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I had been debating how to cover the WarioWare series in this site. Should I do it by release, in order that I played them, worst to best...? In the end I decided to just start with what I actually wrote back in 2019 with some minor variations and updates.

I have felt (and this is not an unpopular sentiment) that the WarioWare series gotten worse and worse over time (including the quirky and bizarre feel of the games), from the high points of the original and Twisted! to the (then) depths of DIY, and now WarioWare Gold for the Nintendo 3DS. Part of this is the homogenizing of the franchise. It's a bit of a "best of WarioWare" wrapped up in a new storyline, but that's a VERY charitable description.

While many of the games got straight ports from their original games with some graphically upscaled graphics (if you could call it that) but none of them are done particularly well. A few stick out in my mind: "Write On, Dude" is where you copy a kanji character from the top screen, but unlike the original (on WarioWare: Touched!), there's no outline to trace and the game is very picky as to where you write the strokes. (This "unforgiving attitude" also extends to the boss game of the Kat & Ana stage, the incredibly un-fun "Top Notch", which involves exact placement of ingredients on a cake, and I do mean exact to the point where a few pixels can cost you the game). "Crazy Cars" is another mostly-original port but adds new vehicles that are far harder to jump over. "Tiptoe Titan" no longer has the joy of letting you lose by crushing the little men, nor does it have the "camel" (two little men inside)—see this YouTube video. "Crossing Guard" is completely changed, and removes the undiscussed "story" in the level two (an ostrich runs to the right, then the ostrich runs to the left followed by a crowd of people, then a crowd of people run to the right as a crowd of ostriches follow). The voice acting on this game is terrible (despite Charles Martinet still voicing Wario and others), and it's not just the main cutscenes sounding like half the VAs slept through their lines while the other half is screechy and overacted. It's not just the established voices used for characters like Mona and 9-Volt have changed, it's the fact that if any microgames use voices, it's the same, tinny voice for every game, and you'd see what I mean if you played it. (To speak nothing of new character Lulu, who looks like a Goomba wearing a wig...less said, the better).

Lastly, the actual console of the 3DS doesn't lend itself well for the ports. The 3DS is far heavier than the GBA for tilting action, with the heavier GBA SP clocking at 5 ounces, but the 3DS family starts at 9 ounces and only goes up from there. The microphone is also in the wrong place for the 3DS, at the bottom instead of the middle.

What's particularly saddening is this could have been really great. The new artstyle isn't great (though 9-Volt's mom, 5-Volt, seen on this game's thumbnail, is oddly attractive), a straight port of the best of the original, DIY, Twisted!, Touched!, and Smooth Moves with perhaps some adjustments taken into account for heavier hardware, and then 30% new games, but with the bizarre atmosphere of the original games.

FINAL RATING:   

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