Aesthetically speaking, Virtual Boy Wario Land is extremely my cuppa tea, monochromatic sprites in a chthonic void, luxurious widescreen! Experiencing this in anaglyph 3D mode rather than stereoscopic headache-inducing red is a real treat! The intro cutscene exemplifies the dioramic delights, inviting you to peer through the layered sheets of forest to spy those little baddies marching past in the extreme distance.
The gameplay isn’t doing anything terribly new compared to the first game. You can combine powerups now which is cool. Hopping between foreground and background is a cute gimmick (the first boss does this and it’s genuinely exciting anticipating their attacks and watching them hop-splash across the lake that stands between the two of you before landing on your plane of interaction for a thumping). EDIT: I was mistaken about treasure rooms I think, you don’t need a key to open them (in the previous game, carrying the key to a treasure room door meant you couldn’t use your special abilities so had to suss out the route with a nerfed moveset) the challenge is simply finding them now (though you do need to find a key to exit the level). There do appear to be less stages and no overworld map which was a neat aspect of the first game (it does seem like the levels remain connected though and you can backtrack all the way to the beginning but I haven’t tested that yet (only about a quarter of the way through)).
The spritework. Lovely little touches abound in a playground of peripheral starkness (the lil bats at the bonus screen (two individual expressions of joy when each is selected), the beaver chilling and watching TV…in the water stage there are these fish enemies that swim in and out of z-space and these simply drawn schools of non-enemy fish just chilling with warping shafts of light filtering in from above…dreamy stuff. I’m slightly obsessed with the boxes in the treasure rooms…
Now this is not what it’s looked like for me via emulation (though I still dig the red on black)
But check these out if you've got a pair of 3D glasses (red/cyan probably work best)
And the music is so crunchy
and reverby
Such voluptuous voidness. Many more Warios to go but I could see this becoming a personal fav based on the look and sound alone.