Wario has returned to serve dozens of microgames, all in the name of amassing wealth.
But his newest video game idea has some bugs.
They’re literal bugs, which players must shrink down and enter the game to destroy.
The bugs have not corrupted the game’s affinity for drawing Wario in silly styles.
Cut scenes between campaign missions don’t make much sense, but that’s typical for this series.
Getting a bit meta here, Nintendo.
It’s not a WarioWare game without a selection of classic Nintendo titles redone as super-short microgames.
A Fire Emblem dating scene, redone in WarioWare style. Nice.
I’ve lost track of how many times I’ve looked at a formulaic Nintendo sequel and wished for something fresher. Remember, behind a pile of Mario and Zelda remakes, Nintendo has a considerable stash of irreverence and whimsy, as proven by franchises like Rhythm Heaven, Elite Beat Agents, and WarioWare.
That last series in the list is now up to its ninth entry: this week’s WarioWare: Get It Together. I can’t knock the 18-year-old franchise for sequelitis, and this latest title doesn’t rest on its Wario-styled yellow-and-purple laurels. In fact, it may very well be Nintendo’s most ambitious collection of “microgames” yet.
But ambition is nothing without execution. WW:GIT is hard to fault on a piece-by-piece basis, and when laid on a table like an unsolved jigsaw puzzle, its parts are up to the series’ standard of humor, creativity, and polish. Yet the collection has not been put together quite right, and the result is a rare case of Nintendo putting a game out before it feels finished.
Contents
A brief primer: Wario class is in session
A refresher: WarioWare games revolve around the premise of rapid-fire microgames, each roughly eight seconds long (with “bosses” lasting a whopping 60 seconds or so). The plot gimmick is that villain Wario has designed these ridiculous games in order to sell them a la carte, become rich, and pose with piles of money while laughing in his waa-aa-aa way. Since Wario “made” these games, they can be as uncouth as he is, thus allowing longtime Nintendo partner studio Intelligent Systems to get cartoonishly stupid and giddy with its ideas. (“We didn’t make this game! Selfish, brutish, farting Wario did!”)
Each microgame begins with a prompt. You have a limited amount of time to figure it out, typically eight seconds or less.
Put it out, put it out.
Bring the apples to the giraffe?
Or bring the giraffe to the apples?
It’s green, but we know what that is.
Litter physics to the rescue. As you move toward the green poo, you’ll push litter bits until you cover it up.
These burly men will protect you.
Speaking of bombs from the sky…
The monster in the horizon will come closer when you spin this windmill.
A refreshing face mask treatment, as ripped off by a tiny Wario.
I wonder if that toothpaste is extra sensitive.
Speaking of sensitivity… ouch.
If you like Nintendo at its most wackadoodle, you will like this WarioWare entry as much as the others. Since each microgame is so short, they all strive to leave a mark, and it’s usually a comical one. Examine WW:GIT on an art, sound, and presentation basis, and the result is a LOL-lercoaster—which you can probably ascertain from the above gallery of microgames. Aim a peeing baby statue to put out a fire. Pick hairs off a statue’s armpits. Turn a windmill enough times to beckon a giant monster to stomp toward you.
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That’s only half of the WarioWare promise. The other half is typically the to-the-bone simplicity of its controls. Each microgame starts with brief instructions: “Block! Escape! Count!” Between that and whatever you see on-screen, you have a very small window of time to parse what’s happening—Do what? Go where? The last thing you want is further complication.
In the earliest entries in the franchise, a tap of the d-pad or a single action button is all you needed to get a pretty clear sign of whether or not you understood a particular microgame. Eight seconds later, you’d try all over again. Newer titles tried wacky control twists, including a tilt sensor on WarioWare: Twisted and motion control goofiness on WarioWare: Smooth Moves. These exceptions aside, the games generally hewed to simplicity.
