![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
chuckroCaptain Syrup and his pirates have broken into Wario’s castle and stolen all of his treasure! Wario stole all that stuff first, so it’s time to get it all back!
I’d make an argument that this was the first true “puzzle platformer” in the modern sense, before there was an explosion of them. Wario can’t die (not just easy respawns: there is literally no death condition), and that was a huge thing at the time. Instead, enemy attacks either just make him lose coins (which you can always replace), or inflict status ailments that double as power-ups. (Being on fire makes you run uncontrollably, but is also the only way through certain blocks. Spring forces you to jump, but also lets you jump really high. Etcetera.) There’s no time limit, just the limits of your own frustrations. I beat this “honestly” twenty years ago; I used save states in a bunch of places this time to keep things fun.
The game also has branching paths and a fair amount of replayability: On your first time through, you’re given a seemingly straight-line plot, and you might find or miss treasures as you go. Once you’ve beaten the game the first time, they reveal the full map of 50 stages, each with a hidden treasure and a picture panel in the bonus game at the end. (And five distinct endings.) Full 100% completion means getting every treasure and the full picture, which unlocks a bonus timed challenge stage.
I hit a hiccup trying this on the 9X-S (six months ago) because it wouldn’t save my system data, which is necessary to explore the game’s multiple paths and endings. (I played an hour on the “stay asleep and retake the castle” path, which is only 5 stages, so it was fun but I don’t feel too bad about the lost progress.) Gambatte was a little quirky in that it only seemed to recognize the saved system data if I reset the emulator without exiting (at which point it updated the save going forward). Anyway, that was odd and I mostly used save states, but it worked and I could beat every stage that way.
Overall: This really holds up, and I think a lot of that is the adventurousness of the design: You do need platformer reflexes, but a lot of the challenge is in the puzzles and the frustration is from radically different sources than many platformers before or after.
I’d make an argument that this was the first true “puzzle platformer” in the modern sense, before there was an explosion of them. Wario can’t die (not just easy respawns: there is literally no death condition), and that was a huge thing at the time. Instead, enemy attacks either just make him lose coins (which you can always replace), or inflict status ailments that double as power-ups. (Being on fire makes you run uncontrollably, but is also the only way through certain blocks. Spring forces you to jump, but also lets you jump really high. Etcetera.) There’s no time limit, just the limits of your own frustrations. I beat this “honestly” twenty years ago; I used save states in a bunch of places this time to keep things fun.
The game also has branching paths and a fair amount of replayability: On your first time through, you’re given a seemingly straight-line plot, and you might find or miss treasures as you go. Once you’ve beaten the game the first time, they reveal the full map of 50 stages, each with a hidden treasure and a picture panel in the bonus game at the end. (And five distinct endings.) Full 100% completion means getting every treasure and the full picture, which unlocks a bonus timed challenge stage.
I hit a hiccup trying this on the 9X-S (six months ago) because it wouldn’t save my system data, which is necessary to explore the game’s multiple paths and endings. (I played an hour on the “stay asleep and retake the castle” path, which is only 5 stages, so it was fun but I don’t feel too bad about the lost progress.) Gambatte was a little quirky in that it only seemed to recognize the saved system data if I reset the emulator without exiting (at which point it updated the save going forward). Anyway, that was odd and I mostly used save states, but it worked and I could beat every stage that way.
Overall: This really holds up, and I think a lot of that is the adventurousness of the design: You do need platformer reflexes, but a lot of the challenge is in the puzzles and the frustration is from radically different sources than many platformers before or after.
