Retronauts - Retronauts Episode 371: Wario Land II & 3

Episode Date: April 19, 2021

Jeremy Parish, Bob Mackey, Ray Barnholt, & Stuart Gipp return to definitely-not-the-Mushroom-Kingdom for the innovative further adventures of definitely-not-Mario. What happens when you play a game where your hero can never die? Only Wario knows for sure. Retronauts is made possible by listener support through Patreon! Support the show to enjoy ad-free early access, better audio quality, and great exclusive content. Learn more at http://www.patreon.com/retronauts

You're listening to Retronauts, a part of the Greenlit Podcast Network. To hear more great shows or to learn how you could become part of our consortium of independently owned podcasts, check out Greenlit Podcasts.com. This week in Retronauts, we continue to be number one. Hi, everyone. Welcome to Retronauts episode. I believe I said 3171. That's so many Retronauts. And yet we continue to go because there continued to be games we haven't talked about enough. I don't say we haven't talked about before because we have talked about these games before. But we are going to talk about them more. and give them the discussion they truly deserve. That's right, we are talking about Wario Land 2 and 3. And before I get going about why we should talk about these games

and how important that is, first you might want to jump back and listen to episode 343, where we talked about Wario Land 1, aka Super Mario Land 3, and Virtual Boy Wario Land. So that sets the stage for this conversation that you are listening to right now, a conversation between myself, Jeremy Parrish, and let's start in the UK. Who is that out there? Hello, I'm Stuart Jip, and I actually look quite a lot like Wario. And right before this, someone threw a piece of cake at me.

I called it in my mouth, and I became enormously fat. Phenomenal. And then, of course, as always on, well, as most of the time, as many times, my co-host. Hey, everybody, it's Bob Mackey. I wait too many crazy orbs last night. And finally joining us for this kind of kind of bringing things back around to the first time we talked about Wario land. Hello, this is Ray Barnhold, garlic magnate. And yeah.

So as you may recall, we did talk about the Wario Land, just Wario series, I think, in general, back in the very, very early days of the Retronauts reboot, where it was like episode two or something. It was two. not just a low number, but a single digit. That's how long ago it was. And now here we are, decades later, talking about these games again, because it's been so long, we've forgotten everything that we said except that we like these games. But why do we like them? That, I think, is a topic for greater elucidation. And so we are here to elucidate, because that's the kind of thing Wario does. He does anything that sounds vaguely naughty and rude. So I'm hallucinating here in North Carolina, talking to people in California and the U.S.

United Kingdom. Actually, yes, that's right, United Kingdom. I couldn't remember if Brexit broke up the United Kingdom thing or if it's just like... I stopped paying attention. Yeah, that's probably the way to go. Might as well. In any case, we are fans of Wario around the world. And so we're going to talk about these games. So let me ask you, all of you, each of you, when did you first play Wario Land 2 and 3? I tinkered with Wario the first two, Wario, games with emulation. I never bought them new or used or anything like that before around the time they came out. And then when 3 was out, I had a new Game Boy Color. I needed something to play on a vacation to Berkeley where I live now. And that is when I just got super addicted to it and I went

back and played the other games. But 3 is my favorite of the series. And I think it is such an amazing game that is very overlooked in terms of talking about the best games of all time and also the best Metroidvania's of all time because it is a Metroidvania. No one. acknowledges that. I acknowledge it now that I've replayed it and said, oh my God, but we can talk about that more later. Ray, what about you? Right. Okay. Let's see. I played Warieland 2. I specifically waited for the color version because I knew that was a thing, which we'll talk about, I'm sure, but I played a lot of that after loving Wario Land 1. And then I really didn't get Wario Land 3 when it first came out. I didn't acquire it. I didn't really, I guess I didn't really care that much.

I don't know what the problem is. But like the most I played it was probably in the past week on my mister. But for that true portable experience. Yeah, it's weird. So I skipped three. I've played four. And then like the other ones after that, like shake it and stuff. So I'm most familiar with two. All right. And Stewart. I didn't play two or three until I was able to emulate them. I never had a Game Boy, but I did buy Game Boy magazines because I still liked 2D games because I had my master system. And I wanted to see these new 2D games that were coming out. So I would play Waryor93 by tracing my finger through the maps in Planet Game Boy because they mapped out the whole game in that magazine, which as far as I'm concerned counts. But later, when I did get a

Game Boy, I picked up WarioLand 2 and 3 secondhand, and I loved 2. I think 2 is a fascinating video game. I think 3 is even more fascinating, almost at the cost of accessibility, but as I've played more and more of 3, I appreciate it a lot more because it's probably the most complex game-by-color game I can think of in terms of its structure. But yeah, I've always loved Wario, I think he's a good lad, so I always have to talk about worry it. Yeah, I would say that tracing your fingers through screenshot maps in a magazine absolutely counts as playing the game. And when I finally got my hands on the Donkey Kong Game and Watch this

past year, you know, I felt like I already knew it inside and out because I used to stare at a photo of it in the Sears catalog for like the better part of a year. So yeah, totally, absolutely. That makes you an expert in this video game. Got all of the music lines and everything. Wow. Oh, nice. Yeah, that's fantastic. 100% play through. Yeah, so as for myself, you know, I didn't really do that much portable gaming before Game Boy Color, mainly because I didn't have access to Game Boy for a long time. And by the time, I finally could afford one, Game Boy had kind of fallen by the wayside.

So basically, when Game Boy Color came out, you know, there's right around the same time as NeoGeo Pocket. And then WonderSwan was in the wings. I was like, this is it. I'm going to keep playing these games because I, you know, I like what's happening on the 3D front. but I miss my old school games. So, you know, WarioLand 2 came out in color shortly after Game Boy Color in the U.S. And so it was one of the first games that I really spent a lot of time with as a portable beyond having borrowed a Game Boy in Metroid 2 or whatever years before.

So really, really enjoyed it and really got into it, played it, you know, very thoroughly. And then, you know, Warioland 3 came out a few years later, and I was absolutely like 100% committed to this whole 2D gaming st. but I just, I could not really find it in my heart to joy warrior land three that much. I played a few hours of it and was just like, eh, I don't know, I'm not feeling it. So I never went back to it until we put together this episode and I went back and I've played, you know, a couple of hours, gotten, you know, moved around the map a lot, explored, I've opened up most of the regions at least. And yeah, I'm really, I'm really enjoying it. I do know that at some point I will have to fight that goddamn rabbit, the sports rabbit, and that is where my brick wall was last time.

Save states. I think this time I can get past it. So, yes, we are talking about, again, Wario Land 2 and 3, and they're such good games. And the interesting thing about Wario games is that they kind of appear in twos. Much more so than most other series I can think of. Wario Land and Wario Land for Virtual Boy are really two of a kind, like in terms of mechanics and structure. wireland two and three are very structured you know structured very similarly have very similar mechanics and then you have warrior land four and shake it and those are also very very similar you know

different aesthetics but very very similar structure and level objectives and kind of the overall format so i don't i don't know why that is exactly i think it's because wario is so weird and so offbeat compared to what you expect from a normal action game a normal platformer that they put the ideas out there once and they're like okay that was That was good, but we didn't quite get everything right. Let's do this again and try to really nail everything and really, really lock it down. So you get this kind of iterative approach where, you know, it's not like every Mario game is exactly the same because they all vary pretty wildly, especially when you have these two sort of in the middle. But, you know, it's not like every single entry is a wild reinvention of the franchise. It's like they do an idea, they perfect it, then they move on to a new approach, perfect that, move along to a new approach, perfect that. and then they go away and stop making the games. But alas, we can at least take delight in the fact that these two games do exist. And they are now nearly, well, no, actually, they're more than 20 years old, both of them.

I can't believe it's been that long. And yet here we are. So let's talk a bit about the creators behind the Wario, these two Wario games. And the interesting thing is that most of the creators are, you know, the creative team, the talent is pretty consistent across the two games, which kind of lends credence to that whole iterative design thing. It's only a group of like seven or eight people. I'm not sure exactly how involved Hiroji Kiyotake was. He's listed as character designer, but is that just Wario?

Or is it like every character in the game? I don't actually know. And evidently, neither do you. So the director on these two games was Takehiko Hosokawa, who was kind of like the really kind of the creative, you know, direction design lead for R&D1's Game Boy games. Like, if you look at his CV, it's just about all the Game Boy games that R&D1, Nintendo R&D1 developed.

He was the designer or director. Yeah, I think he was also a director on Mario Land 2 and the first WarioLand, and then he was a producer on Mario Land 4. And, yeah, also been heavily involved with the Metroid Games, Metroid 2, Fusion, Zero Mission, and Samus Returns, had a special credit in a thank you credit in Super Metroid has done some other stuff that Bob made a note

here, very sad note. Oh, sorry, one of three directors on Metroid Other M, that game needed three directors to be that bad. It's possible he was trying to stop the other two. Yeah, he might have been the voice of the dissent. Shoving them away from the keyboards.

