Virtual Boy Wario Land

The Good
It’s absolutely no secret that the Virtual Boy had a shallow library. Only 14 games were ever released in North America during its brief lifespan, and of those, many felt like tech demos. However, despite its meagre number of titles, there was a lot of variety on display. The cumbersomely named Virtual Boy Wario Land, the unnumbered sequel to Wario Land: Super Mario Land 3, is actually the console’s only true platformer. Luckily, it’s a damned good one and easily makes up for the absence of others.

The game’s story begins with Wario taking a snooze while on vacation in the Awazon River basin. After he’s rudely woken up, he spies a group of treasure toting, masked creatures entering a cave. He follows them and finds them at the door of a colossal vault. He dispatches them, but before he can grab the treasure, it disperses itself and he falls deep into the cavern. The opening cutscene is actually quite eye-catching, showing Wario sleeping in a jungle with a waterfall in the background. It’s extremely well animated and told effectively without using speech or text boxes. It has so much personality, then it goes seamlessly into gameplay. Spectacular!

The game itself is a 2D platformer. As with the previous Wario Land game, you play as Wario, whose main goal is to collect as much treasure and coins as possible and make it out alive. Each level has a secret treasure to find, and a key which unlocks the exit. The keys are necessary to advance, but the treasures and the money are more or a less a scoring system that dictates what ending you get. It’s quite different than a standard Mario game, as the focus is less on precision platforming than it is with exploration. It’s an extremely satisfying game to play, and finding the secret treasure in each level is a fun little added challenge.

What astounds me is how tight this game is. The controls, the sound, the graphics, and the design are all polished to a bright gloss. The three hats from Wario Land: Super Mario Land 3 make a return, but now the fire-breathing hat and the flight hat can be combined to allow all three powers at once. After you’ve gotten this ultimate hat, all other power-ups become intangible until you lose it, which is a good way to prevent you from accidentally picking up a worse power-up and allows you to go back and pick up leftovers. It’s also interesting to note that enemies don’t respawn and power-ups remain where you left them until you leave the level. It’s a small but worthwhile tweak to the design that makes the exploration far more satisfying.

The graphics and effects are very impressive throughout the entire game. The sprites are large, detailed, and beautifully animated, and the locales are varied and put together well to take advantage of the added 3D. Everything takes place on a 2D plane, but certain areas allow you to jump into another plane in the background. Bosses in particular make good use of the two planes, and each employs a different use of the 3D. My favourite boss was one that lobs explosives into the foreground, it’s quite striking. Because of the game’s 2D platforming nature, it’s hard to claim that the 3D is a required feature, but it’s still quite well done, and I feel the game would be poorer without it.

I think what I found most impressive about the game is the sound. Immediately after the opening cutscene you find yourself in a quiet cave, where the only sound is that of swinging pendulums that get louder as they approach the screen, and quieter as they get further away. Moving into the background layer makes your sounds a lot quieter, as if being heard from a great distance. The sounds enemies and obstacles make are played from the channel relative to their position on screen. These sound effects really pop on the Virtual Boy’s speakers, which are a simple stereo setup, but when you’ve got your face up to it, they sound about as good as headphones, almost as if they’re surrounding you.

The Bad
Virtual Boy Wario Land is an extremely solid game, and it’s difficult to poke holes in it. The biggest complaint I came away with was its brevity. The game can comfortably be completed in about 2-4 hours, with all treasures, and a high enough score to receive the best ending. This puts it well behind the first title. However, this complaint is somewhat less effective when you consider that 100% completion is rewarded with a more difficult second quest. It’s also less of a factor when you take into account that the console itself is prone to cause discomfort. Chances are, a typical gamer will need more than one sitting to complete it.

The first quest in VB Wario Land is also a tad on the easy side. It seems to be fairly common for Wario games to lack any real challenge, instead opting to have the player feel like a powerful bully. With that in mind, I found the final boss to be disproportionately difficult when compared to the previous bosses. While I don’t recall even failing a boss encounter more than once, the final boss had me drop about a dozen lives. While I agree that the final boss should be the most challenging part of the game, I feel that this was an unreasonable ramp up. It detracts from the game’s more laid back nature and it had me cussing.

Beyond that, I guess you could say that Wario Land isn’t anything special. While I say that it’s difficult to poke holes in, that’s partially because its tight gameplay is the product of constant refinement in side-scrollers over the years. Beyond simply tightening and refining the groundwork found in the first Wario Land game, there’s nothing that really differentiates it from other platformers. It doesn’t take any grand risks, there are few power-ups, and there isn’t a great deal of depth to be found. It just plays it so safe that at times it can feel slightly innocuous. With that said, believe me, I’m grasping at straws here. Lack of inventiveness isn’t a terribly huge problem when the game is this refined.

The Bottom Line
It’s a shame Virtual Boy Wario Land has never been ported to another platform, as it really is an OUTSTANDING game. It’s rare to find a platformer this solid, and one that exudes so much personality that it’s a shame to let it fester on a console that few people really own. Its only real downfalls are its brevity and unwillingness to take risks, but that’s probably how the development team was able to achieve such a level of polish. It’s tempting to say that if the Virtual Boy had more games like Wario Land, it wouldn’t have failed so badly. However, I think it’s important to keep in mind that the software library wasn’t the console’s only problem. Nonetheless, it would have at least been a bit better remembered with a few more of these gems in its library.