Wario Land: Shake It! (Wii Review)

Wario Land: Shake It!
aka Wario Land: The Shake Dimension (Europe) or Wario Land Shake (Japan)
Platform: Nintendo Wii
Released July 24, 2008
Directed by Madoka Yamauchi
Developed by Good-Feel
Published by Nintendo
NEVER BEEN RE-RELEASED

It’s almost hard to believe it’s been over eighteen years since Wario starred in a non-WarioWare game, but it’s true! Shake It! for Wii could very well be the finale of the Wario Land franchise. And, it’s kind of easy to see why. While I’m a huge fan of Wario Land: Super Mario Land 3 and Virtual Boy Wario Land, the series had seen better days in the 2000s. A Nintendo DS game, Wario: Master of Disguise is among the least popular Nintendo mascot titles. Wario World got a “mixed response” and personally, I hated it. Wario Land: Shake It got a lot of 7 out of 10s when it released, which might not sound too bad until you remember that the scale for first party Nintendo games bottoms out at 7 and goes (10) excellent (9) good (8) okay (7) the driver of the car that ran over your dog.

Wario Land: Shake It! is one of the rare games where the main gimmick is “look how damn pretty this is!” I’d say Shake It is all style and no substance, except the style might actually be part of the problem. With character design and animation from the famous anime studio Production I.G, it seems good looking, but by the time I finished the game, I no longer believed even that. The first reason is that Wario Land: Shake It is kind of barren. The variety of enemies, set pieces, and hazards leaves a lot to be desired, which I guess is the price you pay when you have a non-gaming studio hand animate everything. The weird thing is, Shake It! has a fairly large assortment of unused enemies, some of which were the typical “early versions of existing enemies” but some of which looked pretty ambitious. Since the levels often feel empty and lifeless, more things to smack around or dodge probably would have helped. Alas.

The other main gimmick is the variety of motion controls, back when those were still new and annoying, as opposed to now where they’re tired and annoying. Like the name suggests, most of the motion controls are just shaking the controller. When you use Wario’s normal dash attack on a money bag, you get a single coin out of it. But if you pick up the bag and shake it, coins literally spray out it for a second or two. That really sucked as an idea, by the way, since the coins vanish into thin air after too short a span. You can also shake the hell out of enemies, which for the normal baddies usually results in them dropping life refills. A few other enemies need to be shaken to solve puzzles, though “solve puzzles” requires quote marks that are suing me for working overtime.

In addition to several other reasons to shake the controller, shaking is also how you cause little earthquakes. That’s what the -W- meter at the top of the screen is, and it’s basically the game’s main move. If you’re not shaking the controller, you’re probably tilting it left or right. That’s how you aim where you throw, which is the f*cking worst. Even late in the game, with plenty of experience, I still found this to be clunky and unreliable. Like seriously, I regret using Wii controllers for this review. After beating the game, I tried a few levels and bosses with a normal controller and motion controls mapped to analog sticks (and “shaking” mapped to a button) and it played so much better. I mean, it didn’t exactly save the game or even close, but it didn’t suck to play it anymore.

And there’s also a handful of gimmicky vehicles that use the tilt controls, the main one of which is a submarine that has three out of the twenty main levels devoted to it. Those levels play like shmups crossed with the dam level from Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles on the NES IF that was played with tilt controls and they’re just the absolute pits. One of these would have been barely tolerable, as the combat is lackluster and the level design is repetitive. Having three of them, none of which are locked as bonus stages, is f*cking unhinged. I can’t stress enough that all three submarine levels are lowlights in a game that already doesn’t have very many highlights. There’s a couple rarer contraptions like a mine cart or a jetpack that aren’t so bad, but they also don’t have full stages dedicated to them. Well, actually the Jetpack does (apparently it’s actually a bucket) but it’s locked as a bonus stage.

Which actually brings me to both the best and the worst part of Wario Land: Shake It: a whopping twelve levels are “bonus levels” that you have to find items to unlock. There’s only twenty non-bonus levels in the game not counting the tutorial level and the six boss fights. It reminded me of Super Princess Peach, which has roughly the same percentage of bonus levels (a little over one-third of the total levels in game) AND, like with Super Princess Peach, the level design is mostly a boring, overly-simple slog until you get to those bonus levels, where the developers finally pulled the stick out of their ass. It’s too bad they hid the maps that unlock the bonus levels in utterly arbitrary locations, like so:

Yeah, there’s actually an item that unlocks a whole extra level in the above screenshot. After you give the ground a good fisting, it just appears out of thin air.

I’m sorry, but that’s lame as f*ck. There’s absolutely no way to logic-out the locations of the twelve bonus stage maps. In fact, you have to wait until after you beat the game to even know which levels have the bonus stage maps. Also, after beating the game, the maps will suddenly be marked by having the ground sparkle where they’re at.

And yeah, the best levels in the game, by far, are the bonus levels. That’s not a virtue, by the way. I, for one, think it’s f*cking annoying that any game makes you have to work to get to the good stuff. There was also a better unlock method. Each level has three hidden treasure chests. Like I said with Wario World, I preferred how Super Mario Land 3 and VB Wario Land handled treasures: NOT EVERY LEVEL HAD THEM! It actually gave the game a treasure hunt vibe and made collecting a treasure piece feel like a big moment. If they insisted on having three for every level, make that one of the unlock conditions for the bonus stages.