Yeah, he couldn't get a quorum though. Yeah, well, no, actually I think OtherM, the idea there was that they had three different elements to the game There was the action bit and the movie bit. I think something else, like the exploration bit. So he might have been the director on the exploration aspects of the game, like the world director,

whereas I think you had a team ninja guy who was the, like the action, the combat director. And then you had someone from whatever studio they worked with to do the cinematics as the cutscene director, like the story director. I think I remember reading. That's how it worked. So the action. world design, like the structure of the world, I think, in Metroid Fusion, or other end was

pretty good. So I'm not going to hold too much over his head. And he's given us so much else. Everyone's allowed on this step. Yeah, but he sounds pretty well-versed in Game Boy. So, I mean, obviously, he would know how to make a very good expansive Game Boy game. That also feels good. Yeah. And his last portable game was he was co-director on Samus Returns from a few years ago. Yeah. Not bad. Yeah. So that was another case, kind of like other where it was internally Nintendo but also externally, in this case with Mercury Steam. So he was probably

there to rein in their bad instincts because I've played Castlevania, Lords of Shadow, whatever the hell that was called, the 3DS game. Mirror of Fate. Yes, and it really dragged. I'm playing it now. I'm playing it now. I'm trying to finish it, yeah. Well, not literally right now as we do this, but... I was going to be impressed,

actually. I mean, I mean, it's not that difficult. Yeah, it's not like a game you really have to commit to. It's a game you kind of sleepwalk through. So maybe less impressive. But yes, anyway, so he was, let's just say, responsible for the good stuff in Samus Returns. So basically, we like Takahiko Hosokawa. He's a good guy, and I want to see him make some more video games. So maybe he can make games for Switchlight exclusive once the Switch Pro comes out, because it'll be suitably like last gen. Maybe he's being helicoptered into Fix Metroid Prime 4. Maybe. He hasn't worked on any of the Prime games. Maybe he's

like lost in the archives trying to find Metroid dread. So the composer on Wariland 2 and 3 was Kozue Ishikawa. I'm not familiar with, I guess, her work, their work. I'm not sure who they are and what they've done. I did not look that up. It's a woman and she did a lot of Game Boy music and some of her first music was for Link's Awakening. Okay.

There you go. So, yes, very good. Well, hopefully she wasn't the one responsible for the Acorn music because that sucked. But all the other music was good. Programmers, Masaru, Yamanaka, Katsuya Yamano, and Nohuiro Ozaki. Names you probably don't recognize just being rattled off. But again, like Osokawa, they've been heavily involved. They were heavily involved in a lot of Game Boy stuff, portable stuff.

So it's kind of, I guess you would say this is like the Nintendo Deep Bench. It's not necessarily the team members, the staff that you think, oh yeah they made all of my favorite stuff but they actually did make your favorite stuff they just don't get you know paraded out on display for Nintendo directs or whatever to say hey here's a cool person you should know

they just they just make stuff and that's good because the stuff they make very very good yeah but that's also like three-fourths of Nintendo in general oh yeah yeah there's lots of unsung talent there who when you start picking around and like kind of going through their CVs or cross-linking on

moby games or whatever you're like or Kyoto report you're like wow this this game was made by people who made all these other games and that explains all the connections and why these are so good that's great just the kind of background information but at least that information is out there for people to find i i work a lot with the you know trying to chronicle video games whose staff is not well documented and it's always a mystery who knows why they made this game or who even made it in fact So anyway, we're going to break this down into Warioland 2 discussion and then Warioland Discussion. It has to be one before the other because Warioland 2 does really inform the design of Warioland 3. And that's such a huge break from what had come before. We talked, you know, again in episode 343 about Warioland and Virtual Boy Warialand and how you know, the design of those games was kind of like Super Mario Land, but twisted.

You had a much bigger, bulkier, more aggressive main character than Mario. Like, everyone thinks, oh, Mario, he's the chubby little plumber, but no, like, Wario is a big dude. He's got bulk, and the game really plays that up. He moves more slowly, but he has, like, when he charges, he does so with more force, and he's more aggressive, harder to hurt. he has the ability to pick up enemies and toss them like holding them overhead as opposed to Mario who only did that in Mario too which doesn't count because it was a dream but normally Mario

like when he picks stuff up he holds it out in front of him but Wario's just like I'm a made of bulk I'm a muscle man because he eats garlic and stuff so yeah that was very much the kind of premise for the play mechanics hey I always wondered though if Wario is so big and strong and heavy and whatnot and he and and Mario can get enemies by stomping on them wario does it but he just knocks him over like how come he doesn't like completely flatten the enemy it's because he wants to humiliate them yeah you know I'm I'd buy that actually yeah he doesn't go for the clean kill he wants to knock him out and then throw them around yeah I can see that I think Mario probably cheats and has like weapons you know like blades and of course Mario cheats okay I mean that's the

whole premise of the Wario cartoons, right? Oh, yeah, right. So, yeah, the first couple of Mario games, Wario is kind of like, like I said, kind of the weirder, bulkier version of Mario. And his power-ups,

the power-up scheme comes from Super Mario Land, too, where Mario would put on different hats and gain different powers. And that carries over to Wario, who normally has a pith helmet when he starts out in these first two adventures, but he can gain the like the Viking hat or, you know, the

bullhorns that lets him charge. He can gain a dragon hat that lets him breathe fire, an eagle hat that lets him fly and so on and so forth. And, you know, Virtual Boy, Wario Land, again, it's iterative. So he was able to basically take the hat powers from the first game and combine them and have, like, upgraded hats. So, of course, none of that carries over to Wario Land, too. The hat scheme is just completely abandoned altogether. Wario does not have innate power-ups. He doesn't, he doesn't gain abilities as he goes he is he is the character that you see right from the start and he can do the charges and the smashes and the stomping on things and throwing things but he doesn't need hats to be able to do it and in fact most of the interesting kind of

power up equivalent here is is more like penalties more like power downs that's that's kind of the big change for wario land too is that warrior doesn't have a health meter he can't die he is truly like the immortal villain all of a sudden and he's basically indestructible yeah I remember that being like the real highlighted thing when I first read about the game and probably like Nintendo Power or something

it's like oh wow okay so you made him so you can't die so how's that really going to work out and so that was really interesting and it did work out because they've made him like the sort of all-consuming kind of slapstick character really and I guess this game is it does feel a lot more kind of

I guess not, I mean, it's not super strong, but it's more kind of narrative led than most or any Mario game. Yeah. There is an actual story going on there about his sort of the greed and avarice. And I feel like his position in the game is kind of the villain under the actual villain, if that makes sense. He does suffer in the way that you'd expect like a comedy villain to do so. He gets squashed flat and he gets turned into like a zombie and stuff.

I think it's pretty interesting. I just like the fact that even when he's engulfed in flames, he can't die. So I think Wario's a witch. Wow. Yeah, I think Nintendo... Burn witches. Only the true witches. Oh, only true witches.

Yes. Are they supposed to fly away after beating? Well, I think Nintendo was really obsessed with this idea of limited transformations because it started arguably in Yoshi's Island and then it was also in Mario 64 and then in the Wario series and then eventually in things like Mario Galaxy. just the idea of a limited power-up or a limited transformation that it gives you more agency in some ways, but it can also take away agency in other ways. Yeah, in a sense, yeah, that's completely true.

And, you know, I think with the Mario games, that really came about as a way to give Mario powers that exceed his basic abilities without having to necessarily rebuild every 3D stage around, you know, like what happens if Mario can fly anytime he wants. That breaks a 3D game. So, you know, they limited a lot of his power-ups in the, in Mario 64 and so forth, just I think as a matter of necessity. But here it feels like a different approach. It's not, not so much like here's, here's a taste of what you could do in Super Mario World, but more like, hey, here's something weird that happened to you. But wait, there's, that's interesting. It seems like it's bad that you got turned into a zombie. But now you can. do stuff you couldn't before. That's, oh, you're on fire. Well, that's awful. You're going to burn to a crisp and be reduced to ashes before you start back up and you're running out of control.

But, oh, wait, you can break through fire blocks and anything you run through will be destroyed. That's interesting. So here I feel like it's less a matter of, you know, just sort of a practical game design consideration and more like almost the cornerstone of the game design. It's less a limitation and more like a starting point. point, if that makes sense. Yeah, it's really great how they can just make, you know, a on the surface negative thing

into a positive that becomes, you know, tools to help you progress. But this really does, you know, represent a radical shift in thought for how video games work. Because throughout history, which at this point was like, you know, 15, 20 years of video game history, the idea of a challenge of, you know, you. you know, limitations of see how well you can do, how far you can go before you die and, you know, have to start over or have to continue to give us more money. Like that was built into the fabric of video games, you know, of action games. The idea of an action game without death, without, you know, losing health, that just seems antithetical to what action games were all about. And so,

you know, Wireland 2 is really, it's a very innovative game and a very, kind of a daring game, I would say, just because it throws out, you know, two decades of kind of accepted, standardized thought about how an action game should work and about the, you know, the idea that action games should be Twitch challenges and should be tests of skill. And this becomes, I mean, there's definitely an element of test of skill to it, but it's not a game that penalizes you in the traditional way. Like, the worst thing that can happen to you in Wario Land 2 is that you can be inconvenienced. And, you know, like when you go up against a boss and it afflicts you with a status condition that bounces you out of its room and you have to go

start over, is that really functionally different than, you know, dying and starting, you know, with a new life? Not really, but you have infinite opportunities to do it. Like, you don't have to worry about running out of continues or running out of lives or having to start over from the beginning of the level. The idea is there that Wario has the opportunity to just keep going until he gets it right. And that sense becomes much more of a puzzle game than a platformer, but not in what we thought of it as puzzle games at this point, which was Tetris-style block, you know, matching games. Like, this is actually the levels become puzzles that are meant to be solved with horrible afflictions and deformities that are first upon Wario. And that's different and

