Wario World (Nintendo GameCube on Switch 2 Review)

Wario World
Platform: Nintendo GameCube
Released June 20, 2003
Directed by  Kouichi Kimura & Hitoshi Yamagami
Developed by Treasure
Published by Nintendo
Available with Switch Online Expansion Pack EXCLUSIVELY on Switch 2

After Super Mario Sunshine, I guess I hadn’t gotten the idea of searching for treasure out of my system, so why not turn to THE treasure hunting Nintendo character? Plus, Wario World is actually made by Treasure, as in the legendary studio made out of Konami cast offs. Prior to Wario World, I’d only reviewed one other Treasure game: McDonald’s Treasure Land Adventure (yes, as in THAT McDonald’s) for the Sega Genesis that was seriously one of the best 16 bit platformers I’ve ever played. Go read McDonald’s Classic Video Games: The Definitive Review for that review. If Treasure didn’t phone-in a Ronald McDonald game, there’s no way they would do that with a Nintendo IP, right? RIGHT?!

Calling Wario World a 3D game is a little misleading. I don’t think it’s truly 3D most of the time. I’ve heard it described as 2.5D. I’ve heard comparisons to Crash Bandicoot. Either way, the game is framed so that it feels like a 2D game that has depth. “Isn’t that 3D?” No. It’s closer in gameplay to a top-down 16 bit game. A throwback to SNES/Genesis collect-a-thons, with a fixed camera angle that offers only a little wiggle room. When I say “fixed camera” I mean strictly the angle. The camera follows you, so don’t expect old school Resident Evil. Think more like a Zelda game or something like Super Mario RPG. There is absolutely no “looking around” in the levels themselves. You can view a little in front of you, and sometimes you can tilt the camera at a downward angle, but this type of looking:

Well, you just plain can’t do that in Wario World, and I never found a single instance in any level overworld where I found the limited camera options to be useful. Even a level based on using reflections in a mirror, where you’re specifically told to use the camera angles, I didn’t think it helped. Hell, changing the default camera angle usually made things worse. But that’s not always the case, as the bosses and puzzle rooms can feel closer to the type of 3D game that was well established in the early 2000s. Wario World has eight levels, and each level has eight trap doors that look like this:

Doing a butt stomp into the trap door takes you to a “puzzle room” and in those rooms, you can do a full 90 degree rotation of the camera. It’s still not a free camera, but you can also tilt the camera downward (never upward) or make the game take place entirely from a bird’s eye view, and sometimes it’s actually helpful.

So, right out of the starting gate, Wario World feels like a relic in terms of style of game. A massive, massive downgrade from the humongous levels of Super Mario Sunshine. But hell, it’s not 2003 anymore and I’m all about exploring different styles of games, so what might have hurt in 2003 just plain doesn’t matter in 2026. Despite that, I found Wario World to be a total slog and one of the worst Nintendo-published mascot games ever made. I literally can’t believe Treasure made this, because Wario World is f*cking boring.

For whatever reason, the game leans into Wario as a sluggish, lumbering oaf. Okay, so he’s fatter than Mario, but so what? He could jump and platform around every bit as good as Mario in Wario Land: Super Mario Land 3 and Virtual Boy Wario Land. Then, following those two games, for Wario Land 2 and 3 Nintendo turned the character into a high concept “you can never die” puzzle platforming experience where Wario changed form based on allowing enemies to hit him (I’ll review those soon).

So there’s a precedent that Wario is every bit as limber and capable at platforming heroics as Mario. That’s all out the window here. Wario can barely jump and the pitiful level layouts do well accommodating that, IE they’re not exciting to navigate at all. He also doesn’t spring off enemies and has to rely on ladders or these little balls scattered throughout the world to climb even small structures. Very rarely, you might use an enemy for climbing, but those moments are few and far between. It’s also one of the poorest controlling Nintendo games in that the timing feels….. off.

