![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
chuckroWario, villain of Super Mario Land 2, gets to be the protagonist, as he goes after the giant statue of Princess Peach that was stolen by the pirate Captain Syrup.
I think there’s a reason Wario Land 2 stayed in my mind as a groundbreaking game and this was mostly just another platformer. It starts a bunch of the Wario-centric ideas (coins as collectables rather than to get lives; hidden treasures; many of the character and enemy designs) but keeps a lot of Mario trappings that would later be discarded (extra lives, shrinking to small Wario on hit, power-up items, timed levels). This also keeps the weird, floaty jumps that characterized SML2.
This game also has fewer treasures (only 15 in the 40 stages, and I think only two of them require replaying stages to find) and it’s a shorter game overall. I spent 3.5 hours on this, around 7 on Wario Land 2, and around 10 on Wario Land 3—and that’s for pretty much 100% completion in each case. That also continues in the general trend of Game Boy action games to be longer, fuller experiences over the life of the system, as they became less like NES games you were intended to replay over and over (I could beat the original Super Mario Land in 25 minutes), and more like the secret-filled, battery-backed SNES games that required many hours for full exploration.
Overall: I suspect that if I was more clever, I would have played these games in proper order: SML2 was heavily influenced by Super Mario World for the SNES, with the free-roaming world map and spin jumps. This is the next evolution before the Wario series really breaks off on its own. As it is, taking hits and losing your power-ups comes as a shock following my playing the later games. Still fun, though.
I think there’s a reason Wario Land 2 stayed in my mind as a groundbreaking game and this was mostly just another platformer. It starts a bunch of the Wario-centric ideas (coins as collectables rather than to get lives; hidden treasures; many of the character and enemy designs) but keeps a lot of Mario trappings that would later be discarded (extra lives, shrinking to small Wario on hit, power-up items, timed levels). This also keeps the weird, floaty jumps that characterized SML2.
This game also has fewer treasures (only 15 in the 40 stages, and I think only two of them require replaying stages to find) and it’s a shorter game overall. I spent 3.5 hours on this, around 7 on Wario Land 2, and around 10 on Wario Land 3—and that’s for pretty much 100% completion in each case. That also continues in the general trend of Game Boy action games to be longer, fuller experiences over the life of the system, as they became less like NES games you were intended to replay over and over (I could beat the original Super Mario Land in 25 minutes), and more like the secret-filled, battery-backed SNES games that required many hours for full exploration.
Overall: I suspect that if I was more clever, I would have played these games in proper order: SML2 was heavily influenced by Super Mario World for the SNES, with the free-roaming world map and spin jumps. This is the next evolution before the Wario series really breaks off on its own. As it is, taking hits and losing your power-ups comes as a shock following my playing the later games. Still fun, though.