interesting. And that's really, it just makes it such an appealing game to try out. When you're so used to like the traditional Mario style, this really does take the standards and concepts of Mario and says, well, no, this isn't Mario. This is Mario. Everything's different and weird. So get through this game, this game of weird differences. It's also a way for them to integrate, I don't know, more than five organic checkpoints within a level because you're often tasked with you get this power or you have to do a certain thing in a certain time. If you don't, you go back to get that power again or that deformation again. In a way, it just adds a lot more checkpoints to a platform level that feels really organic. Instead of just a banner you cross or a block you hit, it's just a very natural part of the level design itself. The only problem that raises for me personally, and this is very, this is entirely personal is I find it psychologically more annoying to be set back than to just get a blank screen and start over. I don't know why. Like, if I get knocked out of the boss room and I have to do a circuit to get back to it, it's functionally exactly the same as if you like air quotes, lose a life or whatever. But I find it somehow

more irritating. I don't know. I think it's because it becomes like attrition because you can't really get a fail state. No, I think you're absolutely right. That's not to say I don't, I don't dig it. It's just, it feels very different. I agree with you, Stuart. I had time to repeat myself 20 years ago, but for these games now, I do often save state before, you know, the challenge I have to do next because I don't feel like having to repeat a little bit of a section, I think it's fair. Yeah, I mean, there's definitely a few issues that, you know, emerge from this. But I feel like is there really a solution that is totally seamless?

Like every approach you take to challenging a player, which still does happen here, like this is not a game where you can die or lose health, but there is still challenge and you still have to perform correctly and figure out. out like how do I apply these abilities or disabilities or whatever you want to call them in the proper way. And so, you know, there is still going to be some sort of kind of inconvenience and like a penalty for failure. And yeah, I agree. Like after you have to go back and climb a bunch of platforms and smash through some enemies to take yet another swing at the boss who's going to like smack you before you even hit them because you, you know, missed your jump or something. And

The jump physics in this are a little weird. Like, Wario's a little, like, his control and handling is a little awkward sometimes. So I do find it kind of easy to get kind of screwed over and have to do things over and over again. And it can't get frustrating, especially that goddamn rabbit. I think it's balanced sort of, I think the level design is generally brilliant. It's really, really good. I love the alternate route you can take through the game and all that stuff. Like the secret route in the first level is so mind-bogglingly funny.

Yes, I do love that. Where you, should I spoil it? Can I spoil it? Is it okay? You might as well, yeah. I think people are listening to this, you know, they've had a long time to play this game. It's okay. Basically, the start of the game is that the spearmen break in the warriors like castle and take all this stuff.

And he gets what he's supposed to be woken up by this alarm clock. So the first level starts with you in bed asleep while the alarm clock's going off. If you touch a single button, you get up and you get on with the game. And if you don't touch any buttons, you just sleep through it. And you go into an alternate chapter because you just choose not to do any. thing, which I think is genius. I think it's brilliant. It's such a wacky sort of Nintendo thing to do.

It's just the route to take to get to the secret area is just not to do anything. I mean, it's so definitively Wario. Like, Wario is greedy, but also incredibly lazy. So what's the laziest thing you can do? It's to sleep through your alarm clock. And what happens when you choose to do that? Well, you get an entirely different story outcome. Well, Stewart mentioned this before, but this game has, if I may use a word that was overused a lot about a decade ago.

This game has a lot of environmental storytelling. Environmental storytelling, but no ludonarrative dissonance, folks. I checked it out. I cleared the test. But, yeah, this game sort of like, I hadn't seen it since a game like Castlevania, the Castlevania series, in that it tells a story through the levels, and each level necessarily builds off the last one. You're not just put into random levels like you are in Wario Land 3 or even Wario Land 1, where the level is just, like, kind of in a vacuum, it's themed.

But in these levels, one necessarily builds off the last one, and they often tell a story that will lead to the next level. Like, you're sinking a boat, you're moving into a cave system, you're going into a haunted house. Each level is just following off the last one in a very satisfying way. They have, like, objectives as well, not just get to the exit. That too, yeah. Turning off the giant tap and stuff.

Yeah, I will say that Warieland won, when I was researching for that last episode we did, I came to appreciate the fact that it does have some environmental storytelling, the way the levels connect with each other and, you know, the way they evolve. They do actually kind of, I wouldn't say necessarily relay a grand story or anything, but there is a sort of coherence and cohesiveness to the way they relate to one another and the way the environments flow one to the other, which you don't necessarily appreciate as you're playing, but when you sit down and kind of look at everything mapped out, you're like, oh, okay. yeah, this makes sense, like where you go from a dock and then you, you know, go across a bridge and then you're in a mountain. Like, it does all kind of flow together. But this is much more so. And, you know, the stages are kind of themed into the core stages, the 25 core stages are themed into five worlds. But yeah, there is, there is a story that happens from stage to sage. And, you know, the story elements are not necessarily traditional. Like, you know, there's a boss here

that you have to go to feed. It's more like, oh, Wario's favorite hen was broken out of its cage. So now you need to go find the hen and bring his favorite hen back to, you know, it's home so that it can give you an egg. You know, it's just, it's weird stuff. And that's great because it does, it does really feel like they sat down and said, oh, you know, let's not just do the same stuff that we do in every video game because that's just not Wario.

Wario's got totally different motives and totally different desires. He's not out to save anyone. He just wants his money back. He wants his stuff back. And like he cares about the things that are close to him like his chicken, but he doesn't really care about anyone else. They really realize that just getting to the end of the level is not as satisfying as finding something or doing something unique. Yeah. Some of my favorite level objectives are one, just turning off an alarm clock because it's annoying, turning off a faucet to prevent the castle.

from being flooded, sleeping until the chapter ends, leading Wario's favorite hint back to her nest, just hitting the brakes on a train, and dunking your bad guy rival into a basketball goal. So, yeah, like, you know, not every stage ends with an amazing, like, wow, I've never done this in a video game before, kind of, you know, conclusion. Like, sometimes you just have to defeat four ducks. But sometimes you really are just doing things that are extremely offbeat and not what we would expect in an action game. And they're such trivial sometimes, you know, objective, such seemingly insignificant goals

that it really does kind of develop what Wario's character is. He's, you know, he's obsessed with, with money and, you know, with food and whatever. But he, like, focuses on very weird specific things. And he goes about the task of, you know, defeating his rival in some very strange and an orthodox ways. The money thing, the currency thing, is like. like a big deal in this game. I don't think we've mentioned it that much. There's coins everywhere.

Like in the first level in particular, that like almost every wall you can smash through and find little sort of like Carby Holtz with more coins in them. You've got those giant coins that I think give you 30 or something. And then you've got to use those coins to play really, really dumb mini games like, hey, to get 100% that have nothing to do with anything else. Like what is like try and guess what a number is going to be

while some cards turn over with bits of the number. Well, no, the mini games, you, the number guessing game, that's what gives you the maps, like the map pieces. So if you get all of those, then you open up the true final stage. So there's 51 stages in the game. There's 25 core stages, 25 secret stages, and then the final stage. And the only way to get to the final stage is to get all 50 pieces of the map that are hidden in each of the individual stages, which you do through the mini games.

I just really don't like the minigames. I wish they just hidden them in the levels somewhere fun. You cannot come on. You can't have a Game Boy action game without many games. It's like the closest thing we had to like, Ninja Turtles follow the Foot Clan. Well, now it's back in Warrior Land. I did want to mention the structure of this game that blew my mind when I did a podcast about this eight years ago because it's not advertised. I didn't see it in coverage, but you seemingly finish the game in the final stage and it's a very sizable Game Boy game.

I think it took me maybe five or six hours to beat the first final boss. But then the game reveals, you see the credits. once you turn the game on and off again, it shows you an entire map where it's like, okay, now every level or a lot of levels have alternate exits, and now you can select any level. And that was something that is not advertised, that when you finish the game, when you finish the final stage, it's advertised as the final stage, you actually have only finished half of the game. And I wish more games would do that, surprise you with another half of a game. Yeah, that was kind of a thing around this time, because you also had Castlevania

Symphony the Night, where you beat Richter, and they were like, you know, Maria's like, hey what would have happened if you hadn't murdered the guy that I like would that have been different? Do you think maybe you could have tried that instead? And then it forces you just stop and think, wait, what about those weird things that I couldn't figure out the use for? Maybe I should have tried to do something with those and not just murdered the Belmont guy. So yeah, that was something in the air. I think, you know, game storage capacity was finally becoming big enough that they could actually do extra stuff like that. And it wasn't just like ghost and goblins like, oh, you beat

it, well, that was nice of you, but now you've got to do it again and it's going to be harder and you're going to hate life even more. And the alternate access that you open up leads to alternate timelines, the thing that Stewart mentioned earlier in the podcast about how if you don't wake up Wario, you go to different levels. That only happens after you finish the game one time. That's when you can actually do that in access a different timeline in which Wario was carried out of the castle instead of waking up in the castle and fighting his way out of it. I think you can You can do that on a first play, but it's not that you wouldn't think to. I tried it.

