Wario World (2003, Treasure)
Nintendo, fresh out of the system generation that saw them not only definitively dethroned from their position as kings of the console market, but also thoroughly pummeled in sales by Sony's unbelievably successful PlayStation, and a generation before they exited the conventional console market entirely in favor of the nebulous "Blue Sky" approach to corporate innovation leading to the creation of the second worst designed console, and after that the worst designed console ever before circling back around to relative sanity with the Switch, began to try some new and strange things with several of their properties. The GameCube launched not with a new Mario title, as the U.S. Nintendo Entertainment System, the Super Nintendo Entertainment System, and the Nintendo 64 had, but with Luigi's first (real) starring role in Luigi's Mansion, in which the titular Mario Brother dons a vacuum cleaner and sucks up ghosts in a haunted house. Super Mario 64 2 it surely wasn't, but it was good on its own terms, and did much to show off what the new system could do visually with its stellar lighting and atmosphere. When it did come time for a new mainline Mario around a year later, we got Super Mario Sunshine, in which our hero straps on a water pump-gun backpack thing and runs around a series of island vacation spots. It was an odd way to go for the next full-on Mario but the result was a lot of fun, and again, showed off the graphical capabilities of the GameCube with its blindingly sunny locales and impressive water effects. The GameCube era also saw Nintendo become much freer in recruiting other companies to create games for their beloved characters, with the white-knuckle thrills of F-Zero GX provided by longtime rival Sega, who had recently exited the console market in favor of becoming a third party developer, and somewhat more significantly, with Metroid's triumphant leap into three dimensions in Metroid Prime, developed by then no-names Retro Studios, resulting in a first-person adventure that absolutely no one expected to go down in history as one of the greatest games ever made. And then Nintendo got Treasure to make Wario World.
Wario World, ostensibly, is a 3D collect-a-thon platformer. It has a sparse hubworld by which you enter one of four progressively unlocked worlds, each comprising two platforming stages ending with their own boss followed by one big boss. There oddly isn't much to separate the significance of stage-end bosses and world-end bosses, but most of them are pretty fun to fight and have some neat gimmicks. Par for the course for Treasure, who had become known partially for games that are more or less glorified boss rushes. In its main stages Wario World puts a large emphasis on combat, pitting you against a variety of enemies including small dudes that go down in one punch and big dudes that you will need to knock out, pick up, and then either throw, spin, or piledrive to their doom. The controls here are tight enough, but the time it takes to pick up a large enemy often just barely exceeds tolerance, all the while you get no i-frames to speak of, which can get a little annoying during crowded fights. The stages have within them mini-stages that either take place underground, which are more puzzle-based, or in the sky, which are typically platforming challenges, each of which you enter via trapdoors placed throughout. From these you collect red gems, a minimum number of each being required to see the boss of that stage. Along with the boss fights these comprise the real meat of the experience, the sky stages especially so, as their minimal platforming challenges are enjoyable on the whole and call to mind favorably the "secret" stages in Super Mario Sunshine and some of Galaxy's obstacle course-based stars. The graphics in the substages are plain but get the job done, and the main stages are thematically diverse and reasonably attractive while running at a flawless 60 frames per second. The sound design leans toward overly busy and irritating, e.g. with the ear-splitting squeaky door hinge sounds in the circus stage and the incessant "woo-woo" of the imprisoned Spritelings you come across throughout, and the pause music is possibly the most obnoxious ever put into a videogame; any time I paused to make notes I had to mute the television. The rest of the music is passable but nothing special.
As a seemingly nitpicky but honestly kind of important aside, the continue mechanism is a little busted in that, upon losing all of your health, you merely need to pay a small price of the voluminous amount of coins you collect everywhere in order to pick up right where you left off, even if you're in the middle of a boss fight and they've got one hit point left. This completely trivializes and removes all legitimate tension from the game and renders pointless the limited for-pay health regenerators dotted through the stages, so my recommendation for prospective players is to ignore it entirely and restart the stage on death. They should've removed it in the first place as much of what you do in the stages stays done so it's not even that big of an ask. The inclusion of such a lenient continue feature likely contributed to the common complaint by contemporary critics that the game is too short; the player faces so little resistance by continuing that anyone aiming to clear will do it in a handful of hours regardless of how knowledgeable they are about the stages or bosses. It's not that it's short, it's just way too easy. The whole "don't continue" thing might sound insane to you when we're not even talking about an arcade game here but I was having a lot more fun on my second playthrough when I decided to decline continues and death as a result had a little bit of weight to it instead of none at all.
