Wai Wai World 2: SOS!! Parsley Jō (Famicom Review)

Wai Wai World 2: SOS!! Parsley Jō
Platform: Famicom
Released January 5, 1991
Developed by Konami
Never Released Outside of Japan
NO MODERN RELEASE

It looks like it’s going to be so much fun. Sigh.

Hoo, boy this is awkward. A lot of my friends have very different taste in games than me. While I was suffering through the first Wai Wai World, people I like and trust assured me that the sequel would be a lot of fun and to not worry about it. So, I didn’t. I really did have faith this was going to blow my socks off. Well, my socks are still firmly attached to my feet and I’m so darn butt hurt about it I could spit nails. So, it falls to me to knock YOUR socks off. Let’s see if this statement does it. Ahem. I really hated the first Wai Wai World, but I’d rather play it than this sequel because this is one of the most boring competent games I’ve ever played in my entire life. Wai Wai 2 is mechanically fine and it’s dull.

Instead of the possibility of playing as every character in a single run, you’re limited to only three of five Konami all-stars, which are.. you know what? F*ck it. There’s no point in even saying what characters are included or what games they’re from because they don’t feel anything like the original characters.

This is NOTHING like the first Wai Wai World. That’s all I really knew about Wai Wai 2 going into it. I never looked at a screenshot, and if I played this when I ran through hundreds of NES ROMs a few years back, I don’t remember it. So, when I saw the look of the game, my first visceral reaction was “eww.” It’s not what I was hoping for. Wai Wai 2 reminded me of Kid Dracula, which I liked just fine. It’s an okay game, but that art direction worked for it, and I’m over it. For this franchise, I wanted something that resembled the sprites from the Konami library, not hyper-cute versions of them like Kid Dracula did. It’s what the first Wai Wai World did and what I thought I was signing up for. But, I kept my mind open, at least until the gameplay slammed it shut with one of the most intolerable opening stages ever.

Look! It’s the guy from Contra! I mean, it doesn’t look like him or play like him even a little bit. You can’t even shoot the gun diagonally. None of the iconic power-ups that made Contra an all-time classic are along for the ride, which would be the only reason anyone in their right mind would want to play as the guy from Contra in a non-Contra game. Allegedly the spread gun is here somewhere, but I didn’t see it, and it wouldn’t have helped in THIS game. Even with just the basic gun, he’s so overpowered that he takes what little stakes there are out of the game completely. Calling this the Contra guy is jiggling a key chain at its worst.

Unlike the first game, this is a completely linear ten level genre mash-up that opens with one of the slowest auto-scrolling platform stages I’ve played. An introductory stage that has no excitement at all. I’ve never used the fast forward function on my emulator as early as I did here, and then I kept going back to it because there’s so much dead air where nothing is happening because the screen isn’t so much scrolling forward as it is eroding forward. I’m not a big fan of auto-scrolling platforming in general. I can tolerate it, but not when it’s this slow and nothing happens. The enemies are easily dispatched and the game continues to inch forward. When the stage was still going on minutes later, even though I frequently fast-forwarding, mind you, I really started to become afraid the whole game would be like this. When the second stage allowed me to actually do the scrolling, it was such a relief. “Well, at least the auto-scrolling is finished.” And then, later in the game, this happened:

By the way, that robot is the main character, with all the Konami all-stars being like power-ups you switch to.

That is a screenshot from the slowest and most boring auto-scrolling stage in the entire history of video games. LOOK HOW SLOW IT SCROLLS! Who the hell play tested this? Did they think it was exciting? Did they think this was fun? Now, the stages where you actually do the scrolling aren’t the worst levels in game history, but they are very boring. The designers seem to have overcorrected the difficulty problem of the first Wai Wai World, because this sequel is completely toothless. I never died once during the platforming segments, even though I was braining myself on the spikes in the slow-moving swimming stage above. Besides one boss fight, I don’t think I ever had more than one or two hearts worth of damage. I can’t imagine playing this co-op, because it sure seems like one of the two players is going to have nothing to do for all but one level. There’s not enough meat in these levels for one player, let alone two.

