Virtual Boy Wario Land (Review)

Virtual Boy Wario Land
Platform: Virtual Boy. I mean, duh. It’s in the name!
Developed by Nintendo
First Released November 27, 1995
NEVER BEEN RE-RELEASED

This one was a lot harder to get action-based screenshots than you would think thanks to how Wario’s tackle/charge move looks.

When I first ran through Virtual Boy’s library back in 2020, two games stood out to me as being pretty dang good. Then I replayed Mario Clash earlier this year and I realized it wasn’t anywhere near as good as I originally pegged it to be. I still ultimately gave it a YES!, but barely so, and I’ve been dreading replaying Virtual Boy Wario Land ever since. It was the other unambiguously good Virtual Boy game, but maybe I’d set my expectations for Virtual Boy so low that it messed with my initial perception. Thankfully, now that I’ve finished my second play session with it, I don’t have to stare blankly at the screen and ask myself if I had a good time or not. It’s really good. And painful to play, but hey, if you’re going to fry your eyeballs out of their sockets, do it with sprites this beautifully done. Shame about it being on Virtual Boy, where it’s fated to linger in obscurity, unloved, until the end of time.

Wario once had a game animated by the same people who did Ghost in the Shell, so it might be audacious for me to say this, but I’m saying it anyway: this has the best sprite work in Wario Land history. Some of the best in Nintendo history, in fact. It’s a solid decade ahead of its time. Very cartoon-like.

At only ten stages and four boss fights, it’s a short game. I’ve never needed more than two hours to finish it. While the levels are sprawling, only a couple I would consider to be “maze-like.” Each of the ten stages has a key and a hidden treasure somewhere in it. In this second play-through, I only one time made it to the exit of the stage without holding the key. Nine of ten times, I just happened upon it through the normal progression of the game. The hidden treasures were a little more difficult. VB Wario Land has six possible endings, the two best of which require you to find all ten of the treasures. Four times I had to do extra exploring to find them. It works, though. Above all else, Wario Land as a franchise needs to feel like a treasure hunt. VB Wario Land pulls it flawlessly. You actually do have to explore, and my only complaint is that there’s only two things to find in every stage. I think perhaps they should have required more than one key to finish a level. I strongly suspect that was planned at some point, but then someone said “do we really want our players to keep their eyeballs on this thing longer than we have to?”

My proof is that there’s more rooms that have this pattern, but they have 1ups instead of treasure. It makes no sense to make a big deal of extra lives since extra lives are plentiful and the game is absurdly easy. No, I think they had more ambitious plans that had to be dropped because of the platform’s ability to broil your retinas.

Of course, a well done treasure hunt doesn’t mean anything if the levels are boring to explore. That’s certainly not the case here. VB Wario Land has some of the best 2D levels Nintendo has ever built. With the exception of the first level, which has no personality or theme to speak of, VB Wario Land has excellent set pieces. Sure, they’re mostly the typical cliches of forests, deserts, waterfalls, etc. But they all feel fresh here. Breathtaking backgrounds and even mundane pathways are drawn with attention to detail. They have this otherworldly quality to them that few 2D platformers achieve quite like VB Wario Land does. It also helps that the enemies all have authentic personalities. Wario is a mischievous character, and this is one of the few times where every aspect of the game feels like it belongs to him, and him alone. It’s so well done.

Go figure that an all-red platform would have some of the best underwater sections in platforming history.

The big twist in this Wario Land is the ability to transfer from the foreground to the background. This is usually done with springs that launch you back and forth. Other times, you’ll access one or the other via doors or pipes. There’s even extended sections that take place entirely in the background. While it’s fun and it works, it’s also one of the reasons the game is so easy. There’s rarely anything in the background that can hurt you. I also feel the mechanic was underutilized. Early in the game, the backgrounds are mostly used as bonus areas where coins or hearts are found. Later, shifting between the foregrounds and backgrounds is more incorporated into the maze-like layouts of the level, and the game truly finds its footing as one of the all-timers. It just takes a while to get there. The springing between the foreground and background is also incorporated into two of the four boss fights, both of which are among the highlights of the game.

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Virtual Boy Wario Land’s weakness is that it’s probably the easiest platforming game Nintendo ever made. I’ve played this three times now. Once on Halloween in 2020, and twice this session, including the “harder” second quest, and I’ve still never lost a single life playing VB Wario Land. Enemies are mostly toothless. In this session, even while playing the second quest, I never took damage from a single basic enemy. In the second quest, I did get hit by the spiky balls that are laying everywhere and I damaged myself on the first mini-boss when I was too slow to attack it, but otherwise, not one single basic enemy ever hurt me. And it’s not because I have mad skills or anything like that. Most baddies don’t hurt you when you touch them, even if you’re not attacking. They just bounce off you. It’s so awkward. I’ve made jokes before about the silliness of the video game logic that enemies are lethal to the touch no matter what they’re doing, but Virtual Boy Wario Land is a glimpse into what gaming would be like if that weren’t the case. There’s also no pits to fall into. The Wario Land that followed this removed the ability to lose a life altogether. I can’t help but wonder if that was discussed for this one, too?