But Wario’s games are about finding treasure, right? Well, about that………

In Wario World, each of the game’s eight levels (not eight worlds. EIGHT LEVELS) has eight treasure rooms that are guaranteed to have a crystal in them, so 64 total red crystals. You need X amount of crystals to unlock a level’s exit and face the boss, but you’ll just naturally pass by enough puzzle room doors to get them if you don’t go for 100%. There’s also eight statue pieces per level, some of which are in the puzzle rooms and some of which are “hidden” on the levels. Another 64 things. There’s eight separate treasures per level that have to first be spawned by hitting their corresponding button and then locating the platform the chest is on:

And sometimes the buttons are up against a wall and have to be activated by having an enemy thrown at them. So I’ll call it 64 for the buttons + 64 for the treasures themselves. Finally, there’s five elf things trapped in boxes in each level, and again, sometimes they’re in the overworld and sometimes they’re in the puzzle rooms. There’s forty in total and, apparently, they’re the only thing that changes the ending. As per tradition, Wario World has multiple “endings” though your reward for 100%ing the game is a f*cking static screen of Wario sitting on a throne.

Oh f*ck off with that lazy sh*t. Seriously, really?!

But the journey is the reward or whatever. 64 + 64 + 64 + 64 + 40 = 296 total things to find in Wario World. Gosh, that sounds like quite the treasure hunt, right? Yeah, no, as maybe two dozen total things require a little bit of off-the-beaten-path searching to locate them. Most of the crap you’re looking for you’ll pass along the one and only main path in each level, with MAYBE a small hint of having to walk up and down to spot something.

If it actually requires searching, it’s not THAT much searching or backtracking. Sometimes you’ll pass a treasure platform and then the button for it is a little further up ahead. If the elf boxes or statue pieces aren’t in levels themselves, you’ll probably find them right next to the crystal in the puzzle rooms. It’s baffling. Less than a handful of times, the puzzle rooms separate the crystal from whatever the other reward is, but not in a way where you have to do additional challenging things.

And the puzzle rooms are completely toothless bores. If you fall off the edge in those rooms, there’s NO punishment besides having to start over. You don’t lose any health. They’re the most rudimentary of platforming challenges. Maybe two or three out of sixty-four in the game put up an actual fight or made me stop and think about how to tackle them. And locating them isn’t exactly hard. Because the levels are fairly linear in their layout and branching paths don’t branch off too far, I could count on one hand how many times I needed to actually look around to find things I missed.

Thankfully, if you miss stuff and need to restart a stage to 100% it, you can quit and return to the hub as soon as you gather the treasure and it still counts. So, total times I needed to significantly backtrack? Twice in the entire game: once in the second level for a single statue piece and once in the Christmas/ice theme because there’s a slope that you can’t climb up once you’ve passed them. It took me like five minutes to get what I was missing. The rest of the stuff I got just by spotting it through normal progression. The treasure hunt is a complete failure.

So if that’s the case, what’s even the point of Wario World? They seem to have been aiming to make a brawler-platforming hybrid. The game constantly spawns the same tiny handful of enemies that are reskinned to look different on each level, but functionally they’re the same two or three basic enemies you were introduced to at the start of the game. You can punch and tackle them to kill the smallest ones. The medium or large ones have to be “finished off” by using a power move.

By the way, this clip is the entire Wario World experience in a nutshell: fighting the same couple reskinned basic enemies you met less than a minute into the first level while you “locate” a chest full of coins, a puzzle door and a treasure chest just by literally crossing paths with them along the level’s main path. Astonishing in how uninspired it is, really.

I’d say the brawling was probably the main focus, except it’s just too limited. When enemies are seeing stars, this indicates you can pick them up and do a power move. For example, you can jump in the air and do a piledriver, which not only kills the thing you’re smashing but does splash damage to everything around it. It’s the quickest and lowest effort of the power moves. Or, if you’re stupid, you can throw them, but this has to be charged up and aimed. The piledriver doesn’t require charging or aiming. Just pick-up, jump, and press a button for maximum splash damage to everything around you. You can also swing them, and I’ll get to that. But that’s the extent of the combat.