Perhaps this should have been named Super MarioWare
Intelligent Systems, in search of ways to spice up the series this many years in, has expanded WW:GIT’s control portfolio. Those controls are arguably best described as “Super MarioWare.” The cast must now run, jump, fly, and blast as platforming characters inside of each microgame. In days gone by, if you saw a button in a microgame, you tapped your real-life “A” button and the button would get slapped. This time, if you need to hit a button, smack a lever, or turn a dial to beat a microgame’s prompt, your platforming character has to figure out how to touch or affect it. In older WW games, only occasional microgames would ask the player to, say, use a d-pad and fake like Mario for a second. That’s now the rub of every microgame this time around.
What’s more, WW:GIT’s default modes want you to swap from one platforming character to another between each microgame. By the time you beat Get It Together, you’ll have unlocked 20 characters. Some float around like spaceships in a shoot-’em-up. Others obey the laws of gravity as run-and-jump Mario-likes. Still others are locked to the ground as turrets, and these characters can only move using a counterintuitive grappling-hook system (more on that in a bit).
Wario flies in whatever direction you want and also comes with a body-smash attack. He’s easy to figure out.
Kat and Ana are constantly moving and bouncing, on the other hand, and are far more unwieldy.
An example of cooperation gone wrong. One player is trying to push the ice cream up to keep it on the cone. But the other has a weird boomerang…
…and has accidentally boomed the treat off the cone, womp womp.
9-Volt is also a constantly moving character who only pauses when he shoots a yo-yo upward.
Teaming up to either tap or physically move pipes.
Each character may or may not have a weapon of some kind, like an upward-shooting yo-yo, a sideways-only gun, or an any-direction laser. Other characters must use their bodies to activate or attack something in a microgame.
WW:GIT’s campaign, meant for one or two players, frequently slams the brakes to introduce a new character. Each introduction comes with a 60-second tutorial that makes you platform your way through a short level. Then you’re off to a slew of microgames that you must complete while juggling a cast of three or four characters. When each microgame starts, the characters in your crew are randomly shuffled, and one is dealt to you. You get exactly one second to test-ride your next character before a microgame begins.
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More characters, more frustration
Every microgame has to support every character’s control style, and Intelligent Systems has somehow pulled this off. If you go into WW:GIT’s “collection” menu to research microgames you’ve previously played, it will show you a ranking of which characters are “best” and “worst” for each microgame. No kidding.
As one example, the characters who operate as fixed turrets have serious mobility issues, because, again, they have to do this weird thing of aiming their weapons at golden rings that hover within certain microgames. Aim your weapon and hit one of these golden rings and your weapon will temporarily become a grappling hook. To move from that point, aim for another golden ring. It’s weird, and not in a good WarioWare way, especially since these microgames favor rapidly blasting to achieve an objective within eight seconds. So it’s easy to inadvertently warp when you intended to shoot something, or vice versa. Other characters are locked to the “floor” or have their movement restricted every time they tap the “A” button or can only shoot their lasers in one direction or don’t have laser-like weapons at all.
This gets awkward when each microgame’s language of interaction is wholly different from the others. Do you need to ram your body against something to beat the microgame? In one level: yep, you have to touch something with your own body, mobility be damned. In the next: nope, that’s a bad touch, so you either have to shoot a laser or platform toward the object perfectly. Yet another level: the thing you need to touch is next to a hitbox that will “kill” your character and end your microgame, whoopsie. You should’ve lasered it. And another level: why did you shoot the object with a laser? You needed to touch the object with your character’s body, duh!
I’ve run into more comprehension frustration with Get It Together than any WarioWare game. I can’t help but wonder: does every microgame need to be compatible with all 20 characters? Does WW:GIT need 20 characters’ worth of variance? Having beaten the game, I’m of the mind that some of these characters could have been consolidated, or WW:GIT could have blacklisted certain character-and-microgame combos, outside of a toggle like “Super Wild Wario Difficulty.”
Should you plan to play WW:GIT by yourself or with one friend joining from start to finish, the resulting confusion and learning curve aren’t necessarily deal breakers. The campaign forces players to use each newly unlocked character enough times to understand their basics, and subsequent playthroughs include a “use every character” toggle that ramps up the challenge and variability. Each microgame can now play out in 20 different ways, as randomly shuffled in an endless microgame session. While some of those are outright frustrating or annoying due to character-and-game mismatches, this is, all in all, the most replayable variety I’ve seen in a WarioWare game’s single-player mode.