Before each boss, you have to fight these tiny robotic mini-bosses by avoiding their attacks and waiting for them to fly up in the air and crash down on you, which exposes a button. They each only take two hits to kill. In the second quest, you have to hop before they crash, because they only expose the button for a split second. It was the first time (and the only time, come to think of it) that VB Wario Land was anything resembling challenging.

As if the enemy designs weren’t weak enough, VB Wario Land has absolutely no balance when it comes to power-ups. Frankly, they went overboard. The standard Wario bull-charge would have been satisfying enough. It’s one of my all-time favorite game attacks. You can also just jump on enemies, which will knock them out and allow them to be carried, but they’re a bit unwieldy. The charge/tackle move, however, is always delightful. The fact that your butt causes earthquakes that disable every enemy on screen is insanely overpowered and shouldn’t have been included, but it’s Wario. I guess it’s okay! Hell, had they kept it at that, it’s likely the game would have been a contender for Nintendo’s best platformer ever. But, they didn’t. There’s a dragon helmet that breathes fire, though its range is limited to a few spaces in front of you. Some of the blocks can only be broken by fire, and sometimes you need fire to find the special treasure (I’m almost certain you never need it to find the key). It destroys most enemies and has unlimited ammo and would be overpowered by itself. There’s also an eagle helmet that lets you dash in the air and fly for a short distance, which can get you over large gaps. It’s fun to use. So far, that sounds pretty normal, right?

They might as well roll the credits once you have this.

The problem is the dragon and eagle helmets stack to form a winged dragon that can both fly and fire projectiles the full length of the screen. It’s very useful for exploring, since the projectiles it shoots pierces all blocks (though it does stop with enemies), allowing you to clear out entire rooms worth of blocks in a second or two. But, it also allows you to instantly vaporize nearly every basic enemy as soon as you get them within sight. After getting the winged dragon helmet, I almost ran the table on VB Wario Land. The next time I took damage, it was while attempting to score the final hit against the final boss of the game. Once you have it, assuming you actually take your time to measure every jump, the only remaining challenges will be the bosses, since they can’t be damaged by your attack. There’s no particularly difficult jumps, either. Your own recklessness is all that stands in front of you and the end credits. The play control won’t screw you over, either. VB Wario Land handles like a dream. A surreal, all-red, eye-bleeding dream.

Even on the second quest, enemies pose little to no threat. This thing is one of the few that are immune to your projectiles, but it’s not like it’s hard to kill. Really, the second quest could be called Wario’s Adventures in Spiky Ball Land because it’s basically all spiky balls, all the time.

The second quest really isn’t harder so much as it’s just more annoying. The treasures and keys were in the same locations as they were before. Enemies were still nothing more than cannon-fodder. The bosses and even mini-bosses did attack faster and had smaller windows for vulnerability, but otherwise, it was the same game. Only now, there were tons of spiky balls laying around, so many that you literally have to crawl through many sections. Some were even placed in a way where it made getting some coins impossible. Was it harder? Obviously not, since the second time I beat Virtual Boy Wario Land almost exactly thirty minutes faster than my previous session. And the second time around, I skipped the after-level extra lives bonus round (which I don’t think counts towards time anyway). I didn’t need it and still finished with 20 lives. That’s owed largely to the unbalanced power-ups. If Nintendo were to remake VB Wario Land, adding more levels would be a given, but actually, the biggest change I’d recommend making is removing the winged dragon helmet. It’s just too overpowered. Besides, it’s nowhere near as satisfying as the bull charge is (in my head canon, Wario is cousins with Bald Bull).

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I get the impression VB Wario Land is meant for a much younger, less experienced audience. I’m not sure I’ve ever played a 2D platformer that’s better suited to introduce young children to 2D exploration-based platforming than Virtual Boy Wario Land. Nintendo should fully colorize it, restore its original name (Wario Cruise) and give it a modern release. They won’t, but they ought to. I’m not sure re-releasing this in the state it’s in would be the wisest move. I wanted to test this on my nieces and nephew. They were excited, too! But, I decided to cancel the plan because my eyes were hurting after playing it. I’m not making a joke here, either. I’ve been rubbing them and squinting a lot ever since I finished, and I’m not going to put them through that. The same thing happened to me when I played Mario Clash earlier this year. What the hell was Nintendo thinking when they made Virtual Boy? I wasn’t even playing on a real one and my eyes are killing me. Don’t tell me the designers at Nintendo didn’t experience the same thing during its development. There’s no way they didn’t. But, despite legitimate eye soreness, I can honestly say what hurts worse is that VB Wario Land is unlikely to ever see the light of day again. Even though it lacks difficulty, the joy of exploring the levels and finding the treasures is undeniable. Maybe it’s not the absolute best “lost” Nintendo game, but it certainly doesn’t deserve to forever wallow in obscurity. As far as their hidden gems go, it shines among the brightest. Maybe that’s why my eyes are so sore right now.
Verdict: YES!