Now the game does reward you with coins for throwing enemies at other enemies or hitting piledrivers off higher and higher ledges, but coins are literally everywhere. The infinitely repawning enemies drop them, and if you leave a puzzle room and come back to it, all the coins are restored and the treasures you got out of it are replaced with chests full of coins. But unlike previous Wario games, coins don’t boost the ending you get. Neither do the statue pieces, which instead increase your health by a half heart if you get all eight out of a level. The treasures are useless on the Nintendo Switch 2 since, on the GameCube, they unlock samples of MicroGames from WarioWare Inc.:  Mega MicroGame$. The only thing that affects the ending is the boxes with the elves. So combat is both the focus of the game and usually unnecessary towards progress. After a while, I found myself avoiding combat sections.

Technically the game is split into four worlds that each have two levels and a big boss, but the worlds have no connecting themes at all. Like, the final world starts with a magic mirror level, and then the final level of the game is a totally uninspired Ancient Egypt theme. AND BY THE WAY, TREASURE: the desert/Egypt theme is very well established as a mid-game theme. Especially in the Mario universe, where Wario, like it or not, will forever be compared to. You can’t end a game on a desert level. It makes an already short game feel downright sawed off.

And what’s frustrating is none of the levels feel like they have their own personality, with two exceptions and one of those doesn’t last. The first is a creepy circus level. Oooh, that’s a titillating theme for a Wario game. Imagine what you could do with it! Except, again, almost all the enemies are just reskins of the same enemies you’ve been fighting from the start. Same attack patterns, same weaknesses, different looks, and that muffles the potential for the theme to land because if the enemies are just a facade, logically the set dressing will feel like a facade too. And that’s exactly what happens. Then, halfway through the level, it turns into a generic city theme anyway. Look! This screenshot is from the circus level!

It’s like they ran out of ideas for a circus so they just stopped. Wario World is like drinking a glass of flat soda. There is something missing with the experience. There’s no pizazz. No kick to it. All the levels feel samey because the themes are superficial and mostly feature the same kind of enemies and puzzle rooms you’ve been fighting all along. The mirror level is the most notable stage in that you’re supposed to use your reflection to navigate, and for about ten seconds, it does an interesting thing where you can only see enemies by their reflection. It sounds great, but the actual level design isn’t ambitious at all. It’s so basic that it makes you realize they never actually got far past the “use your reflection to navigate” pitch. It’s basic, because they didn’t really think it through.

That’s just so lame, you know? Not once in the entire game did I look at something and say “that was really clever” or “that was really elegantly crafted.” That last one really bugs me. You expect Nintendo publish games to be elite in terms of craftsmanship. Maybe they thought “well, it’s Wario so we don’t need elegance.” The character is inelegant. Fine. But the worlds Wario has been established to explore have always been thoughtfully designed. They didn’t bother with that here.

For me, the swinging attack is the element that shows they just didn’t care. Knocked out enemies can be picked up and swung around, taking out other enemies or activating switches. The game leans so heavily into this that almost every level has a segment where you’re locked into fighting wave after wave of enemies for 60 seconds, usually with columns nearby in order to do the spin attack (even though some enemies block literally every shot from them). But you have to physically rotate the control stick, so it doesn’t happen instantly. And then they incorporated it into the navigation, like so:

In that clip, I didn’t slip off the platform, but you can, and it’s actually easy to do so. To do these things, I had to literally place my controller down and then spin the analog stick because anything shy of spinning perfectly will likely cause you to wobble off. At other times, there’s dials that you have to rotate, sometimes clockwise and sometimes counter clockwise. Using enemies to solve puzzles is fine, but the cartoonish violence vibe they were aiming for doesn’t land at all because the controls are so fickle and sloppy. There’s no joy in these moments.

