such a cute and fun lil thing with some of the coolest meta shit i've ever seen in a game - the ending stretch really is that good, too. don't want to say too much, this game is short and it's cheap - just go play it and find out for yourself!! now!!!!!

edit, 1 week later: just played through the alternate route and wow. it most certainly has its flaws but what it adds is really quite impactful - made me feel wrong for acting like i had beaten the game after my first playthrough. play it also!!!

i absolutely adore how much character this game has. wario games are always so expressive and personality-ridden in a way other nintendo (and particularly mario) games just can't seem to ever fully match, and when everything about the game so thoroughly feels like the devs had so much fun creating it, it really seeps in to the game and adds a lot to the experience in a way that i find really hard to explain. the pixel art and how animate everything - especially wario - is, all the different level theming and the level design within them, the insane sound design (cough cough) - it just makes for something so deeply fun. this game might be short at only 18 levels, but essentially all of them are so well crafted that it isn't much of an issue, at least for me - having that many fantastic 2d puzzle platformer stages in a row really felt fulfilling enough as is. simply put, this is a fantastic game - probably the best 2d platformer within the mario franchise and maybe even for nintendo as a whole. play it!!

the vibes are maybe a teensy bit better in the original but aside from the controls being weird (not a big problem since they can be remapped) and the depth perception sometimes feeling off, this game is so peak it's crazy - maybe it's just the autism speaking but playing the game at all just made me feel so happy in a way that's so hard to describe. everything about this bleeds insane amounts of charm, from the ways enemies dance around in battle to the random 2d platformer sections to whatever the fuck happened in the ending and it all just culminates to an experience that means so much to me in spite how little meaning anything in it actually has. play hylics 2!

(one personal little knock; the music has gone from directionless neo-psychedelic post-rock strumming in the first game to direction-ful neo-psychedelic psych rock strumming in this, which although this soundtrack 100% has some great stuff to offer i do prefer what the first was doing. i especially miss how noise rock-y the first game's ost got on tracks like Messy Song - hearing that song for the first time in-game changed me as a human being - but oh well i can live with what this game does)