously built structure of the game – yeah, you can’t pick up enemies yet, but you’ll be coming back to whatever level you’re in anyway, so you can do it later. This is perfect for handheld gaming, as when I played through Wario Land 3 again a few weeks ago, I struggled to put the game down – I kept thinking to myself “just one more treasure. Just one more!” and would often go to bed later than I intended. I also prefer this to Wario Land II’s structure because you don’t actually see the path you’re taking until you’ve beaten the game, so unless you already know beforehand which exit will take you down which path, your playthrough might be vastly different from others (which is fine, really, just not quite what I prefer).
Wario Land 3 is also stronger aesthetically than II, not just because it’s a Game Boy Color only game so has richer color palettes. The animations of the various transformations Wario takes are fleshed out and animate better, the enemies and Wario himself have more frames of animation, and there’s several new songs compared to Wario Land II (which remixed some songs from the first game and had a few new tracks itself).
The game also changes the minigame structure from the second game – rather than guessing random numbers or try to spot a match quickly, in Wario Land 3 you occasionally have to move a barrier by completing a golf minigame. This has Wario knock an enemy “ball” into a hole at the end of a sidescrolling golf course with various traps along the way, such as sand, water, lava, and rough grass. There’s a certain number of different hole layouts, and each play costs Wario some coins, but the coins Wario collects are across his entire playthrough, rather than the specific level he’s on now. I liked the design of Wario Land II with having to find coins in each level to beat the minigame, but I prefer this because it allows each level/treasure chest to be more purely about solving the route to get to the key and chest rather than randomly wander around the level collecting coins to ensure you beat the minigames. Also, Wario Land 3 doesn’t make you play the golf minigame in every level or for every chest. I didn’t keep track of how many times I had to play it, but out of 100 treasures, I’d guess maybe like twenty times? In any case, just like in the second game, the minigame is a bit disconnected from the design of the rest of the game, so I advise savestating before going down the minigame pipe to make sure you don’t waste time, if you aren’t playing on the original cart, which, frankly, is a knock against each game in this series (I also usually savestate sometimes in the first game to double Wario’s money three times at the end of levels, just because that minigame, too, while optional, ultimately amounts to tedious RNG).
In any case, if you’ve never played Wario Land 3, I strongly recommend it – I had an absolute blast replaying it for the first time in years recently. It is, imo, a delight. Hell, play all these games, whether it’s your first time or your twentieth. They are all extremely great and well worth your time, and among the best games on the platforms they’re on.
Someone else can write about Virtual Boy Wario Land and Wario Land 4 (and later games), because I’ve yet to “crack” those games and love them to the degree I do the first three. They’re good, too, I just don’t have the experience with them I do with these three games. Anyway, did I miss anything? Do you disagree with me? Please argue with me! I want to talk about this series that I love so much.
Welcome… to the Wario Land Appreciation Society.
Wario Land: Super Mario Land 3 – Fifteen Golden
As a fan of the first two Mario Land games (especially the second), I must admit that the third game is a vast improvement over the first two. Not that they’re bad! It’s just the team seemed to have figured out they needed to change up the gameplay from straightforward Mario NES-style play to better suit the blurry, lower resolution Game Boy. So, they made a game that starred Wario, the final boss from Mario Land 2, who controls slower, generally, than Mario, but his gameplay was built to account for that by being more puzzle focused, or at least less tricky in terms of platforming. Not to be pretentious, but Wario’s gameplay is a bit more cerebral than Mario – I don’t intend this to be a value judgment, just an observation based on how Wario traverses levels compared to Mario. Mario doesn’t have much of a reason to explore or slow down – I mean, he may find power ups or 1UPs, but if the player doesn’t need or care about those, they can run through a level as quickly and easily as possible to get to the next one (perhaps best exemplified by the hippo level in Mario Land 2, which is how you access the moon world – the easiest way to beat this is by grabbing the bubble at the beginning, and just holding A to float all the way to the end of the level to hit the bell, with not a single obstacle threatening Mario).
