For those who don’t know, I live in Belgium. Around late November – beginning December, we have a special holiday. Depending on the region you are in, you either celebrate Sinterklaas or Sint Maarten. Both days are basically the same thing, but Sint Maarten takes place in late November and Sinterklaas in early December. Now, what is this? Sinterklaas or Saint Nicholas Day is a sort of 2nd Christmas day/Santa Claus celebration. I could explain the whole celebration, but I think I’m just going to link to a Wikipedia page that explains it better than I can: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sinterklaas. Now, why am I mentioning this? Well, during this celebration I usually give my godchild a gift and I get a special gift from my godmother. This year she gave me WarioWare Gold for the Nintendo 3DS. Now that I have finished the game, what did I think about it? Let’s take a look at it! Oh, and before you say: “Don’t look a gift horse in the mouth!” Well, I just want to review this game… Anyways, feel free to leave a comment in the comment section down below with your opinion on the game and/or the content of this article.
The good
While the story isn’t anything special, the voice acting is just amazing. It’s one of the best performances that Charles Martinet as Wario. The voice acting actually gives the story the charm it needs.
The theming of the minigames is perfect. This game is sort of a compilation game of all the previous WarioWare games, the 300 mini-games it has are a blast to play. Especially since you have games where you need to use the microphone, gyrosensors and the touch screen.
There are quite interesting extras in this game like recording your own voice in the cutscenes and the mini-games. There is also a lot of Nintendo history in this game that made me quite nostalgic.
So, the gameplay is amazing. If you played WarioWare games in the past, you’ll feel right at home with this game. If you have never played a WarioWare game, the game works like this. You get challenged by a character that sets the theme of the mini-games. In these mini-games, you have to quickly perform one action to complete a goal. For example; shave three hairs for a chin or blow, blow out a candle, raise a bridge on time… All of this with a simple action or button press. It doesn’t matter if you win or lose, you go to the next round. The consequence is if you lose, you lose one of your 4 lives. Logically, you need to restart the whole chapter when your 4 lives are lost. The mini-games speed up at a certain point and after a couple of rounds, you’ll face the final challenge of that character.
The visuals of this game are amazing. The game looks colorful and vibrant. The artwork is sublime. There are a lot of amazing references to other Nintendo games and to earlier WarioWare series. I especially loved the nods to WarioWare D.I.Y. with some mini-games having crudely drawn visuals like a casual player would create on the Nintendo DS.
I had a really hard time deciding where to place the soundtrack of this game. I’m personally a bit mixed on it. While the soundtrack has a lot of great tracks, there are a few that didn’t click with me. Now, when I replayed these sections, I noticed that the tracks didn’t click with me outside of the game. So, I can’t fault the game too much for that. So, that’s why I decided to mention the soundtrack in the good section.
The bad
So, let’s talk about the story in this game. While the voice acting is amazing and adds a lot of charm, it doesn’t fix the mediocre story of this game. The story just feels incomplete, storylines that go too quickly to their conclusion. There is barely any arc.
I can totally understand that the story needs to be short and bite-sized for the WarioWare games, but I feel that there is a lot of wasted potentials here and that this story could have been more interesting if it was more fleshed out for a Wario platformer.
While collecting the collectibles is a fun distraction and a nice post-game objective, most of them are just useless. In previous games, most of the unlockables had some sort of interesting function but in this game, a lot of them are just images of previous Nintendo products with a little bit of explanation. That’s a major let down.
Conclusion
This game is an interesting one. While I highly enjoyed my time with the game, I felt that there were a few things lacking. I felt that a bit more polish might have improved this game to be even better. But, on the other hand, there are a lot of things that this game does right and nails in the process. Like the voice acting and the visuals.
Personally, I highly recommend this game to everybody who enjoys playing mini-game collections, puzzle games, Nintendo games, and other WarioWare games. Personally, I wouldn’t pay full price for this game and wait for a discount. But, I wouldn’t skip this game at all. I think it’s worthy to be in your 3DS collection or library.
Since this game is one of the only games that use almost all the features of the 3DS and I think that’s just great. Thankfully, they didn’t use the 3D feature or I would be in trouble because I use a 2DS XL.
With that said, I have said everything I wanted to say about this game. And yes, I have left a few things out for you to discover… I want to thank you so much for reading this article and I hope you enjoyed reading it as much as I enjoyed writing it. I hope to be able to welcome you in another article but until then, have a great rest of your day and take care.
Score: 75/100
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