I tried it. I don't think you can. Yeah, you can't access any alternate exit on your first play-through. I tried it because I thought it could be a little smart-ass and open it up immediately, but they block all those out in a way that I think is kind of unfair because you don't know how big the game really is and you have to defeat a really annoying final boss to see the true scope of the game. But, yeah, they do lock everything down until you beat that first final stage.

I will say that the final boss at this game is less annoying than Virtual Boy Warioland's final boss. So it does have that in its favor. Also, people have actually played it, so that's a bonus as well. Yes, Vinton has made it accessible. How about that? But, yeah, speaking of versions and accessibility, so Ray mentioned earlier that WarioLand 2 initially shipped as a black and white cartridge, but he waited for the color version, which came out in the U.S. early in 1999.

The black and white version actually came out in America in March 1988, so it had been around for a year. Uh, yes, 19, no, 1988, 100, it was very innovative. It came out before the Game Boy. Yeah, sorry, 98, yes. Out of its time in so many ways. It really was. But yeah, I think most people were really just not paying a lot of attention to Game Boy at that point, at least in the U.S., because Pokemon hadn't launched here.

Uh, the next gen consoles were out in 64, PlayStation Saturn. Um, you know, people just didn't really care about games. It was almost a decade old at that point and what was happening for it. So, you know, when Nintendo released WarioLand 2, like, there's a huge holographic sticker on the front of the box that says, no, because otherwise you wouldn't have been known. It would have been like, oh, huh, there's a Mario game from like six years ago that I missed. Oh, well, who cares? Yeah, there's that period of the Game Boy Dildrum's years where they just put that sticker on

everything because they needed people to know that, hey, there are. new Game Boy games. You can buy them. Yeah, I mean, it's the definition of a sleeper because really almost no one was paying attention to Game Boy at that point in the U.S. You know, in Japan they'd had the Pokemon Revolution already like two years prior. But, you know, that hadn't made its way to the U.S. because they really wanted to really go in, all in on the Pokemon launch in the U.S.

and localized the games and the cartoons and all the merchandise. They knew it was going to be big. So they took their time with it. So Pokemon obviously didn't launch in the U.S. until two and a half years after its Japanese debut. So that's kind of this weird interim time where the Game Boy was viable as a platform again. In Japan, people were buying.

They were snatching up Game Boy's. You couldn't stock them fast enough. But in the U.S., people were just like, in Europe, people were like, eh, that's that old thing, huh? It's still around. Well, okay, whatever. No one was making portable games in any, in any respect. So, you know, just no one cared.

So the, the mono version of Game Boy, or of WarioLand 2, shipped in 98, early 98, for America and Europe and Australia. But it never shipped in Japan. Instead, the Japanese version, even though Game Boy, like the black and white Game Boy was resurgent in Japan, for whatever reason, Nintendo was like, ah, we're going to, we're going to hold off and we're going to launch this game in color alongside the Game Boy, color in October. So it was a launch title in Japan, but because it had come out like six months prior, less than that. In the US, by the time Game Boy Color came out, they kind of pumped the brakes and waited another six months to release

it here and in Europe. So a really kind of weird release order, like the whole like the circumstances of its launch were very strange and probably didn't do any favors initially for its popularity. So let me get this straight. Okay, so they released it

in black and white only. Then they released it in color, but also black and white? Like, would the color version work on a brick gameboy as well? Yeah. That's very unusual. No, the, for the first year or two of Game Boy Color's life, most games, I think like first year or so, most games shipped on the black cartridges, which signified that they were color games if you put them in a Game Boy color, but they would be black and

white if you played them in a mono Game Boy, like they were backward compatible. But the weird thing about the Wariland 2 cartridge, like the black cartridge, is that you can play it on either a Game Boy or a Game Boy Color, but you can't use the save from one platform to the other, even though there are no substantial differences. There's like some tiny little visual differences besides color when you play it on Game Boy Color for whatever reason. I don't understand this, but if you play it on black and white Game Boy and make progress,

if you want to play it on color, you have to erase your save file and start over because there's only room for one save file and it doesn't switch between platforms. It's a very strange thing. That is interesting. It reminds me of, I mean, I'm no tech expert on this, but I had R-Type DX on the Game Boy, and that was the same. If you had, if you played the black and white versions, they were basically different games, which was really unusual. So I wonder if that's something, I mean, I assume it's something to do with that, but I have no idea. And R-Type was a game that was also originally in black and white.

Yeah, I think it was basically that they put those old black-and-white versions on the cartridge, but the kind of ones were just full remakes. Yep, that's a curious. one. It is a, yeah, it's a strange thing that I just happened to discover when I was playing, but, you know, the, the, both versions, I believe, have a very nice Game Boy, Super Game Boy border around them. So, you know, there is, there's an advantage to playing on TV, and there's actually a kind of a built-in color palette. So you get a sort of semi-colorized version if you play on Super Game Boy, even though it's not the full

Game Boy color version. So there's actually three, there's three ways to play this game. And That's not including, like, you know, 3DS virtual console or whatever. That's how I put it. But, yeah, it's... Still waiting for the Switch, Game Boy Virtual Console. I think we all are. Yeah. Yeah, I would love that.

You mean Nintendo Switch Online? Yes, yes. Yeah, I'm waiting for the Game Boy Classic, same size. It doesn't even have to be Mini. Just Game Boy Classic. Let's go. It'll be micro, like the Game Gear Micro. No.

Oh, no. You can actually inhale that thing. It's a stupid little device, but I really like them. If I were able to game be a micro and died, that would be the perfect way for me to die. This is just me screaming into the wind, but, you know, COVID has interrupted Nintendo's, you know, development. Just drop some ROMs into a bucket and then throw them online and let us play Wario Land on Switch. That's all I got to say. You know, they're going to do that, and it's just going to be like alleyway and tennis.

Yes. The Daily and Opis is available. Oh, yeah. You know, I would love to know what's up with Vic Tokai, because I would like, I would like to license clash at Demonhead from them to reissue for limited run games but no one knows anything

about Victor Kai like they still exist but I don't think they care about video games they only made video games for like three years They're a power company right?

Dydellian opens probably not happening Maybe if you just did it and see how they react might be okay they'd get Golgo 13 after us yeah you don't want that yeah so anyway a few more things about

Warrior Land too I think we've covered most of it but just kind of going back to the idea that there is a sort of narrative woven throughout the game. The way the alternate chapters interact with the main game, it's not just like you have a separate set of stages. You have to find those separate sets of stages, and they're linked to a specific goal in a specific stage.

So there's like five basically hidden exits throughout Wario Land to's main world, and you have to figure out exactly what those are. And, you know, they can be very unconventional, like sleeping, through your alarm, or they can be just more like go past the exit you find when you beat the boss and there's another exit. So now there's a secret behind that door. So it's just a matter of kind of narrowing down like which stages. You know, you can look at the map and say, okay, it's going to be this stage. It's going to have a connection to something, but you have to figure it out. The one I like the most is instead of dropping the anchor in the boat, you sink the boat and then

you have a bunch of underwater stages to explore. Yep. And that's the really great thing about the alternate stages is that they really are just like alternate reality what if versions of the main stages so the first chapter of the game is called one noisy morning where wario wakes up in his castle uh you know the alarm clock is going off it's been looted and he smashes his way through and starts to take his journey to captain syrup's castle because she is the uh kind of the minor villain from super mario land three who's decided to steal all of warri land or wario's stuff so the alternate version of that is that you sleep through the alarm, and that gives Captain Syrup's gang time to basically take over your castle. So then the chapter becomes invade Wario Castle. So you're invading

your own home. The second chapter is called SST Cup, and it's basically a journey to get to a boat and then to take the boat and then anchor the boat. But you can also find an alternate exit in the first chapter, and then your alternate second chapter is called Go to the Cellar. And so you're basically down beneath the base of the um foundations of wario castle uh the third chapter is called maize woods which is pretty much what it sounds like you're out in the woods uh but the alternate version of that of chapter three is like bob mentioned instead of anchoring the boat and stopping it you sink it and so uh you and captains sir up and her entire gang end up and basically like sunk in ruins beneath the the ocean or the lake or whatever and so you actually complete

the game early by going through here. Like you end up having a showdown with Captain Surrup down in the ruins. The chapter four is called in town and it's basically a bunch of cityscapes, buildings and that sort of thing. The alternate version

that comes out of that is called Mysterious Factory where you end up kind of going off into a factory at the outskirts of town and fighting Serap's gang there. Or the normal Chapter 5 is Surrup Castle where you invade it's Captain Surrup's home, or the second alternate version of that is called Uncanny Mansion,

where you end up in a haunted mansion and have to fight Surrup among the ghosts. So it's just like a bunch of, you know, what if the outcome of this part of Wario's Quest? What if he had chosen to take a different approach to stopping Captain Surrup and pursuing her? So the main story is kind of like the long way around. And then all of these others are basically like, what if you, you know, did it wrong and you had an ending and had to fight Captain Surrup someplace else. So if someone mapped this all out like the Zelda timeline? Yeah, I don't know which one is the true timeline in the in the Wario Land 2 story.

Well, it all ends up in the true final stage. So I think all of these are correct. So somehow Wario does all of these things. It's all canon at the same time. We need the Wario Historia and then the next game could be a prequel. Yeah, exactly. Where's that book? I want that at my coffee table.

