K[oP]
If I recall, your wealth (and therefore ending) was mostly determined by the unique treasures you found, rather than the coins.
I remember being just 1 treasure away from getting the fifth and best ending, but could never find that goshdarned treasure Bā¦
Yeah, the treasures accounted for huge sums of money, but I think it should be theoretically possible to just collect enough coins? I also wonder if ājustā finding all the treasures, while blowing all your money on mini-games, would be enough to get the best ending.
iirc it isnāt, you still need a lot of coins to reach the max amount. i donāt think itās anything that requires you do a lot of grinding, or maybe any if you play all the levels, but yeah. also im pretty sure the best ending requires you collect the max amount of coins possible and get all the treasures. if you miss either one you prolly just get the second best ending instead i think.
wario land 2 definitely felt large to me as a kid, mostly because of itās branching paths, which you only notice after you beat the game once. almost every path led to several more levels and a completely different ending, though none of them were as long as the main path, really. but also, like, narratively or thematically or w/e you wanna call it, the way each path branched off and the unique or more indepth areas you visit in each one really implied there was a larger world than what the game was showing you. for instance, at one point in the game you sneak onto the main bad galās ship and are told to drop the anchor to beat the level. if you do so then you continue on the main path and persue captain syrup through the woods into the city. if you find the secret exit, though, which is a giant block you destroy thatās plugging a hole in the ship, you sink the ship and end up taking an alternate path in the game going through some ruins at the bottom of the sea. idk i thought it was really neat and i still kinda do? there were a lot of levels too, even though admittedly they were all rather short (except for the tonally different body horror-esque super secret level you can only unlock if you collect all of the map pieces in the game i guess, unless you know everything usually it takes about 10-15 minutes to beat iirc).
(also, side note, one of my fav little secrets ever is in wario land 2. at the beginning of the game warioās asleep while his alarm clock goes off. pressing any button will wake him up, but if you just let him lay there for a bit, heāll stay asleep and youāll beat the level anyways and unlock an alternate path where he gets kicked out of his own castle while still asleep and you have to take it back instead. its neat!!)
wario land 3 def didnt feel as large to me by comparison, though i can see how it might be. like, there are way less levels but there are four different treasures in each of them. unfortunately, each treasure also served as an exit, so, really, itās just four different paths in each level, sometimes intersecting but mostly not iirc. and, also, most are cut off from you unless you go in at day/night, or collect a certain treasure in a different level, or have a certain ability unlocked, and itās hard to tell sometimes when youāre going down a wrong path until you hit one of those roadblocks, and, yeah. it felt frustrating and despite the levels looking open ended in a way they actually felt really linear to me.
anyways those are some of my wario land thoughts, thx for reading
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Sorry in advance, I usually try to stay more on topic outside the axe, but I canāt supress my urge to babble more about my experiences with the Gunpei-birthed Mario and Wario games.
Let me wax pretentiously about diegesis and concsious game design first. Why are there coins in Mario games? As a concession to all action games at the time of Mario Bros. 1ās inception having a score? Because it was the easiest possible collectable trinket to render on early 8-bit hardware? Some kind of underhanded comment? Wario has a clear incentive to collect money. It kind of is the point of his games. He donāt care about getting dat puss. He wants to have a shit ton of cash to afford a big fucking mansion at the end. It makes sense. Mario on the other hand, has no reason to go about mushroom kingdom stealing all the coin he can get his dirty plumber gloves own. Or does he? Well, I guess his job isnāt paying too well, and I bet he canāt wait to move into his own apartment, away from his annoying brother. But itās still an asshole thing do to. Just taking it without asking. Offhandedly. Along the way. Like it is completely normal. The right thing. As if heās entitled to just rob those asexual mushroom folks. They wonāt speak up. Theyāll let it slide, cause he agreed to save their princess. Oh Mario. What a devious character you are.
In this sense, Wario really is a darn effective parody. Mocking its inspiration by pointing out its ridiculous behavior and running with it.
(I talked about all this before on sb1 but I think it bears repeating. It is the reason I like Wario more as a person than Mario. Heās fortright about his intentions. Heās keeping it real.)