This, generally, isn’t a thing in the Wario series (with some exceptions in the first Wario game, such as using the Jet Helmet powerup, but the difficulty ceiling for this is a bit higher than many levels in Mario Land 2, where the Magic Carrot powerup allows the player to just tap A to easily float over gaps so long as they keep mashing that A button). At the most basic level, in Wario Land: Super Mario Land 3, Wario needs to not only get to the end of a level, but sometimes find a treasure behind a locked door, and sometimes have enough coins at the end to pay the “toll” to unlock the exit (by spending ten coins). The player won’t know going into a level for the first time, whether there will be a secret treasure or if they’ll have to pay the ten coin toll to beat it, so they must adjust for this by trying to collect coins to ensure they can beat the level once they reach the end, and usually by exploring nooks and crannies of the level to make sure they don’t miss any hidden treasures. This is smart game design – rather than encourage the player to just try to “survive” the level to get to the end like in the first two Mario Land games, the basic design philosophy of Wario Land is to encourage the player to explore a bit, to make sure they can beat the level. The game doesn’t explicitly say there are hidden treasures in some levels, save for a screen the player sees when they complete each level that totals all the coins the player has collected so far, along with a mysterious display labelled A through O:
Assuming the player is unaware of the significance of this screen, either because they didn’t read the manual (which explains exactly how keys and locked skull doors function, though doesn’t show this screen explicitly), or because they don’t have one, this is the only hint they get that there is more to this game than they may have initially suspected.
In any case, the game eases the player into this slowly – the first treasure the player can get is treasure “B” in the second world. This means in order to get every secret treasure, the player must return to the first world, “Rice Beach,” after advancing far enough into the second world – called “Lake Asparagus” in the manual, though “Mt Teapot” in the game itself – after having altered the world state to partially flood one of the levels in Rice Beach. Other than a quick animation on the world map of the tea pot lid closing, the game doesn’t explicitly tell the player that that old level has flooded. The hint, for the attentive player, comes when playing the level the first time, pre-flood: when beating the level, there is clearly a platform above the exit that leads over to the right, but it is not accessible (well, it is, by a somewhat tricky jump out of the quicksand to the left, but let’s assume a first time player is unaware of this). This leads to an alternate exit, which is the other hint something else is going on – the stage on the world map has a dot in it, unlike all the other levels in Rice Beach, which means there is an alternate exit. Yes, this alternate exit has nothing to do with the secret treasure in this level, but I’m trying to argue that this all points to there being more going on in this level than one might think. Once the level has partially flooded, a key and skull door are accessible, so a player returning to Rice Beach will also see the tide has come in on the world map, and that this level is possibly affected by this, so will enter the level and quickly see the obvious skull door very early in the level.
Not all of the treasures are this cleverly hidden, of course – many are in plain sight and just involve some light exploration or some backtracking to “solve.” My point in elaborating on all this is there’s nothing that involves that much thought on behalf of the player in the first two Mario Land games (again, not a value judgment, those games are great fun). This shows the direction the series is going to eventually go by first doubling down on the puzzles in Wario Land II, then going all in on it and making it the main point in Wario Land 3.
Wario Land II –
I’d not played this game until long after enjoying the first and third game in the series, so I overlooked it a bit over the years, but it is both excellent and a clear evolutionary step between Wario Land 1 and Wario Land 3 (I’m not counting Virtual Boy Wario Land in the evolution because, while a good game, it always felt to me more as a spin on Wario Land 1 than a step forward for the series). I don’t intend to imply that Wario Land II is incomplete or incoherent or anything – far from it – but it feels exactly like a halfway point between the two games on either side of it. Like Wario Land 3, Wario is invincible, but like Wario Land 1, he does get a form of punishment if he takes regular damage here – he loses coins rather than regress to a small, mostly useless form like in the first game. This is a punishment because Wario needs coins to play minigames to collect the hidden treasures in Wario Land II, rather than find a hidden key to unlock a door. His small form from the first game is still present in Wario Land II, but it’s more of a status change than a punishment, which is the form of gameplay that gets expanded on even more in Wario Land 3 (though small Wario isn’t present in that game).
