xandermartin98
Wario Fan Supreme
Being an excellent game in general (despite the fact that it is clearly far too easy even on Super Hard mode) and having ball-bustingly phenomenal art/sound design aside, Wario Land 4, in my opinion, seriously deserves more recognition for turning its franchise's signature weirdness into the truly beautiful art form that its previous home consoles (Virtual Boy and Original Game Boy) could never quite manage to support due to their ever-so-crippling technological limitations. Although WL3 is kind of a better game overall, WL4 is just far too much of an aesthetic and atmospheric masterpiece to pass up (basically making it the more interesting game between the two by a landslide, in other words).
Almost immediately from the get-go, the game feels off-kilter and bizarre in almost every way; levels are entered in a somehow even more bizarre variation of the Super Mario 64 style, and even the tutorial level looks suspiciously like Red Brinstar from Super Metroid (particularly in the parts with all of those mysterious pillars in the background; giant purple light towers, anyone?) and also features moving hieroglyphs. You exit said level by jumping onto a frog-shaped switch and setting off a dimension-destroying bomb that also happens to be accompanied by some of the most disturbing music in video game history, and then it turns out that the guy who sells you items for the first boss is a literal human shadow (shaped like Mr. Game & Watch) who lives in an also-literal hole in the wall leading up to said boss. And of course, making him smile for you causes him to make all sorts of hilariously out-of-place sound-effect noises as well.
As for the actual mini-games that you have to play (on Super Hard mode, due to Spoiled Rotten's 15-second time limit) in order to get the tokens for the item shop: Wario's Homerun Derby has you holding your Game Boy Advance sideways to hit a baseball that has Wario's face printed onto it; Wario Hop has Wario running atop a dislodged car tire and jumping over living cacti with faces (most notably the ones that happen to be shaped like voluptuous naked women), along with twitching rocks, pigs in the middle of the desert, and zombified Einsteins eating rice cakes; last but not least, Wario's Roulette has the player make Wario's face look even uglier than it already does (in absolutely hilarious ways, no less); also, the mini-game shop itself appears to be located on the freaking Moon for whatever reason, so there's that too.
And then, of course, the boss itself, which reveals why the Entry Passage's logo is an eggplant of all things, in addition to featuring in-universe Nintendo Gamecube cameos and serving as an introduction to the game's remarkably Ren & Stimpy / Courage The Cowardly Dog esque boss designs, most of which words can barely even begin to describe the weirdness of:
Spoiled Rotten: A giant eggplant/Kirby hybrid whose name becomes horrifyingly literal during her final phase, complete with razor-sharp teeth and an insanely detailed face; just to make her look even more like an insane serial killer, she also drags her doll along on the ground behind her (as if it were a recently murdered corpse) during said phase
Cractus: Is a freakishly long-limbed, horribly drug-intoxicated Venus Flytrap monster (blatantly named after cocaine, in a kids' game) who spends the entirety of the fight (not counting the part where he's asleep) cartoonishly slasher-smiling from ear-to-ear...which he later combines with rolling his bloodshot eyes all the way backward into his skull and rabidly drooling like a maniac once Wario makes him angry enough; also, if you manage to get hit by his drool, it turns Wario into a zombie that Cractus then maniacally laughs at
Cuckoo Condor: True to his name, spends his (ridiculously easy) first phase as a downright horrific zombie cyborg cuckoo clock monstrosity who has a tuning fork for a right arm, a sawblade maker for a left arm, and even a giant construction vehicle claw for a dick, in addition to having yet another bird (as well as an exhaust pipe) on top of itself, being shaped like an Asian pagoda, and having a mysteriously shadow-concealed face with glowing yellow eyes that creepily stare off into space with an extremely over-enthusiastic and pedophilic-looking expression that makes it unclear whether the...thing is happy to see Wario, excited to murder Wario in his sleep, and/or simply in a perpetual state of agonizing pain due to its bionic attachments...he doesn't even really become that much less weird once his clock disguise breaks off either, as it is revealed that the extra bird atop his head was, in fact, literally grafted into his skull, in addition to him having comically oversized bat(?) wings (along with multiple tails) and laying eggs that hatch exploding ducks
Aerodent: Possibly the only non-disturbing boss that the game has to offer, as he is basically just a mouse piloting a giant inflatable stuffed bear (corpse?)