So the one thing we haven't talked about, and this is a good way to lead into WarioLand 3, because so much of this carries over into WarioLand 3, is what it means for Wario not to be able to die. Like we mentioned, he can't be defeated, he can't be killed, he can just be inconvenienced. when you are damaged by an enemy, don't lose health, you're just kind of flung backward and you drop coins, which as Stuart mentioned, is very important because Wario is all about the money and this entire game is about him trying to reclaim his wealth. So, you know, basically anytime you take damage, you lose like 10 coins. And so that kind of sets you back a little bit from your goal. And if you take too much damage, you won't be able to pay for the mini-games

and, you know, your ending will be less impressive. So you want to gather up as much money as you can. So there's still an incentive not to take damage. But depending on the enemy that hits you or, you know, the hazard that strikes you, you have all kinds of potential weird status effects for Wario, who is normally just like a big guy who smashes into stuff and jumps. But his alternate versions include, oh, was someone going to say something? No, I was just going to add, one thing I love about the transformations is I think they all have their own theme, music theme.

It makes you feel even more cartoon-like. When you get squashed, you get the sort of I've been squashed now music or that I'm massively fat now music or et cetera. I just think that's something that adds a lot of characters to the game. Yeah, so Wario has, what is this? One, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine, ten, eleven, nearly a dozen different status effects. I guess if you count normal Wario, that's 12 different conventional. for Wario to be in. Many of these are temporary, but some of them are temporary only in the sense that you have to find some way to reverse the condition. It doesn't just go away.

A few of them do go away on their own. But like bouncy Wario, when something hits him and compresses him, he turns into a spring and then jumps around helplessly, which is good in that you can reach places you couldn't necessarily go before. But it's bad if you are trying not to jump from beneath a permeable platform that you can only go one way through. So this is how a lot of bosses get you. A lot of bosses will turn you into bouncy Wario and you'll just spring right out of the layer

and have to start over again. Bubble Wario is when you're underwater, get trapped in a bubble. It allows you to move through jet streams somehow. I'm not really quite sure how that works. But you know, you're floating and you can get through barriers underwater that you normally couldn't.

there's crazy Wario but we all know he's drunk Wario and you know what? In the Japanese version Blue Penguins throw beer at you and that is a better game. Yep. Here I think they throw bowling balls at you

and it like hit you on the head and turns you woozy but yeah in the Japanese version like they are just getting you just toasted. They don't even go that far. They just call them orbs. You just are hit with crazy orbs. Ah yes, crazy orbs.

Yeah. So that's kind of almost. worse. It is. It's more menacing. Yeah. So unfortunately, Nintendo of America was like, children can't see a bad guy who drinks alcohol.

That would be wrong. So this bad guy doesn't, he just says no to alcohol. Maybe he's under 21. Anyway, so crazy Mario is probably the least useful status effect because he just staggers around and it's really difficult to control. Is there anything good that comes out of being crazy drunk war? No, you can't do anything special. you just have to jump into water to cure yourself

and then try it again. There's no... You can sober yourself up? Yes. Maybe it temporarily silences the voices. Maybe I don't know. There's Fat Wario, maybe not politically correct, but extremely useful, actually. Fat Wario can't jump very well. He moves very, very slowly, but basically he is a large ball of destruction,

ball-ish destruction thing. He can break through blocks by jumping on them. he wouldn't normally be able to butt-stop. Any enemy that touches him just goes flying off the screen instead of just being stunned. So actually pretty handy. And eventually that one will go away. You know, you just need to do a little calisthenics where it works out enough and he'll slim back down to his normal svelt self.

Fire Wario is another temporary one where if something set you on fire, Wario is like literally just runs back and forth pretty much out of control. He'll turn around if he hits an obstacle. and you know hits a wall or something he'll turn in the other direction and run but otherwise you just have to wait for him to flame out and he turns into ash and laughs he thinks it's hilarious and then he reverts to normal like a phoenix yeah a very different concept from what you would call fire Mario it's almost like the magazine parody of what fire Mario sounds like oh I wanted to

go back to drunk warrior really quick because in that in that transformation you can burp, but it doesn't do anything and it doesn't transform you back quicker, at least for my experimentation. So you have a burping ability if you hit the B button. There's flat Wario, which is kind of like the springy Mario, but instead of bouncing, he is just like a piece of paper and he can't jump very high, but the great thing about Flat Wario is that when you jump off a ledge or something, you'll drift downward, kind of rocking back and forth in the breeze, like a piece of paper.

and this allows you to get places that you normally couldn't reach. It's also possible to get into areas that are too narrow like vertically, vertical spaces. So this can be very useful. It's kind of hard to control the floating effect. So there are some kind of frustrating stages toward the latter

portion of the game in Surrup Castle where you're trying to get through a little crack on the opposite side of the screen and you just have to float just right and it's a little challenging. They made this a lot easier in the next game. They really fine-tune the controls. It's still hard, but it's not as tricky as it

is in this one. All right. There's float Wario, floating Wario, who basically he's allergic to be-stings, and it causes him to swell up like a balloon. So it's kind of like Mario with the P-balloon, but basically, you know, your histamines

are going crazy. There's Ice Wario. Whenever you're frozen, instead of shattering or something, Wario basically turns into an ice statue that slides at high speeds across the floor, which is great because it can smash stuff, like barriers that wouldn't normally be permeable can be broken that way. So that's, that's handy. Small

Mario is kind of a throwback to the original Wario land where like the very, the very old games where you could turn into a tiny Mario, kind of like tiny Mario, and you don't have a hat and it's just horrible looking. So this is basically that. There's zombie mario, sorry, not Mario. zombie is I don't know It might actually be the most annoying status effect Because it's so hard to avoid But at the same time

It is kind of fun to be a zombie Just the goofiness of it That's where you have to go into the light To change back, right? Right, yes, light turns you back or water But you basically are helpless Like you can't jump at all You can only shuffle slowly

But it is handy because normally, you know, thin platforms, you can only jump up from below. You can't jump down like, you know, contra style. You can't do that. But zombie Wario, I guess because he's so, he has so little cohesion, he just drips through those platforms. And so you can get into places you could normally when you are a zombie. And then finally, there is Ball Wario, which is that damn rabbit. Does anyone like the rabbit battles?

Because I really hate them. Again, safe states. Do not be afraid to use them. And I agree with Stewart in that the design of this game, the only thing that makes the design of this game worse is the fact that it means that in boss fights, you usually can get hit once and that's it.

There's no other way around it because of the way to the design of the game works. So that is the one thing about this game that can be frustrating. And I think the Captain Syrup fight in this game is really hard to do. I was getting annoyed even with SafeState. So I don't know if I would have seen the other half of this game

if I had played it originally on the hardware. I don't think the bosses of the strength of this game personally. I think they highlight the more annoying elements quite. They put a spotlight on them, you know. But I don't hate them or anything. They're not like terrible.

I just, they're not my favorite. The rabbit's one of the more frustrating ones because he doesn't just be you. He like makes fun of you. Yeah, he turns it back on Wariya, I suppose. Well, so the thing with the rabbit that I keep referencing is each game has a rabbit boss. The first one is called Dung.

and the second one is named shoot. But basically you have to compete with them in a sports match. In the first game, in Wario 2, it's a basketball match like street basketball. And the thing about it is that you don't have a ball. The goal of the boss battle is to turn your enemy into a ball and then slam dunk that ball into the basket. So the thing is, you're trying to jump on the boss, which will turn it into a ball,

then rapidly pick it up because it starts to bounce away from you as soon as you turn it into a ball. So you have to grab it, then, you know, make a good shot and throw it into the basket. And you have to do that three times. But the entire time, the rabbit's also trying to jump on you. And it's much harder to get away from the rabbit when you're a ball than it is for the rabbit to get away from you when it's a ball. So it's just, it's very frustrating. And yes, it's not just that you lose. It's that you are abjectly humiliated.

Like, it is just the most demeaning way to lose. Like, you literally get dunked on. Like, this is where the phrase come from. And then the worst thing is the follow-up battle in three is harder for me. When you've got to score in a sort of soccer, let's say soccer, the football goal, but there's an actual goalkeeper. It's really difficult. Yeah, the goalkeeper is like, he doesn't really care to defend against the rabbit,

but he is very good at defending against you. you have to like stun the goalkeeper and the ball like the rabbit ball and yeah it's with the dunk battle correct me I might be misremembering this but is it the fact that you need to get three points and he can just throw you out of the arena or am I imagining that yeah that's right yeah so if you fail once he'll throw you but out and you've got to start over but you've got to get him three times as I recall it's quite because he's quite big it's quite easy to bounce off him and get trapped under him as well when you're trying to jump on that's right yeah yeah yeah yeah

Good stuff. Good times. Lasty Labs. It's a show hosted by me, Kinsey Burke, and my dumb-ass friend, Mark. Nasty Labs. This twice-monthly show about game development, Japan life, being nice to people, and hey, maybe a few other things. Nasty Labs is a product of Chewai Labs brand incorporated, and now available for three easy payments of 4269, only on the Greenlit Podcast Network. Hi, I'm Steve. And I'm JP. And we host. a little podcast called

Whatever Nerd A biweekly nerd culture podcast where we talk about subjects such as games comics, movies voice acting and did I mention games

you did join us every other Tuesday at whatevernerd.com or wherever you get your podcasts this is Snake Hey Snake it's Sam Who are you? Sam from the brand new

PlayStation podcast Polygon symphonies. Is that so? Yeah, it's a podcast that's exploring the PlayStation library. Impossible. Well, not really. Each week, we take a game, play it, and then we rank it, and our grand list of games. Is that right? Yeah, it's available on iTunes, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts.