Considering Wario Land 2 and 3 as adventure games hasnāt even crossed my mind. Interesting way of looking at it, though I wonder how you got there. I always saw them as āpuzzle-platformersā, as opposed to the āaction-platformersā that make up the rest of the series. Though of course it is always a matter of degree. I have too much time on my hands, so let me order them from how I perceive them as most to least puzzle-ish:
Wario Land 2, 3
all other mainline Warios (1, VB, 4, Wii, DS, GC)
SML1, SML2
SML1 and 2 are about survival. They have the most intricate physics. Wario Land 2 and 3 are about finding the āone right solutionā to each problem. The rest falls somewhere inbetween.
Wasnāt that fun? (I guess it was me, who was having all the fun.) Anyway, looking at them more as (action-)puzzle, and less as (action-)adventure games, helps to appreciate them more. I think.
And now that you mention it, I do remember liking itās branching structure a lot. That really was a neat thing that I donāt recall seeing in many other games except maybeā¦ uhā¦ visual novels? I should play Wario Land 2 and 3 again at some point. I bet I would appreciate them more nowadays. My acceptance of slower-paced puzzle games has increased with age.
As a short anecdote: I got a copy of Bomberman Quest when I had a GBA, to give it another go, after my bad emulation impression (cross-shaped explosions in empty fields) and I totally got over my initial nitpicks. What a fun adventure! In some ways, it rekindled the magic that was Linkās Awakening to me at age 12. Sure, it was a lot less story, and more āgameyā. More simple. Less polished. But I didnāt mind. It had so much character(s). Like you said, the deliciously bad(ly translated?) dialogue gave every enemy some personality. And it was so addicting. What an interesting game structure! Every encounter with those cute lilā monstas a potential new item, a new way of play. Gotta catch them all! Iām glad I played it again. I cherrish it like Qix Adventure and Hyper Choro Q as an oddball Game Boy game that have a lot of heart.
Is it? Youāre better than me then. When I played Super Mario Land 2, I sure was wondering why the hell it kept throwing so many extra lives at me. I beat the six bosses and got the six coins without too much trouble. Pretty easy indeed. Then I entered Warioās castle and was thrown into platform hell, burning through dozens of lives in a matter of minutes. Game Over. Back to the front gate, scrub. Gotta beat the bosses all over again, noob. And donāt forget to collect more lives this time around.
What a dick move. I love it. It seems to me that this game is not so much about getting through the levels, but saving up resources for the final challenge. Throwing something at you that is entirely beyond anything youāve encountered before, makes the whole journey feel likeā¦ training? Puts it into perspective. My childish mind will always remember Super Mario Land 2 as a joyous romp through adventure wonderland, punctuated by a torturous nightmare.
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Hih. Well, like I sad, I remember almost nothing about Warioland! I beliee I sat and beat it in one afternoon. Isnāt there some ind of lady genie at the end? Like, you bottle or unbottle her? Pretty sure it was a straight run-through.
Nice TMKF-esqe longpost, btw. Donāt they feel good?
I only ever played through Survival/Stranded Kids once way back, but it always felt like I was only exploring a small section of the island in the game, so I guess that one felt like a pretty big GB game.
Wait, Warioland? I thought you were talking about Mario Land 2? Huh.
Longposts are exhausting to me. But also satisfactory, once Iām done and happy with them. (Which is hard, but sometimes I manage.)
Iād say that itās harder to make a good large thing, than it is to make a good small thing. Which is why I shouldnāt be so harsh on Wario Land 1ās excess. Or the quality of my longposts. Maybe.
Edit: As a case study, I just spoilered out, then edited out, then edited in, then edited out again, a long meandering piece about the nature of perfection.
Oh, Mario Land 2 is cake!
Something about how you wrote your response made me think you were talking about Warioland (which I also mentioned).
