The other reviews that say "eh i guess there could've been a BIT more single-player content" are being very generous. There's no single-player content. No side games that are more fleshed-out versions of microgames, no collection of souvenirs/toys, no mission mode, no replaying individual microgames in the album to unlock anything (the section where you play the individual games is just to practice them once on each difficulty; no endless play with target scores), no leaderboards, no unlockable cosmetics. Play through the story mode once (which will take maybe two hours), play each stage one or two more times to see the 7 microgames on each stage that you didn't get the first time, play the three elevator stages, and then all that's left to do is get high scores.

The original Warioware was a passion project developed in secret, and most every game since then still kept that spirit, with all of them having a bunch of extra stuff thrown in that was clearly the developers having fun with every little idea they had for the new hardware. This feels like they were told they had to make a new Warioware -- and one that plays more like the best-selling one on the Wii instead of going in another new experimental direction -- and get it out for the last holiday season before the Switch 2 comes out. I guess ironically it feels like the first one that was actually made by Wario.

The multiplayer is probably good; i haven't had a chance to try it yet. And maybe it's unfair that i'm rating it before trying the multiplayer, but Warioware was never a series that only cared about multiplayer; there was always plenty to do in single player to keep you coming back. I think even Mega Party Games had more single-player content than this (and it also had more multiplayer content btw).

The games are good, and that one afternoon i spent going through the story mode was very fun, but i can't recommend this at full price if you're not getting it as a multiplayer party game.

i've tried giving this a chance several more times since beating it when it came out, and after ten years i still can't understand how anyone could think this is okay, even without the context of the first decade of the series. none of this is fun. i don't know, i guess if you'd never played any rpg or any story-based game before and you're just coming in like "ooh, it's the guy from new super mario bros wii, but there's dialogue! neat!" and you just power through the obtuse puzzles and unrewarding gameplay because of the novelty of talking toads.

also frustrating that people still respond to this like "oh you just don't like it because it's not exactly like ttyd" like no fuck off, i don't want another ttyd, i want the paper mario game they should have made after years of learning from and building off of ttyd and spm; instead they completely threw everything out and started the entire "mario... but he's paper!" concept from scratch and it took them three/four games over eight years to muddle their way into something almost as good as the first time they did it 20 years earlier.

The first dozen or so times I tried to play this i kept falling off of it, and i think a big part of it was the controls. Fusion was my first 2D Metroid, and i kept trying to find a way to make this feel like that. Even after playing all the way through and loving Metroid 1 and 2 i still had a hard time with this, i guess as kind of an uncanny valley thing where the controls are similar enough to modern Metroid that it feels off, while 1 and 2 are different enough that they're clearly their own thing.

While i do still think it would be interesting to have a modern remake of it to stand beside the rest of the series, this time i stopped trying to make it feel like modern Metroid and had to get myself into the same mindset i did with 1 and 2 -- i need to sit down and invest my time into this old game and let it be what it is. And making a map -- the game kinda tricks you into thinking you don't need to make a paper map, but you kinda do. (the ingame map shows you where rooms are, but not where doors are; when you have your own map where you've marked how to actually get around and can see all areas at once (fitting all the pieces of graph paper into one big connected thing at the end was really satisfying), the backtracking (which there really isn't a lot of as far as i can remember?) is a lot less frustrating). With that in mind, this time i really got into it and loved it.

Half star off because jumping controls could be better. Wall jumps still feel finicky for me, especially since pressing up or down takes you out of the spin jump and forces you to fall all the way back down and try again (in modern Metroid you can get back into the spin by pressing the jump button again). The controls in general also still feel kinda clunky to me, but the game is slow-paced and easy enough that it doesn't really hurt it.

But i have to say i really don't understand the mindset among a lot of Metroid fans that 1 and 2 are the bad ones that no one should bother with anymore and just play the remakes, and Super is the timeless one. Zero Mission and Samus Returns are both very good games, but the idea that they actually replace 1 and 2 in terms of gameplay makes no sense to me; they're very different games (and especially the idea that a newcomer to the series should play Zero Mission, then Samus Returns, then Super is just completely bonkers; going directly from the newest game to the oldest game is going to cause severe whiplash). Super is the kinda-awkward transition stage between Classic Metroid and Modern Metroid, and all three Classic Metroids are very good games that need to be approached as products of their time and appreciated in context.