Wario Land 3

The original Wario Land games were a series that I enjoyed but I never got a chance to play this one. A few years ago I bought the 3DS port. Proceeded to play it and didn’t really enjoy the puzzle aspects at all. Thought I would give it another chance and play through it to see if it changed my mind any. Once the game boots up we see our “hero” Wario accidentally crash into a forest and find a mysterious music box. Turns out this box is magical traps him within it. A magical being tells him that a bunch of treasure is within the 4 lands of the box and if he finds the 5 music boxes he will free him and let him keep the loot. Wario then goes off to find some treasure.

Once I had control it becomes super obvious that most of Wario’s moves are missing. At the start he can’t throw enemies, do a ground pound or swim like he could in the 2nd game. All of those and more are slowly drip fed as I made progress through the different levels. While this being a Metroidvania game seems amazing every level is fairly small which leads to finding things you can’t do fairly often. Made the game feel like it was wasting my time constantly.

This feeling continues to be a factor in how each level is laid out as well. Some of the cooler levels did use Wario’s moves in a unique way that I enjoyed. Like moving a enemy into position so you could use it’s freeze move to beat what seems to be a unbeatable foe. Yet most areas feel like they are set up in a way where if you get hit then you have to do everything over again. Which just gets tiring after a while.

Additionally even though this game feels like it pretty much lets you do what you want it is very linear. Even with the upgrades some treasures can’t be obtained without finding something else first. Almost every item obtained has a neat animation of it opening up a new pathway. Which then directly points to where you must go next. Collecting all 100 treasures isn’t needed to finish the game yet it very much feels like 75 of them are required to finish it.

If you do like a more puzzle focused game this one certainly has that in spades. Using the assortment of Wario transformations like getting lit on fire to solve puzzles is required almost all the time. With 100 different mini challenges to overcome this game has a lot of stuff to do. I just didn’t like this sort of repetitive challenge. The moment to moment action just feels slow till the endgame where Wario has all his moves. Overall I just prefer the ones with a bit more action and they also don’t overstay their welcome like this game. 9 hours spent on a platformer would have been amazing if I enjoyed playing it more. Yet I could certainly see why this game seems to be well liked. It just isn’t a game I can recommend playing unlike Wario Land 2 & 4.