Yeah, itās hard for me to think of SML2 as difficult in any way. I see it as having intentional kids difficulty only a bit harder than Kirbyās Dreamland. ButāagaināI literally started playing the game at probably age 4 and after I hit that age when I was able to beat games I would just beat it end-on-end over and over, getting every hidden secret along the way. So, itās possible that itās more difficult than I think. But I was basically trained to play it from birth, soā¦
Warioās castle in SML2 is a serious difficulty spike and it caught me off-guard as a kid, too. I had to ask my friend to beat it. The rest of the game is easy-peasy, though.
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Oh, I just reread your post, and I get the confusion.
Yeah, I actually donāt have very strong memories of Warioās Castle. Halloween Land was def my favorite. Man, I love that gel that you can kind of float throughāit leads to lots of secrets.
Itās possible that Warioās castle did eat through lives for me, but itās so damn easy to get 99 lives in that game, because the end-level mini-games are so easy. And then you can trade in your coins for lives in that hill, right? Or is that a pseudo-gambling game? I remember that hill has something to do with multiplying your lives or something.
Anyway, Iāve always had a very hoarding-prone personality, so itās also possible that I would just exploit infinite life loops almost immediately and then just play through the whole game with 99 lives, possibly replenishing before Warioās castle. That seems like something I would have done.
I think I had a count of how many lives you could get out of one level. The hippo bubble level is probably the most, because itās got a ton of secrets. Just from memory, I think if you immediately go under water thereās a bunch of power ups and some extra lives. Then I know there are one or two hidden blocks. Thereās a few caches of power-ups/lives if you float through the sky. And then I think if you float all the way to the top right edge of the level you get a secret path to a bonus level where you can also get extra lives, at the end of which is probably a mini game where you can get more lives. So thatās at leastālikeāfive lives from that one level, except the minigame probably gives you a three-lifer. Or something. Itās all a bit hazy without the game in front of me, but that should make some sense if you remember the game.
Edit: Oh wait, I believe the hippo level actually contains 100 coins, or thereabouts. So I think that was part of the life-grinding appeal. I just remember spending lots of time in that level, being kind of bored, but also being obsessive about, āIf I just put in the boring work, I will have SO MANY LIVES.ā Glad I didnāt stick with that path in my video game playing.
Oh wait, couldnāt you just buy 45 lives if you saved an absurd amount of coins? I think I remember grinding to do that once, but I donāt think thatās how I beat the game the first few times. I think that was a, āWell, Iāve beaten this so many times, but maybe this is a goal I can achieveā sort of thing.
Either I was good enough that Warioās Castle wasnāt a bother or I just had so many lives it didnāt matter.
The game physics were a bit floaty, and everything was huge with full-sprite hit boxes. If it were a normal mario game I would be like, āI was just that good,ā but since SML2 is less precise, itās totally possible that I just burned through lives.
Ultima: Runes of Virtue II seems pretty infinite
Playing Aria of Sorrow on a Game Boy Micro.
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hey hereās a weird thought in that similar line: if itās estimated that soon after Castlevania: Symphony of the Night that the series adopted its fascination with plodding journeys through halls based more on open air-areas and number increasing than platforming and whipping, doesnāt that make the Gameboy Castelvaniaās sort of the last bastion of classic Castelvania design?
pretty sure thatās bloodlines and rondo, no?
Not sure itās been mentioned in this or any other thread, but there was a chart of the mutations that could occur from eating monster meat in FF Legend in a Game Boy Players Guide published by Nintendo Power around 1992.
Donāt know how accurate it was but it was interesting to look at. I also liked the maps in NP of a dungeon where all the rooms were shaped like body parts. Donāt remember if that was the original or one of the sequels.
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castlevania rebirth for the wii vc was the last classic style castlevania in 2009, although it was based on the first game boy game
besides that there was castlevania legends, the last game boy cv game, in 1997, a few months after symphony of the night came out
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Didnāt Iga have some kind of weird beef against Legends too?
yeah, kind of. he retconned a few games including Legends from the official timeline around the time of Lament of Innocence, and then put them all back in except for Legends years later, though as āside storiesā. he stated that it was because it conflicted with the continuity of the rest of the series, since the gameās plot initially established itself as the very first game in the timeline (and sonia, the main character, as the very first belmont (and alucard is there and became her love interest i think??)). also he said that itās not a very good game in general
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