I feel like this is the embodiment of the Leonardo DiCaprio pointing at the TV meme. I too recognize that scene with three coffins from Castlevania III. Jiggle jiggle.

Instead of switching on the fly between the different characters and using them to get past character-specific obstacles, this is just a pure, mindless action platformer where the all-stars are glorified power-ups. You collect an item that turns on a meter that swaps between the three icons of your Konami all-stars loadout. When you press UP and A on the one you want, you switch to that character for the next sixty seconds. Oh, and you’re now invincible. For sixty seconds. Not even fast counting Punch-Out!!-like seconds, either. Granted, if you take damage, it takes a few seconds off the countdown. That doesn’t matter though. This is a seriously cinchy game. I’m not even kidding when I say this is like a baby’s game.

Most (if not all) platforming bosses can easily be beaten by mindlessly slashing at them. I’ve found that a reliable barometer for how mindful a game’s developers are of the type of game they’re making can be found in how much effort a boss takes to dispatch. If you can literally walk up to one the first time  you ever play it and, without making any effort to dodge its attacks, defeat it by simply mashing a button with no regard for how much damage you’re taking by doing that, that’s usually reflective of the game being a product of developers who simply didn’t give a sh*t. Don’t mistake what I just said for easy. It’s not the same. An example of an easy boss is the first Bowser in Super Mario Bros. You still have to actually have timing, especially the first time you ever fight it. Some proactive step has to be taken instead of just not caring what happens to you because you’re going to outlast it regardless.

But even if you do take damage while wearing one of the all-stars, there’s so many power-ups that start that meter. Even if you’re already wearing an all-star, you can start the meter going by grabbing an item, wait for the count down to get low, and activate it for the same character again. By the end of Wai Wai 2, the game is giving you the items for that meter seemingly every screen, allowing you, in essence, unlimited invincibility. On top of that, there’s “health boxes” which reset the timer to 60 seconds. Someone got paid for this idea, and someone else got paid to say “good idea!” to that person, and someone else got paid even more to agree with the second person and green light the first person’s idea.

In addition to the platforming segments, there are also a bunch of one-off distractions from the mediocre platforming along the way. Like, the lead-up to the Castlevania stage is basically Frogger. It lasts under a minute, but it’s better than anything in the platforming stages. And for you shmup fans, don’t worry, I’m getting to that. It’s the only good part of the game.

Of course, having so many of these all-star switchers are probably there to accommodate co-op because, as always, co-op ruins everything. Even taking co-op into consideration, the game abandons the idea of the items being special by the end of the game. I couldn’t keep up with all the meter-starters in the last few levels and didn’t bother trying, but they seem to have forgotten about the 60 second timers. I don’t think I took a single hit of damage for the back half the game, at least in the platforming stages. It’s like Wai Wai 2 gets stuck in God Mode, and God Modes get old fast. You just can’t design a game like this and expect it to be enjoyable, you know?

This would have been neat if Kid Dracula didn’t also do a similar Castlevania, only with much more fun play mechanics. Or if I want to play something like Castlevania, I could just, you know, play Castlevania. I thought the point of Wai Wai was to play Castlevania with the Contra guy, and it’s actually THE Contra guy, with the sprites from Contra and the controls from Contra. That’s the game we all want, right? That’s quirky and weird, especially if you play it completely straight.

I feel like they just had the wrong overall concept for the platforming bits, which make up over half the game. It’s such basic, generic level design with no-frills combat. The closest any Konami game comes to this isn’t actually Kid Dracula. It’s the NES Tiny Toons, another overrated Konami game that’s all style and no substance. What was even the point of doing a sequel to Wai Wai World that doesn’t feel even a little like the first? I didn’t like it, but it does have fans and, at the very least, I’m very intrigued by the concept. I feel like this couldn’t possibly appeal to whatever fans the first game made, but at the same time, this feels so disconnected from the other Konami characters being honored that I’m not even sure why they bothered with this game at all. The platforming stuff is all pure digital boredom and I have nothing positive to say about it, but at least there’s a couple very, very good shmup stages.