I didn't mean to sound sarcastic. That's okay. Just check out Polygon Synphonies, the PlayStation podcast from the Greenlit Network. All right. So we've talked about Wyrland 2. And next up, they actually just gave it a normal number. They didn't do anything like Virtual Boy to Warioland 2 or something. It's just WarioLand 3. But it's an Arabic number, not a Roman number, so not as classy.

I've been very careful. I've been very careful to get that distinction correct in my calls for mail and everything. Thank you. Wario Land 2, Roman numeral. Warioland 3, Arabic numeral. It's like him holding up three fingers that make like a W, right? Yeah. W., it's very clever.

It's very clever. Yes. They did a good job with everything about this game, which I've come to appreciate now that I've played more. more of it more recently as a fully formed adult, as opposed to in the pupil adult stage that I tried to be in before. This was our 2000 release in all territories was just a Game Boy Color game, not Game Boy Color with backward compatibility for Game Boy Classic as just a clear game boy color cartridge. And as such, actually takes advantage of, you know, the unique

features of the Game Boy Color, which Wariland 2 did not. It just was a Game Boy game that had some, you know, a color palette, basically. Whereas this is, you know, there's more to it. And it's more, it has more elaborate animations and cutscenes. There's still not a lot of explicit story. But as with Waryland 2, there is definitely a sort of plot to follow through. And the game world changes and evolves even more than in Waryland 2. So this is kind of the grand unifying theory of all of

R&D2's portable games, I would say. It really, it brings together the elements of both Wario and Metroid. And I had really not appreciated that the way that I should have until going back and playing and realizing that, yes, your goal in this game is to collect five treasures, like five musical boxes because you're trapped inside a musical box and you have to basically gather all these so you can be free. But the process of actually getting those things involves a lot of exploration and collection and clearing gates. So there are 50 treasures in this game. Oh, no, sorry, a hundred treasures, I believe. Whereas there were only 50 in Wario Land 2. Now,

there are only 25 stages. This does not have the sort of secret like, hey, by the way, here's a bunch of extra levels. Instead, each of the levels is much bigger and each of them has more stuff hidden inside. And the challenge of the game is to, you know, kind of keep track of where all this stuff is that you can't get your first time through the stage and say, oh, well, you know, I've gotten this new power. So now I can go back and collect that other thing. And then that will, you know, eventually help me find another power that will help me access later things. It's very, very Metroidvania. Yeah, down to the, yeah, it's definitely warrior at his samisiest.

You can't even turn into a little ball and roll down hills. I was going to say the exact same thing, right? Because when you start this game, you can basically do nothing compared to where you began in Waria Land too. You can't do the butt stop. You can't pick up and throw people.

You can't do your up and a higher jump. All of those abilities you eventually unlock. And one of the coolest things about this game is there are all these treasures. But when you get them, you're not sure what they will do. Will they open up a new stage? Will they add an element to an existing stage? Will they give you a new power?

There's so many things they can do for you. And so it's always exciting to see. see what the treasure will bring you. What kind of new content it will open? Yeah. I like how the sort of eminent sort of try and error-ish elements is removed completely because not only does it show you which stages have changed, you can directly go to the mysterious figure at the beginning of the map and ask him where to go next

if you do get lost, which I did appreciate. But that's help. Yeah. So again, this is, you know, only half as many stages as Warri Land 2, but all the stages, again, are bigger and more complex. And I think that's kind of what turned me off of this game against this game back in the day because, you know, this was very much kind of following a lot of the design standards of that era where, you know, starting with Mario 64 especially, you would have a single stage,

but there would be multiple goals within that stage. And it just seemed like every game was doing that. And this just felt kind of like big, like a big sprawling exploratory collectathon. And I was really, really getting burned out on collectathons, you know, Banjo Cazui and Spyro the Dragon and so on and so forth. Just so many games of this era had that kind of structure. And I think at the time, I just could not deal with that again. But, you know, now that we are 20 years removed from that, going back in, I find it much more interesting. I think it also helps that I'm not playing on Game Boy Color hardware so I can actually see what I'm doing.

I was playing this on a, you know, an iPS-moded Game Boy Advance, so it was a much more comfortable experience and much less of about like, I think I see something there, but, you know, I need to turn the lamp a little more so I can see what's on the screen. You know, just a better play experience in general. But this is definitely a game whose rating has shot up highly in my esteem since I've gone back to revisit it. And I would, looking forward to playing more of it. You really, I mean, I hardly recommend it. Would you still consider it a collect-a-thon? Because I feel like this game is even more reductive in positive ways than Warioland 2. There are no coins on the screen except for the A-Coines in every level.

And in every level, all you are looking for is four keys and four chess. And unlike in Waryland 2, all the treasures that you find, they actually do something. Yeah, I definitely am willing to say that I was wrong in category that way. It was just, you know, it just seemed like every game was doing this like, keep going back in, keep finding stuff and I really, really was burned out on it at the time, you know, but I've stepped away and haven't really played a lot of games like that in a long time. So being able to take it in isolation like that, I'm, I can appreciate the fact that, yes, everything here has purpose, even if it's just a key, like everything you collect, you know, there's only like maybe 10

items that it's just like, if you look at the wiki, it just says, this doesn't do anything. But those are kind of toward the end of the game when you've basically opened up everything, gotten all your powers. And at that point, it's really just like, hey, go back and find the last few things to complete the map and get all the secrets, which, you know, that's not great. But it does a better job of it than, say, Metroid Prime. I love the sense of mystery that this game has, as Bob mentions, the fact that you know that every treasure is going to do something, I think, learns it a lot because even when it's one of the crayons that just gradually colors in the interstitial screen you run through between one of the maps, and you're like, what's the

deal with that? Like, what's that going to be? Because it's building to something. And you don't find that out for like hours and hours and hours. But I do enjoy the mystery of it. It's a lot of fun. I think it's kind of a Metroidvania. But it feels, when I went back to it, it felt quite linear. And there really was only one or two things you can really do at a time. But I suppose that's true of most Metroidvanians anyway. Well, I think it's hard for me to say exactly because I didn't get to play as much of this to revisit it as I wanted to, but the impression I get is that the further you go into the game, the more kind of opens up for you. You know, once you start collecting all these different powers and you can suddenly, you know,

swim through water instead of just floating at the top, and you can smash through bricks, and you can jump and punch bricks and so on and so forth, like a lot of the gating and the barriers you experience early in the game no longer really are. factors. So, you know, at that point, it's really just down to what unlocks for you. And I think the game, if I'm remembering right, it's pretty good about kind of opening up a few different pathways for you. So it's not just like, this is the one level you have to go to. It's more like this is the optimal level, but you can still go around and explore and you might be able to find a key or something in this other space. I think that was just being rubbish and asking the guy every

single time where I should go next. Or if you can't get. And that's a valid approach. Yeah. And if you can't get more treasures in a level with your new abilities, you can go in and maybe get a few of the musical coins. There's eight in every stage. You can just leave and that'll stay in your inventory or whatever for the rest of the game. I thought you had to get them all at once. Yeah, I think you have to get all eight at a single go. I assume if you leave through an exit, you can actually retain them.

You can't just leave the stage to the pause screen. You have to actually leave through a door where the treasure chest used to be or actually get a treasure chest in the level. I really, I love the music coins because they are like 100% completely optional. They're just an extra challenge and they're really challenging. They're really hard to get. Some of them are really surprisingly like cerebral and I really appreciate that. Most sort of Mario games, not that this is a Mario game, but you get me.

Most of these kind of games really don't get to that level of difficulty ever. So it's nice to find something in a game that's like an official Nintendo thing that's that tricky. yeah it's one of those uh one of the many differentiators between wario and mario games is that uh yeah it's a bit more of a yeah like you said cerebral challenge sometimes I do appreciate the fact that the coins are optional, like you said. I mean, there is a collect-a-thon element to those. And the funny thing is that the reward for it is so crappy. It's that golf mini-game.

It's fine, but that's like the reward. You get more of it. And it already exists in the game in different stages. You play that to open up certain doors and stages. So it's already there. You just get more of it. So I guess if that's your thing, that's one of the things I feel they really refined with Wariolan 4, where you have so many different little mini-games that you can unlock.

Whereas here, it's just kind of like, oh, it's another mini-game. It's amusing a few times. But, yeah, as like the thing that you are constantly unlocking throughout the game, just feels a little underwhelming. But, you know, that's kind of my one big complaint. And I do appreciate, like you said, the fact that the coins, which were part of the turnoff for me back in the day, they are something you can pretty much just say, know, I don't feel like doing this.

But if you really want to apply Wario's abilities and penalties and status effects to their full extent, like this game really does take those elements and explore them to their full extent. And there are some new power-ups or power-downs if you want to call them that in this game. There's actually five, as far as I can tell. So the first is Electric Wario, which is one of the few useless ones. you're just stunned. It's basically like when you take a hit

except you are also like, you can see Wario's skeleton. Not that handy. Invisible Wario is really interesting because it's useful, but it's also really, really frustrating to use because you can't,

like he's invisible. And it's not just, it's not just invisible to bad guys. It's invisible to you also. Oh, is that the one where you've got those gates that have big eyeballs on them? Yeah.