Catbat: Has a horrifyingly detailed face with a comically oversized mouth (just like Spoiled Rotten during her final phase), has a giant bat head grafted into the top of his skull (much like Cuckoo Condor), has bat wings (also like Cuckoo Condor?) where his ears should be, has multiple tails (also like Cuckoo Condor), and spits out sentient spiky balls with freaky cyclops faces; despite ironically not actually being the game's scariest boss, he still fits the Sapphire Passage's general horror theme extremely well
Golden Diva: Sucks a live cat (that happens to secretly be her own grand-daughter) straight up her nose through an alien tractor beam and makes you throw no less than four magically summoned giant heads at her as the mere opening to her fight; also, she looks like something straight out of Odin Sphere, masochistically laughs like a lunatic whenever Wario damages her, has incredibly unsettling theme music that perfectly reflects her obvious insanity in and of itself, and has a face so repulsively ugly that she wears an entire stack of no less than twelve (grossly undersized and generally creepy-looking) masks over it just to make sure that no one ever sees it in all of its ungodly repulsive glory; just to make matters even stranger, her final form reduces her into nothing more than a disembodied pair of lips
There's also the audio effects (slow tempo whenever Wario is crouching, fast tempo whenever Wario is rolling, distortion and pitch alteration for the status ailments, et cetera), the boss victory screen that looks like something straight out of Cho Aniki, Hell itself literally freezing over when Wario hits the Frog Switch in Fiery Caverns, the status ailments themselves (which include Wario being crushed into a living pancake, grotesquely inflated by his bee allergies, zombified to the point where he literally just becomes a giant humanoid blob of slime, transformed into a bat, squashed so hard that his legs fuse together into a giant spring, cartoonishly burned alive, et cetera, with none of them actually causing any damage to him), the sound room (which literally has entire tracks that are just a guy snoring and a fly buzzing, in addition to looking eerily realistic and having a giant creepy face that stares directly at you through its entrance opening), some of the game's music in general, the place in which Wario fights the final boss (a pyramid inside of another pyramid), and many of the levels themselves (which range from a creepy, decrepit, seemingly haunted old lake infested with ginormous Black Lagoon monsters and a dystopian post-apocalypse landfill that looks like something straight out of the Future era from Chrono Trigger to a giant toy block castle and what appears to be an entire alternate dimension made out of dominoes and dice; the fact that the former two levels that I just mentioned also have pipes that take Wario directly from them into Candy Land and then straight back again doesn't exactly help either), and the second-to-worst ending (in which Wario gets kissed by a princess that looks like a drag-queen version of himself), just to name a few other particularly standout oddities that the game just so happens to feature.
Oh, and one last thing regarding the item shop's items themselves: when Wario purchases the top-tier items (Black Dog, Large Lips, Big Kiss and Black Dragon), Mr. Game & Watch literally transforms himself into them; also, he somehow makes the Bugle play itself, in addition to having to drag Visorman into the boss rooms as if he (Visorman) is a literal robot.
All in all, though, an amazing game that everyone should play
Almost immediately from the get-go, the game feels off-kilter and bizarre in almost every way; levels are entered in a somehow even more bizarre variation of the Super Mario 64 style, and even the tutorial level looks suspiciously like Red Brinstar from Super Metroid (particularly in the parts with all of those mysterious pillars in the background; giant purple light towers, anyone?) and also features moving hieroglyphs. You exit said level by jumping onto a frog-shaped switch and setting off a dimension-destroying bomb that also happens to be accompanied by some of the most disturbing music in video game history, and then it turns out that the guy who sells you items for the first boss is a literal human shadow (shaped like Mr. Game & Watch) who lives in an also-literal hole in the wall leading up to said boss. And of course, making him smile for you causes him to make all sorts of hilariously out-of-place sound-effect noises as well.
As for the actual mini-games that you have to play (on Super Hard mode, due to Spoiled Rotten's 15-second time limit) in order to get the tokens for the item shop: Wario's Homerun Derby has you holding your Game Boy Advance sideways to hit a baseball that has Wario's face printed onto it; Wario Hop has Wario running atop a dislodged car tire and jumping over living cacti with faces (most notably the ones that happen to be shaped like voluptuous naked women), along with twitching rocks, pigs in the middle of the desert, and zombified Einsteins eating rice cakes; last but not least, Wario's Roulette has the player make Wario's face look even uglier than it already does (in absolutely hilarious ways, no less); also, the mini-game shop itself appears to be located on the freaking Moon for whatever reason, so there's that too.