A comically gigantic version of the iconic Big Core MK I from Gradius is the highlight of the entire game. It’s very cool and actually very challenging. When I wasn’t capturing screenshots, I lost several lives fighting it. You’d swear these segments are a different game entirely. They basically are. Crying shame that they’re stuck in Wai Wai World 2.

Unlike the first Wai Wai game, the shooting stages actually feel like the real games that inspired them. Specifically TwinBee, which is the third stage and Gradius/Salamander, which is the eighth stage. Both of those are “branching paths” but what that means is if you play the game a second time (or reload a save state to return to the level select screen, which is what I did), you can play a different course. This only happens with the shmup stages. I don’t know why they didn’t cut or merge some of the platforming stages and then have every other stage be a shmup, since they’re really fun. I’m not so much into TwinBee, but it’s alright and so are its levels in this. But I’m a huge fan of the whole Gradius format, and both the stages and the encounter with the giant Big Core are every bit as good as the franchise deserves. It’s basically a slightly less silly version of Parodius.

I literally sat up in my chair when the game transitioned to third-person in the TwinBee section, but it was a massive letdown. This is only a bonus stage that feels like After Burner, and all you do is get bells, and here, you can only juggle the bells into one color instead of many. There’s also no enemies. I was really hoping for a boss fight. I’m about to play somewhere around a dozen TwinBee games for a Konami Shmup Definitive Review, and I wouldn’t mind seeing more of this, as long as it does more.

There’s one other branching-path segment that allows you to choose between doing something that kind of resembles a sliding puzzle, only without the normal sliding puzzle rules, or a car driving level. The puzzle was bizarre only because, while you solve it, you occasionally have to switch the position of a character that has a train heading for her. It’s not hard and just adds busy work to the puzzle experience, but it was different. The car level was somewhat close in both look and feel to the Autopia level from Adventures in the Magic Kingdom, which is shockingly one of the most popular reviews I’ve ever written. It controls looser, has projectiles, manual jumps, a boss fight, and it’s much more challenging, but it still feels similar. In fact, when I reached that stage, I wondered if Magic Kingdom was the game that inspired Wai Wai 2. Magic Kingdom had large, hyper-cute characters and basic platforming. The difference between the two games is that one is the platforming is just better done in Magic Kingdom. No boring auto-scrolling helps.

It’s not hard to figure out why Wai Wai World didn’t take as a franchise. It feels like the first game created an amazing set of blueprints to build off of. You never know! Who imagined after playing the first Grand Theft Auto that it would go on to become one of the biggest things in gaming? For all we know, Wai Wai had that breakout potential, and Konami squandered it by seemingly choosing a team that didn’t get the joke of the first game. The idea of a dead-serious cross-over like Wai Wai World is kind of funny by itself. The first game would have been charming if not for the plethora of technical problems. This sequel isn’t charming. It feels like it’s trying too hard to be irreverent and quirky. Going over the top with the wacky sprites and completely changing how the roster of all-stars is implemented so that they no longer feel remotely connected to the games they came from feels like it betrays the entire concept of the first game. And the designers didn’t even stand by their convictions, because they stuck so closely to the TwinBee/Gradius formula for those stages that they feel like they were stolen from other games instead of belonging to this one. I think a ROM hack could save the first Wai Wai World, but this? I don’t think it came from a place of inspiration. It feels cynical, and I can’t forgive it for that.
Verdict: NO!

THE INDIE GAMER CHICK CASTLEVANIA REVIEW SERIES
 Castlevania (NES) Dracula’s Curse (NES) Adventure (GB) Belmont’s Revenge (GB)
Super Castlevania IV (SNES) Dracula X (SNES) Rondo of Blood (SuperCD²)
Chronicles (PSX) Circle of the Moon (GBA)  Kid Dracula (NES) Kid Dracula (GB)
ROM Hacks (NES) Konami Wai Wai World (NES) Wai Wai World 2: SOS!! Parsley Jō (NES)

I honestly forgot this was in the game. After the auto-scrolling in level one, you do this shmup section where you can shoot both ways. It’s as forgettable as the platforming segments.