And they shut when you, yeah, I thought that was it. That's basically, yeah, those are kind of like a key to get through those barrier doors. And Dr. Mad Seinstein is always there chucking invisibility potions. And I didn't realize it, but he's the same guy who shows up in Warioland 4. Yeah, I was going to say, he's the guy you abuse horribly. You throw him around, yeah.

One of the best parts of Waryland 4. I'm looking forward to that episode because it's such a great game, but elder abuse is a big part of it. There's also Snowball Wario, which is different from Ice Wario, because like you turn into a snowball and roll down hills, you know, like Bob said, the most Samus-like of Wario's adventures. You have very limited mobility, but you can just break

anything that is downhill from you. Another ball power, the ball of string wario, I don't know what it's called, but you get wrapped up into a ball of yarn and you bounce around the room smashing things. Is that one where the sort of spiders, the silkworm things get you in?

I believe so. Yes. And then finally, the most valuable of Wario's power-ups, vampire Wario, which is way cooler than zombie Mario because you actually turn into a vampire. You can turn into a bat and fly, basically as long as you avoid light, water, and garlic, which makes sense. It's all, you know, all Wario's, or all vampires' weaknesses. And, you know, I think the garlic thing is, is like a temptation. Like, Wario loves garlic. But he must, the thing that he loves will now destroy him when he is vampire, Wario. It's very poetic.

challenge. I played these games back to back and I did notice that in three they really doubled down on the amount of times you have to transform to do things because in two you're doing a lot of traditional platforming because you're finding a lot of coins in the level. Most of the secret rooms and you know fun pathways lead to extra coins

that you use in mini games. In this game you don't have those coins in the levels so they really just are transforming you to get you to the keys in the chest and that's it. There's not a lot of just regular running around as Mario. Yeah, they really leaned into the kind of puzzle box aspect of it, which I think really

enhances it a lot. So, yeah, I don't actually have that much more to say about Waryland 3 because basically all the stuff we said about Waryland 2 carries over. It's like that but more so. Oh, the one thing I want to add, it's in your notes, Jeremy, the day-night cycle. That

brushes up against being a little too much for this game, just having a little too much going on. But there is a day and night cycle later on in the game you get an item where you can switch from day to night whenever you want outside of the levels. And depending on whether it's day or night, there'll be different things in the levels. Certain enemies will be asleep.

Certain platforms will be there. Certain doors will be open. And, yeah, it's a very interesting twist. Like, one little extra twist of this game that doesn't need to be there, but it does make it more interesting. But, again, it does verge on being a little too complicated for what's happening here, if you consider how dense the game already is. Yeah, that threw me a little bit when I went to revisit it because I had forgotten

about the day-night cycle. So, you know, like the second or third stage you go to, I happen to go there at night. And it's just zombies and you can't do anything. And it's really frustrating because you just keep getting turned into a zombie. Because now the zombies like throw their heads at you and their heads boomering around and fly back at you. And I was like, what am I doing wrong? Why does this suck? And then I went out and then went back in and it was daytime.

And it was good again. And I realized, all right, day night cycle. Interesting. But yeah, like I guess it only has 25 stages, but it has two iterations of each stage. So in a way, is that not like 50 stages in our hearts? Sure. It's like the upside-down castle. It feels like an evolution to me from the, like, the second game, even though it has

all these branching paths, it's still essentially a linear stage-by-stage platformer. And this is just, you're in a world and you can influence the world, you can change the world. It's really interesting, I think. You go back and forth, like some of the hardest things to get are in some of the earliest levels. It's really clever design, I think. You know, I like both approaches, and I really wish they had made more Wario games to let us explore that.

Those different styles, but alas, we just have these games. It's why I didn't like four when I first played it, but then when I replayed it for the podcast almost a decade ago, I did get into it. But I did, I was put off by the idea that, oh, now we're back to having a life meter and, you know, not transformations. And there's a whole different idea going on. But I can respect that game for what it does. I hope next time we talk about these games, I will like the Wii one because I, still don't like it and I haven't played it for a while. Yeah,

I'm going to have to revisit that one. But we've got Ray here. He's just going to stump for it, I assume. Oh yeah, I still like shake it. Okay, good. That game disrupted one-ups front page with its very disruptive ad, which a lot of sites were doing, but I remember the front page is being shaken up.

Times. Advertisements. The shake dimension. Yes. And now we'll tackle those in a few months, I think. But for now, that's pretty much all we have to say about Waryland 2 and 3. But I did open up the floor to a mailbag. And it looks like we have like six letters. So if you guys pull open the notes for this episode, we can do a little round-drop

and it turns reading letters. But I'll start with thoughts from James Doherty. Doherty, Docherty, I guess. Wyrilland 3 will always have a special place in my game collection because it was the first game that got me to fall in love with Nintendo's game design. Coming out in that vibrant period, post-Supero Mario 64, it applies a vibrant 3-level layout to an otherwise 2-D game, as well as reusing sprites and animations for his previous games, the team behind 3 also managed to reuse Wireland 3's levels for multiple objectives

that never feel like they're retreading old ground. many people consider it a shame that Nintendo R&D1 never followed up Super Metroid in the N64 era but I like to believe that much of that talent trickled down into Wario and it's at its most apparent in three which mashes together that game's lock-in key structure with Mario style levels and powers Wireland 4 is such a departure from this game

but I feel both that and three were necessary for R&D1 to figure out how to approach Fusion and Zero Mission the best games in that franchise there really is nothing like fighting words well I mean he's right but here's to a hot take there really is nothing like Wyrilland 3 though my hope is there are designers out there

who might have played the game when I did who will take some of its non-linear elements and world changing effects and apply them to their own creations well now I'm intrigued James Dockney what have you created what what have you applied to your Mario's methods to I want to know more about this

you should write to us tell us more he's totally right about this and we talked about it but yeah if you enjoy Metroid games not sure if you'll enjoy Mario games games, Wireland 3 is kind of a Metroid game. And there is an indie game coming out called Pizza Tower that is a Wario-like. So I'm interested to see if that will

be as interesting as Warioland 2 and 3. All right. So I want to jump in and read the letter from Joseph Kumpo. Waryland 2. I got this game when I was 8 shortly after it came out on Game Boy. I liked it so much I wound up buying the color version as the one game I could get at the Game Boy Color launch.

I'm not sure about that decision. Sorry, that's not part of the letter. It was a quantum leap over any other Game Boy platformer to me. on part with the better game go ones like Sonic Triple Trouble. The multiple parts added a ton of... I'm sorry, but WarioLand 2 is as good as Sonic Triple Trouble. And just... The multiple paths added a ton of replay value.

The lack of lives was 20 years ahead of its time. Wario Land 2 was the beginning of what made the Wario Land series great, but there was certainly room for improvement. Wario Land 3, maybe the greatest 8-bit game ever made, to me at least. It took everything that made Wario Land 2 great and drastically improved it while shoring up its weaknesses. What a great Metroidvania. Sonic Triple Trouble Comments

Beyond the pale to me, to be honest. I can't. Well, you're always going to invite Trouble if you're going to make any sort of comment Comparison to Sonic and Nintendo game. But yeah, that is the best Sonic game on game. I just never ever heard anyone say that. That I love it.

It's an insane thing to say, but it is also the best Game Gear Sonic games. I get what he's saying. We welcome Insanity. I could take this next one by David. I'll read a few paragraphs out of this one. Wireland 2 holds a very special place as my favorite game. from one of my absolute favorite series,

the first game in the series fascinated me the few times I'd had a chance to play in my cousin's copy, so I was inclined to be interested in the sequel. Nintendo Power articles at the time pushed the game's unusual design focusing on Wario's invincibility and how that affected the nature

of challenges and stage design. Even at 10 years old, I could tell there was something important about this game and I knew that I needed to play it. And he says, I really missed the genuine surprise and mystery that games could conceal at the time, but I won't pretend that the access

to information we have today isn't incredible. I'll just consider myself lucky to have such exciting and memorable experiences with games as I grew up. I'm sure they did a lot to cement my love of the medium. And, yeah, I totally agree with David that I do miss the mystery. I do like not knowing that you're getting another half of a game after you finish it. But unfortunately, all of that is covered to death because they want to make sure you know exactly what you're buying when you pre-order now. So, yeah, I do miss the days of mystery.

We just can't know if Luigi's in a game. No, you're not allowed to publish that. Mr. L., who could it be? I'm sad to you skip the part about drinking a whippersnapple. Oh, what is a whippersnapple? I've never heard of that. Boy, I hope that's non-alcoholic because he was drinking them at his grandma's house. I'm guessing it's a snapple that's been whipped in some way.

I see. So like a fray? A milkshake version of a slap slaple maybe. Write a second letter explaining this drink. All right. Ray, you want to tackle this next one? All right. Ray the Temple Green writes,

I've been thinking about what's unique to Wario land that people miss. Is it really just a no-death mechanic? At best, it encourages skillful play to save coins, but at worst, the bosses waste the player's most precious resource. Real-world time. Kirby's abilities have some similarities to Wario's power-ups, but with less of a puzzle-solving bent. Lastly, Warrior Ware largely inherited the anarchic humor,

but lacks the intangible surrealism, lent by the context of a platforming world. The strange treasures, the distinctly un-Mario-enemy designs, and Warrior-Land-4's phenomenal sound room, all enrich the exploration to be had. It may likely to happen while new Super Mario Brothers prints money, but I hope that one day we will have another Wario puzzle platformer that allows us developers to dig so deeply from their imaginations.