Though where Wario World really falters is in the platforming elements of the main stages. Wario's movement is fully 3D while the camera maintains a fixed perspective, only allowing the player to scoot it ever-so-slightly to the right and left. The entire appeal of a 3D collect-a-thon platformer is to be able to fully explore a rich environment loaded with stuff to find, both in wide open spaces and in tucked away nooks and crannies, so to fix the perspective where the player can't see most of the world at a given time runs against the whole purpose of having such a game be in 3D in the first place. Make it 2D or go whole hog, this inbetweenness severely limits how interesting a 3D environment can be since you're basically only ever seeing one side of it and is downright frustrating in practice. So many of the latter stages' challenges are based around not being able to either see Wario as you move him around or see the substage trapdoors offscreen; these are the least interesting limitations you can give to a player. To deepen and complicate the stage design of a platformer by making a 3D space instead of a 2D space while not giving the player the all-important tool of an adjustable camera is absurd. The actual platforming in the main stages suffers greatly as, again, you're moving in 3D space while being unable to adjust the camera beyond the slightest horizontal panning, which makes jumps and such very hard to judge a lot of the time, and the little shoeprint markers the level designers put on the edges of platforms so that you can judge the angle of a jump is no less than an admittance of the fact of fixed-perspective 3D platforming's inherent badness. When the mechanics of searching the world for secrets are so badly implemented the player simply won't bother. There are a couple of sections that make interesting use of the limited perspective but its near-omnipresence absolutely isn't necessary to facilitate these few moments.
The perfect compliment to this state of affairs is that whenever you fall into a pit in these stages, instead of doing the reasonable thing and respawning you close to where you fell and deducting some health, you have to do this idiotic minigame in an underworld with narrow paths (that get narrower as you reach later stages) around water that bounces you around and removes your coins should you fall into it while surrounded by ghost enemies that will grab you and shake you. You have to run along the paths and avoid these enemies while breaking box after box after box until you find the spring that will send you back to the stage proper so you can finally get on with the freaking game and it's never, ever, fun. Don't ever make your players perform punitively unfun tasks! Especially when the player's failure can probably be attributed to the aforementioned design flaw present in almost the entire game!
The weird fixed perspective of the main stages and the inclusion of combat mechanics a bit more sophisticated than the average Mario or Banjo or what have you along with the swarms of enemies the player utilizes these mechanics against leads us to the conclusion that Wario World isn't a 3D collect-a-thon platformer, it's a clumsy beat-em-up that also wants to be a 3D collect-a-thon platformer. It's a marriage doomed from the start. The ideal manner in which the beat-em-up genre expresses its narrative is through carefully constructed setpieces of encounters with large groups of enemies that are defeated through economic leveraging of screen space, which mostly isn't important in Wario World as you can run past the majority of regular fights. A platformer presents the events of its world's story by giving the player obstacle courses to maneuver through that also fit organically into the various settings; Wario World here artificially hobbles the player's movement through the strict, unchangeable camera angle and thus fails at that as well. A perspective facilitating combat against a large group of enemies runs roughshod over the objective of finding items and acrobatically negotiating obstacles. It's not unthinkable that one could mash the two genres together successfully, and they almost certainly already have been (either before or since) and I'm just not thinking hard enough, but the rigid commitment to one angle in both aspects stops the fusion dead in its tracks. As it is, most of the dozen or so bosses are fun to fight and have entertaining gimmicks and the majority of the puzzle-platforming mini-stages, in which you can adjust the camera, are neat diversions if not particularly challenging. Even the combat, though it may need some tweaks with regard to timings, is mostly fine. Gluing these disparate good elements together with highly annoying and actively player-antagonizing world traversal can perhaps be considered some kind of GameCube-era bizarre experiment along the lines of putting Samus in an FPS or giving Mario a water gun. This one failed.
Final rating: 2/5 (Bad)