So the treasure hunt is a total fail. The combat is repetitive and pointless. The levels feel hollow, with poorly executed themes. What else could they possibly f*ck up? Well, it’s Treasure and Treasure makes awesome bosses, so SURELY they didn’t screw up the bosses? Actually, Wario World’s bosses are some of the most janky and inelegant I’ve ever played against. This is where I actively question if Treasure’s heart was in this or if this whole game was a holdover from the PS1 era that they inserted Wario into years later or what (apparently this came about because Nintendo and Treasure enjoyed making Sin & Punishment together). Each level has a boss at the end, and then every world has an additional boss, then there’s a final boss. So how many bosses are good? One, and it ain’t the first big boss, which is this thing:

I was totally pumped when I saw the huge scale of it, but then the actual battle feels like an enemy that’s much smaller. The only addition to the normal combat is having to grab its tail and do a butt stomp to it. You don’t really do anything all that clever to fight it. Most bosses you still cause damage by picking up and doing the throw or piledriver to them. You might have to wait for an opening, but the combat feels, more or less, identical to the exhausting and repetitive combat that wore out its welcome during the levels.

And this somewhat hurts when the game does do clever bits. That mirror level I talked about? That stage’s boss is a play on the “follow the cup” thing that’s usually a bonus game in these types of releases. I’ve never seen it turned into a boss battle. Cool. After you do the normal punches to the boss and avoid his attack, he’ll retreat to one of three cups. Then the cups mix up and you have to follow it and select the right cup. Oh, and he’ll hide inside the correct cup so after selecting it, you then have to punch the cup in the air to knock him out of it. They should have made THIS the damaging move, but they’re really committed to the “mad moves” bit so you have to pick him up and piledrive him here (or do a charged-up throw).

But the bosses don’t scale right either, and sometimes the big bosses don’t feel any more or less special than the stage bosses. Like the second big boss is a two headed dragon that you punch like a basic enemy, then get out of the way and let the other head fry it. I didn’t even realize I was doing damage to this because it’s one of the few enemies you don’t execute the power moves to.

The actual battle features sloppy attack patterns and strange timing between the two heads. And besides that, the scope of the battle doesn’t feel bigger than the two stage bosses you need to beat to unlock it. While I don’t think either fight is particularly good, they were a lot more memorable in their character models and just plain better as boss fights because they felt a little less sloppy. Look at the screenshot above and then look at the two below. Would you be able to guess which is the world boss if I hadn’t already told you?

So Wario World was a total letdown for me. I actually had this when I was a kid and I remembered basically nothing about it outside the piledriver. I don’t think I ever played past the second level, but I didn’t remember it being bad, exactly. I think it’s in the same boat as Luigi’s Mansion: one of those games I put off playing because nothing about the first couple stages held my attention. But, unlike Luigi’s Mansion, I think I always assumed it would get better and I just wasn’t far enough along. Boy, was I wrong. I was SO bored playing this in 2026. I was hoping it was a slow riser that would eventually make me nod and say “okay, they had SOME inspiration.”

Instead, Wario World comes across as one of the most cynical Nintendo releases, and probably Treasure’s worst game (though I’m going to need to review a lot more to certify that). At best, Wario World feels unfinished and uninspired. At worst? Hell, the worst thing I can say about it is the worst thing I can say about any game: it has no heart at all. It clearly doesn’t come from a place of inspiration. It exists to fill out a release schedule. You can tell from the puzzle rooms alone, because they’re so interchangeable and lack any imagination or stakes.

It’s like they didn’t have enough ideas to fill eight per level. Then don’t make it a hard rule that each level must have eight. You know, in Wario Land: Super Mario Land 3 and Virtual Boy Mario Land, there was no guarantee a level had one of the game’s treasures, and that made locating a piece of treasure a little more special. They didn’t shoehorn one into every level for the sake of a checklist. Incredibly, the relatively primitive Game Boy or Virtual Boy adventures with the same character have way more personality in their settings than a less technically limited game made by two of the most revered companies in gaming. Wario World has no charm, no personality, and given the circumstances, I’d be hard pressed to name a more disappointing video game.
Verdict: NO!
Let’s face it: the only thing anyone remembers about this game is the pause music.