"Hey, you know the Wario Land games? Those super idiosyncratic, beloved platformers made a passionate team of developers? Well why don't we get essentially an anonymous studio to make a new one of those, but with touch controls in all the places you don't want them!"

This game feels like a seat-filler. Something that exists just to say "Look how many games we have on our platform!" and move on from. Previous Wario games have so much thought and care put into them and their mechanics, and the way Wario affects the world and vice-versa. Here, all the power-ups that come from interacting with the world are just costumes you equip at any time, all controlled by the stylus and equipped by using it as well. This ends up creating brain-dead level design, where everything is solvable by just putting on one of the costumes or moving onto the next room and coming back when you have the right costume for it. It's as obvious as puzzle platformers come, because the devs here clearly don't understand there's a difference between solving a puzzle through the moveset given to you and objects in the environment vs solving a puzzle by using the Puzzle Solving Item.

Drawing on screen to switch to different abilities isn't horrible, but is there any reason this had to come at the cost of having a jump button? Or any buttons?? I guess they expect you to play this with a hand on the d-pad and another on your stylus, because up on the d-pad is jump and you need touch controls for any attack or action. While going through normal levels this set-up is ok, but for situations that require fast action, I always ended up fumbling over my DS trying to draw the right thing several times in a row. Why doesn't this game pause the action when you draw like in Okami? It wouldn't actually be that intrusive, it'd actually make things flow nicely. Instead, boss fights that require fast costume changes are way more annoying because I keep accidentally putting Wario in the boat costume instead of the one that gives him a gun.

One thing I will praise highly is the dialogue here. The premise of Wario ruining an actual master thief's life by stealing his powers and brute forcing his way through every obstacle is actually funny, and there's a lot of good jokes all throughout the story. This is just another way Wario is the anti-Mario, he can actually carry a dialogue heavy story quite well, just because he's so distinct of a character. I won't say it's the best story, as at a certain point a lot of the beats of each "episode" become repetitive, but it was a surprise to see how much work was put into turning in an entertaining script for this game.

I made a point earlier in this review about how this is a 2D Wario game not developed by the Wario Land devs, and I don't think I would've bothered pointing that out if it weren't for the fact that I feel it tries to evoke it a lot. The levels are set up sort of like Wario Land 4 levels but bigger, the enemies are in the same school of "somewhere between cute and weird" design, and whenever you find a chest, you have to do a minigame with a bomb as a countdown clock, which to me reads as trying to invoke the Warioware games as well. But of course, none of these are as good as the real thing, especially the mingames, which feel like the most obvious things to do with a touch screen possible (there's a slide puzzle). The levels are big in a way that makes them very exhausting to explore, since everything is so slow and often requires re-doing puzzles with specific costumes. Also, the music is just pathetic, no one is going to be bumping this shit, these songs are not going to be invited to the "1 hour nintendo music compilation" party.