Okay, I can solve a mystery for all of us here. Off topic, Whippersnapple is a smoothie drink made by the Snapple Company in the late 80s early aughts. So it was like a frappishel. My only issue with that letter is that I don't know if real world time is my most precious resource. So I don't know if I value it that much at all. Well, you know, let's talk again after the pandemic has settled down.

I was playing the Wayne's World Game Boy game for like an hour the other day. I just don't have any left, you know. Were you doing it by choice or? Well, I was going to do a video about it. Then I didn't do the video. So I just wasted an hour. Well, you know, if you had made a video about it, you would have wasted several hours. There you go.

Sometimes you just have to cut your losses. It wouldn't have been either party time or excellent. All right. One more. Actually, there's two more. One from Anders Moberg. I know that guy. You know that guy? Yeah. I'm a pal. Great. Oh, cool. I think it's quite wonderful that all the games in the Warioland franchise have a different flavor. Not only in relationship to other Nintendo games, but between each title. Warrioland 2 and 3 are similarly playing, perhaps, but otherwise they're quite different on a higher level. You can decide to like any one of the Warioland games for whatever reason you like.

Whenever any Mario-related media deviates from the norms of creatures like Bowser, Gumbas, and Kupas, it's quite exciting to me. It gives the universe a larger scale and invites you to, at the very least, let the idea of connection between it all bounce around your head. It doesn't give it any enormous storytelling depth, but it feels more inviting for fun, creative thought. Despite what the game creators and people at Nintendo Legal might actually intend. And finally, someone can jump in and read this, well, condense this letter from Costa. So Costa says, Warrior Land 3 took an almost Metroidvania-ish approach to its level layouts,

huge open levels with four goals each, and you need to come back to them once you've unlocked certain conditions. It was actually really jarring, going from two to three directly as I did to find I can no longer break certain blocks because I needed to find an item first. Well, once I got over that,

I ended up enjoying it nonetheless. While I know that Nintendo fans have nothing but praise for these games, I have to admit, I still think I prefer Wireland OG to Wireland 4 and more. Sure, they're all platformers, they're still bad east of shoulder smash into and coins to get, but by losing the ability to get hurt to lose lives. These games had to figure out different measures to punish the players.

Neither games do it well, in my opinion. The major punishment for making mistakes in both these games is lost time. Warioland 2 is a bit better about it since the levels are fairly short and linear, but to get secrets in their levels, you need the coins you found in the level. If you get hurt and lose your coins to the point of not being able to spend them, well, you're going to have to redo the level. Wireland 3 decides this wasn't enough and that you will redo the level repeatedly until you succeed. Make one tiny mistake trying to get towards one of the goals and you are forcibly tossed back to the beginning of a challenge, wasting a huge chunk of time.

It wouldn't be so bad, but the large sprites make it very easy to touch enemies or traps that could cause you to make that mistake very easily. And this is Bob saying once again, probably for the fourth time in this podcast, do not be afraid to use, but not abuse safe states. It's completely legal and you cannot be arrested in America for doing it.

If I would do it. Wario would do it. I'm sorry, Stuart. What did you say? I have campaign for that to become illegal. Oh, only in the UK. Yes. Yeah, in the UK.

All right. All right. Well, that's, I think, enough said about Wari Land 2 and 3, two excellent games with, you know, some flaws, some elements that may not be to everyone's tastes. but ambitious, daring, creative, innovative, really just fantastic games, Nintendo, at its most creative in a lot of ways, just, you know, exploring what it means to take a platformer and not be, you know, a normal platformer.

What does it mean to change the rules, change the mechanics and the systems and the expectations surrounding an entire genre? And on the whole, I think they succeeded and I think they came up with some really interesting answers. And the good thing is, is that both of these games are available for play on 3DS virtual console.

Is that it? Is that the only way to play these? That's it. We did not have a Game Boy color or Game Boy virtual console, right? Just DS. And advance. Yeah. Oh, in advance, right.

But these are pre-advance. So they are not worthy of being enshrined on modern systems. But 3DS is still around. In fact, I saw a 3DS game went up for sale on the e-shop a few weeks ago. So people are still publishing stuff for it So the virtual console is still available Check out these games Or get their original cartridges

Which are still pretty affordable And there are lots of ways to play Actual cartridges these days Or do something like a mister Like Ray Just however you choose to play these games They hold up really well I think And they require little patience in places

But the nice thing about these games Is that you're not being forced At gunpoint to play them You can play them on your own time, on your own schedule, take a break if you need to, just soak it in, enjoy it, you know, make the most of these games because God knows we're probably not seeing anything like them again for a long time.

So, yeah, that's Warrior Land 2 and 3. All right. Any final thoughts, anyone, or should we go on to our finale? I want to note one thing that wasn't mentioned this whole time. The sprite of Wario in Wario Land 2 and 3 is awesome. He looks so big. And I just want to say I really rate that. I think he looks really fun.

He's got like big, muscular arms, but he's also enormously fat. And he's more jiggly in three. Yeah, he's just a cool looking guy. Sure. I kind of like his walk cycle. It kind of has like a waterwheel sort of look to it. Yeah. All right.

So that was episode 371, I think, of Retronauts. You listened to it. We said it. We're done. And now to wrap things up, I will tell you that if you enjoyed this episode and want to hear other episodes of Retronauts, including other discussions of Wario games. Sometimes we talk about Mario. You can go to Retronauts.com.

You can go to the Greenlit Podcast Network. You can go to pretty much any podcast-type thing you want, except Spotify. We don't do that. And even better, if you really liked it and you want to listen to episodes before the public release, you can listen to them a week in advance with higher bitrate quality, good audio quality and no advertisements or cross-promotions by going to patreon.com slash retronauts. Not only that, if you go from the $3 level to the $5 level, you'll get two bonus episodes

or just like patron exclusive episodes each month. You'll get weekly columns and mini podcasts by Diamond Fight, opportunities for surveys. There are some higher Patreon tiers where you can request episode topics. So you can say, talk about something that's not Wario, and we'll do it. And, yeah, that's it. That's our pitch. So thanks again for listening. Stuart, want to pitch yourself?

Oh, yeah. Hi. You can follow me on Twitter at Stupacabra, but I honestly wouldn't recommend it because I do talk a lot of shite on there. I do a podcast with my dear friend Luke Fletcher, also on the Greenlight podcast network called Annie Mani chat. And I've got to apologize to you, Bob,

because we basically copied Talking Simpsons except with Animaniacs. It's okay. We're ripping off other people, so it's fine. It's a big circle of plagiarism. I really hate the Animaniacs, whereas Luke really likes it. So we got a nice kind of back and forth going and also sapping my will to live gradually because we have 80 episodes left to do. Plus, they've just renewed it for a third season of the reboot.

So, you know, that's my life. Yeah, season two hasn't even aired yet. Yeah. All right, Ray. Okay, thank you. I'm on Twitter as RDBAA. I made a game called Blast Rush. It's out now on PC and mobile.

You can just go to blastrush.com. I do another podcast, also on Greenlit, called No More Whoppers, with my friend and co-host Alex, who was also recording Retronauts, I think, last week. And we were both kicking each other for forgetting to plug the show. So I'm doing it right now. Okay. It did surprise me, but I thought maybe he was being circumspect. He just forgot.

It's because, you know, when you only do one show, so it's like you don't need to plug your own show on the show. so that's why. And I feel like partly that's why we're on here is because we're also on greenlit. So you can check that out. No more Whoppers. It's also on all your pod services or just no morewoppers. Tumblr.com. Thank you very much. Bob. Hey, everybody. It's Bob Mackey. I'm on Twitter. It's Bob Servo. My other podcasts are Talking Simpsons, the Chronological Exploration of the Simpsons. And what a cartoon. We look at a different cartoon of a different series every week. Find those wherever you find podcasts or go to patreon.com slash Talking Simpsons. And if you go there, we got a lot of things behind the paywall. You get early episodes, of course, but also all of our mini-series. And I believe by the time this launches, we will about to be, we will either have started Talking of the Hill season two, part one, or it's about to start. So either way, it'll be there, or it's coming very soon.

That's our next miniseries for 2021. There'll be another one in fall. Again, that is patreon.com slash Talking Simpsons. And finally, you can find me, Jeremy Parrish, on Twitter as GameSpite. and basically trying to achieve some limited form of immortality by writing as many places as I can, limited-run games where I work at my day job, doing stuff here at Retronauts,

my video series on YouTube, NES works, and at the moment, I'm kind of focusing on SegaGiden, where I'm going back through the history of the Sega SG-1000 system that you probably haven't played and probably don't care about, but it's kind of interesting to look at anyways.

So history, video game history, that's what I'm talking about here. Anyway, that's it. That's kind of the Retronauts thing, video game history. So join us again next week for more video game history, and be sure to check us out and listen to the other episodes, especially the ones we've said about Wario. All right. Thanks, everyone. I'm going to be able to be a bit of a bit of a bit of a bit of a bit.