So, status effects – when Wario takes a certain kind of hit from certain enemies, he gets temporary abilities that allow him to solve small platforming puzzles, or break certain bricks, for example (being turned into small Wario allows him to jump much higher, though this isn’t used all that much and is dropped completely in the third game, as mentioned above). So, if Wario takes fire damage, he begins running around while on fire and eventually is completely engulfed in flames for a brief period, which allows him to break fire bricks. The skill involved with breaking these fire bricks is usually controlling Wario precisely as he sprints about somewhat chaotically so he enters the temporary engulfed in flame state near the fire bricks the player wants to break, since until Wario is totally engulfed in flames, those fire bricks are unbreakable. This is one example of how puzzles have evolved from simple “find the key and get to the door” puzzles in the first game to a series of platforming and thought-provoking challenges, often layered on top of each other in a single level, to find the secrets hidden in Wario Land II. Unlike the first game, each level has a hidden treasure, too, hinted at by the screen the player sees upon completion of a level, where if the player hasn’t found a treasure, a tied bag will tantalizingly shake as though something is in it on the lower right of the screen, telling the player they missed something within. This rules! It’s a little more on the nose than the Rice Beach/Mt Teapot world map shenanigans in the first game, but I don’t see a problem with that, especially since Wario Land II doesn’t have a world map (…sort of. At least, the first time through, it doesn’t. I’ll get to this in a bit). So, the game is pretty clear right away that, in addition to the forward momentum of just getting through the game to “beat” the final level and see the credits, there’s hidden stuff in each level.
Now, to actually collect the treasure, you have to complete a mini game. This minigame costs, at minimum, 50 coins to attempt, and at maximum, 200 coins per attempt. It’s a matching game, in which the player is shown an enemy sprite and must match it to it’s twin with one of eight selectable boxes, which briefly flash images for different lengths of time (the more coins you pay, the longer these images will be visible to the player). This means that, in addition to searching the level for the hidden minigame door, the player must collect enough coins to be able to complete the minigame, so Wario Land II has more going on in a single level than just “find the exit.” It is this minigame, however, along with the second minigame when completing a level, that I find to be a mistake in both this game and it’s immediate sequel. It’s true that the first game in the trilogy had a sort of “random” gambley type minigame in which Wario could double or halve his coin total at the end of each level, but it was optional, even if coin total determined the ending. The player could completely avoid it, though, and just replay levels to collect coins in order to get the best ending if they so chose, but the minigames in Wario Land II and 3 are unavoidable in order to get the best endings, and, in my opinion, do not fit with the rest of the games being cerebral puzzle platforming. They’re just… randomized match two games (or in the case of the other minigame, a “image guessing” game. Wario Land 3 is a slightly different story, but is also problematic for reasons I’ll get to later).
Still, giving the player multiple objectives in a level is an evolution of what was going on in the first game, so in addition to collecting coins and looking for hidden treasure, the player must also find the exit, which itself is usually a puzzle of some sort as well. This is great! It’s very fun and the levels are cleverly designed to give the player multiple ways to traverse them, usually hidden behind changing Wario’s status to get to areas otherwise inaccessible.
The last thing I want to discuss is the level layout, which the player doesn’t see until they complete the game for the first time. There are fifty levels in Wario Land II, and they branch out from each other in different ways. This is the screen players use to navigate the different levels after beating the final boss for the first time:
Each level shows whether or not a treasure has been collected or not, and whether part of the final treasure map collected at the end of each level has been completed, too. But Wario Land II’s final, coolest trick (in my opinion), is laid bare here: there are some levels that have alternate ways of beating them, and unlike the first Wario Land, they aren’t always “find the hidden exit door.” The most interesting one (again, in my opinion), is in the very first level. The game starts by having the Syrup gang infiltrate Wario’s castle and stealing his treasure, but also by flooding his basement and hiding an annoying alarm clock that Wario has to shut off. However, if the player lets Wario continue sleeping by not pressing any buttons when they take control of the game, the Syrup gang will get impatient and come pick up Wario off his bed, carry him outside, and then the game starts from there, with a completely different end goal of re-infiltrating his own castle. This is displayed in the image above by that top most fork in the levels. I love this – it is yet another puzzle layer in addition to the already mentioned ones above. As you can see in the above image, there are several forks in the game, and plenty to do even after you beat Captain Syrup the first time. This structure is – in my opinion – improved upon in Wario Land 3, but in a different way than expected.
Wario Land 3 – Wariotroidvania?!
I realize, going into this part of my post, that I’m about to argue against what I perceive to be the standard TT/Retronauts opinion of this series – that Wario Land II is the best, rather than 3, as I’m about to make the case for. To be, again, clear – all the games are fantastic and worth playing. What follows is why I think Wario Land 3 is the best game in the series.
Wario Land 3 is a series of puzzle boxes. Literally. The entire game takes place in a miniature world in a music box, which itself contains five music boxes Wario must collect to beat the final boss and escape his tiny prison. Each level contains four treasure chests, each locked with a key of the same color that Wario must find first to unlock each one. The level ends and Wario returns to the world map when he collects one of these treasures.