And then, of course, the boss itself, which reveals why the Entry Passage's logo is an eggplant of all things, in addition to featuring in-universe Nintendo Gamecube cameos and serving as an introduction to the game's remarkably Ren & Stimpy / Courage The Cowardly Dog esque boss designs, most of which words can barely even begin to describe the weirdness of:
Spoiled Rotten: A giant eggplant/Kirby hybrid whose name becomes horrifyingly literal during her final phase, complete with razor-sharp teeth and an insanely detailed face; just to make her look even more like an insane serial killer, she also drags her doll along on the ground behind her (as if it were a recently murdered corpse) during said phase
Cractus: Is a freakishly long-limbed, horribly drug-intoxicated Venus Flytrap monster (blatantly named after cocaine, in a kids' game) who spends the entirety of the fight (not counting the part where he's asleep) cartoonishly slasher-smiling from ear-to-ear...which he later combines with rolling his bloodshot eyes all the way backward into his skull and rabidly drooling like a maniac once Wario makes him angry enough; also, if you manage to get hit by his drool, it turns Wario into a zombie that Cractus then maniacally laughs at
Cuckoo Condor: True to his name, spends his (ridiculously easy) first phase as a downright horrific zombie cyborg cuckoo clock monstrosity who has a tuning fork for a right arm, a sawblade maker for a left arm, and even a giant construction vehicle claw for a dick, in addition to having yet another bird (as well as an exhaust pipe) on top of itself, being shaped like an Asian pagoda, and having a mysteriously shadow-concealed face with glowing yellow eyes that creepily stare off into space with an extremely over-enthusiastic and pedophilic-looking expression that makes it unclear whether the...thing is happy to see Wario, excited to murder Wario in his sleep, and/or simply in a perpetual state of agonizing pain due to its bionic attachments...he doesn't even really become that much less weird once his clock disguise breaks off either, as it is revealed that the extra bird atop his head was, in fact, literally grafted into his skull, in addition to him having comically oversized bat(?) wings (along with multiple tails) and laying eggs that hatch exploding ducks
Aerodent: Possibly the only non-disturbing boss that the game has to offer, as he is basically just a mouse piloting a giant inflatable stuffed bear (corpse?)
Catbat: Has a horrifyingly detailed face with a comically oversized mouth (just like Spoiled Rotten during her final phase), has a giant bat head grafted into the top of his skull (much like Cuckoo Condor), has bat wings (also like Cuckoo Condor?) where his ears should be, has multiple tails (also like Cuckoo Condor), and spits out sentient spiky balls with freaky cyclops faces; despite ironically not actually being the game's scariest boss, he still fits the Sapphire Passage's general horror theme extremely well
Golden Diva: Sucks a live cat (that happens to secretly be her own grand-daughter) straight up her nose through an alien tractor beam and makes you throw no less than four magically summoned giant heads at her as the mere opening to her fight; also, she looks like something straight out of Odin Sphere, masochistically laughs like a lunatic whenever Wario damages her, has incredibly unsettling theme music that perfectly reflects her obvious insanity in and of itself, and has a face so repulsively ugly that she wears an entire stack of no less than twelve (grossly undersized and generally creepy-looking) masks over it just to make sure that no one ever sees it in all of its ungodly repulsive glory; just to make matters even stranger, her final form reduces her into nothing more than a disembodied pair of lips
There's also the audio effects (slow tempo whenever Wario is crouching, fast tempo whenever Wario is rolling, distortion and pitch alteration for the status ailments, et cetera), the boss victory screen that looks like something straight out of Cho Aniki, Hell itself literally freezing over when Wario hits the Frog Switch in Fiery Caverns, the status ailments themselves (which include Wario being crushed into a living pancake, grotesquely inflated by his bee allergies, zombified to the point where he literally just becomes a giant humanoid blob of slime, transformed into a bat, squashed so hard that his legs fuse together into a giant spring, cartoonishly burned alive, et cetera, with none of them actually causing any damage to him), the sound room (which literally has entire tracks that are just a guy snoring and a fly buzzing, in addition to looking eerily realistic and having a giant creepy face that stares directly at you through its entrance opening), some of the game's music in general, the place in which Wario fights the final boss (a pyramid inside of another pyramid), and many of the levels themselves (which range from a creepy, decrepit, seemingly haunted old lake infested with ginormous Black Lagoon monsters and a dystopian post-apocalypse landfill that looks like something straight out of the Future era from Chrono Trigger to a giant toy block castle and what appears to be an entire alternate dimension made out of dominoes and dice; the fact that the former two levels that I just mentioned also have pipes that take Wario directly from them into Candy Land and then straight back again doesn't exactly help either), and the second-to-worst ending (in which Wario gets kissed by a princess that looks like a drag-queen version of himself), just to name a few other particularly standout oddities that the game just so happens to feature.
Oh, and one last thing regarding the item shop's items themselves: when Wario purchases the top-tier items (Black Dog, Large Lips, Big Kiss and Black Dragon), Mr. Game & Watch literally transforms himself into them; also, he somehow makes the Bugle play itself, in addition to having to drag Visorman into the boss rooms as if he (Visorman) is a literal robot.
All in all, though, an amazing game that everyone should play
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