This review contains spoilers

This was the one Wario Land game I loved as a kid, and playing it again more than two decades later, my child self's tastes were underdeveloped, to say the least. Wario Land 3 is a game with a lot of ideas, some good like its non-linear structure, other undercooked like the entire day/night system, and others not well executed at all, like the golf minigame and that one boss fight with the rabbit. Also there is some really nasty precision platforming and I really feel Wario Land is not the place for these kind of things.

However, I'll agree with my two decades younger self (and he'll agree with me) on one point: Wario Land 3 has a pretty damn fine final boss. Because, in a stunning display of art, the Nintendo devs decided this boss would have the only move in the entire game that can outright kill Wario, complete with a game over screen you can't get anywhere else. To reiterate, this is not a negative, this is a genuinely cool moment, and it made it so even if I didn't like Wario Land 3 as much as I did before, I could never get mad at it. It has justified its own existence.

Otherwise the game was okay, I guess.

Reviewed on Apr 26, 2023


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