These treasures are the point of the game. They serve various functions – some are power ups (Wario doesn’t start with all of his abilities from the first two games, here, he must earn them all back to progress through the game – more on this later), some unlock various routes on the world map and change things within the levels themselves sometimes, and others are just collectables. Each and every level is a usually dense layer of puzzles the player must solve, usually by finding a key and finding the route to the corresponding treasure chest of the same color. The game lets the player figure out whether or not they can progress in a given level – the only hints the player gets are at the end of a level when an animation plays on the world map to show what levels have changed, or if they go to the temple and ask the “mysterious figure” for guidance, he’ll tell them where to go next. This is nice because it means the player can’t really get “lost” – the player may be unable to figure out the puzzle in a given level, and the mysterious figure may only point to one level, but the player can go to any level they like at any time, and try to solve various puzzles to progress. Exploring is necessary to get 100% - not every treasure chest is required to beat the game, so roughly 30 of the 100 in the game are entirely optional.
The reason I prefer Wario Land 3 to II is the structure – it’s pseudo-Metroidvania. I say pseudo because the game is still split into discrete levels rather than one giant overworld, but other than that, the player still collects abilities and slowly unlocks more levels and paths through levels as they unlock more treasure chests. I can understand why someone might be annoyed, after two games of having all of Wario’s abilities right at the beginning, that they can’t say, pick up enemies right away. But to me this offset by the deliciously built structure of the game – yeah, you can’t pick up enemies yet, but you’ll be coming back to whatever level you’re in anyway, so you can do it later. This is perfect for handheld gaming, as when I played through Wario Land 3 again a few weeks ago, I struggled to put the game down – I kept thinking to myself “just one more treasure. Just one more!” and would often go to bed later than I intended. I also prefer this to Wario Land II’s structure because you don’t actually see the path you’re taking until you’ve beaten the game, so unless you already know beforehand which exit will take you down which path, your playthrough might be vastly different from others (which is fine, really, just not quite what I prefer).
Wario Land 3 is also stronger aesthetically than II, not just because it’s a Game Boy Color only game so has richer color palettes. The animations of the various transformations Wario takes are fleshed out and animate better, the enemies and Wario himself have more frames of animation, and there’s several new songs compared to Wario Land II (which remixed some songs from the first game and had a few new tracks itself).
The game also changes the minigame structure from the second game – rather than guessing random numbers or try to spot a match quickly, in Wario Land 3 you occasionally have to move a barrier by completing a golf minigame. This has Wario knock an enemy “ball” into a hole at the end of a sidescrolling golf course with various traps along the way, such as sand, water, lava, and rough grass. There’s a certain number of different hole layouts, and each play costs Wario some coins, but the coins Wario collects are across his entire playthrough, rather than the specific level he’s on now. I liked the design of Wario Land II with having to find coins in each level to beat the minigame, but I prefer this because it allows each level/treasure chest to be more purely about solving the route to get to the key and chest rather than randomly wander around the level collecting coins to ensure you beat the minigames. Also, Wario Land 3 doesn’t make you play the golf minigame in every level or for every chest. I didn’t keep track of how many times I had to play it, but out of 100 treasures, I’d guess maybe like twenty times? In any case, just like in the second game, the minigame is a bit disconnected from the design of the rest of the game, so I advise savestating before going down the minigame pipe to make sure you don’t waste time, if you aren’t playing on the original cart, which, frankly, is a knock against each game in this series (I also usually savestate sometimes in the first game to double Wario’s money three times at the end of levels, just because that minigame, too, while optional, ultimately amounts to tedious RNG).
In any case, if you’ve never played Wario Land 3, I strongly recommend it – I had an absolute blast replaying it for the first time in years recently. It is, imo, a delight. Hell, play all these games, whether it’s your first time or your twentieth. They are all extremely great and well worth your time, and among the best games on the platforms they’re on.
Someone else can write about Virtual Boy Wario Land and Wario Land 4 (and later games), because I’ve yet to “crack” those games and love them to the degree I do the first three. They’re good, too, I just don’t have the experience with them I do with these three games. Anyway, did I miss anything? Do you disagree with me? Please argue with me! I want to talk about this series that I love so much.
Welcome… to the Wario Land Appreciation Society.