There’s also “missions” in Wario Land: Shake It that are often there for the sake of forcing replays of levels that I, frankly, would never want to play again. I mean, they bored me the first time with their complete lack of challenge and emptiness. I did make a good faith effort at first to play along and complete all the goals. Things like “finish a level with X amount of coins” or “beat the stage without taking damage.” But then there’s things like this:

I’ll call your attention to the goal of beating the stage without falling into the water. Because, if you also want to nab all three treasures in that stage, you actually cannot beat the stage without falling into the water. I don’t mean “it makes it harder.” I mean it’s physically impossible. This is one of many stages that you can’t gloriously 100% on your first try, so I just quit caring. (shrug) Don’t take it personal, missions. I also quit trying to get every treasure too.

I might have gone back and at least grabbed all 99 treasures, but this game blocks you from quitting the stage once you’ve gotten the things you missed. You actually have to finish the stages for it to count. If Wario World had been the same way, I wouldn’t have aced it, either. There doesn’t seem to be an alternative ending for this Wario game and thus there’s no real incentive to get all the treasures or missions besides the satisfaction of a checkmark for a level that probably bored me in a game that I didn’t really like at all. When the levels are bland, you have to give me a better reason than a checkmark to replay them.

Shake It needed peppier combat, a LOT more enemies and better level themes. Honestly, I don’t know what the point was in hiring a movie studio to do the graphics. None of the facades are convincing because they’re all so generic and bland. Like, yeah, the character sprites are great. But look at level themes.

This slideshow requires JavaScript.

They’re not all that bland or generic, but most of them are. It reminded me of Road Runner cartoons, where apparently the only creatures that exist are the ones on the screen. I don’t buy for one moment that these levels are part of a populated ecosystem. And it has nothing to do with the decision to have an anime look. Plenty of games have the same style and do a better job creating atmosphere with it. The problem is the art direction, instead of coming from a place of inspiration, feels like a sales gimmick to make up for an uninspired game. Compare it to how Wario games looked when the series started.

The two YES! games seen above were made with vastly inferior technology and VERY limited color palettes.

And yet, they both feel more real and more alive than a game with artwork made by one of the most critically acclaimed animation production companies in the world. They might as well have saved money and just made the game with sprites. At least that way, they could have done a better job of fine-tuning the gameplay. Then again, Wario Land: Shake It needed a personality transplant in general. There’s no power-ups and only two “transformations” in Shake It, which is really odd for the 2D Wario franchise. The previous three Wario Land games were heavily based around “transforming” Wario into different forms to solve puzzles. That really only happens in this game by dumping snow on him or setting his ass on fire. I mean that literally, and eventually he’ll become engulfed in flames and be able to burn through fire blocks.

But the fire moments are quite limited, and the ice ones are even more so (that’s fine, as those were no good). The other main gameplay hook is the “exciting” escape sequence that caps off every level. Once you reach the end goal, an alarm sounds and  you have to get to the door, usually with the aid of pipes that launch you. The idea isn’t really that fresh, as they copied from Rare’s Saber Wulf. I don’t know if the original PC version did that, but the Game Boy title I had as a teenager did it, and did it much better Shake It. The best usage of the escape in this game is when two of the levels are based entirely around the escape. But the problem is, you guessed it: both those are bonus levels that have to be unlocked.

So yeah, I think Wario Land: Shake It! is pretty bad. Hell, I said “it looks good” while playing it but I’m not even sure I agree with that. Who cares how good the backgrounds or enemies look when they have no personality and the levels are so samey and wrong for the franchise? Again, when the Virtual Boy is curb stomping you in the looks department AND turning in a superior game, something is badly wrong. But look at this:

I honestly think that one screenshot has more personality and charm than the entire game of Wario Land: Shake It. It feels more finely crafted. It’s almost paradoxical, isn’t it? Wario Land: Shake It was almost certainly the most expensive production in the Wario franchise, but it doesn’t feel expensive or hi-tech. It feels cheap. It feels rushed. It feels completely uninspired. It feels generic. It’s lacking in charm. So the already weak gameplay and flat, dull level design is made even worse by the art style.

In short: Wario Land: Shake It! is BORING. So boring it likely killed the franchise for good. Okay, so I do kind of have a hunch we might see a 4K remastering of Wario Land: Shake It! on Switch 2 in the near future. It’s exactly the type of Wii game they re-release these days as a schedule filler. But I’d honestly rather they just make a new game.

I don’t know how Nintendo lost their way with Wario, but with games like this, Wario: Master of Disguise and Wario World, it’s easy to see why they moved completely onto the WarioWare franchise for this character. It really does seem like Wario Land is a dead franchise, but it doesn’t have to be. What do the three middling-at-best games I just listed have in common? None of them were made by Nintendo. Wario World was made by Treasure, this was made by Good-Feel, and the putrid Master of Disguise was made by Suzak Inc. Now, as a reminder, Wario Land as a concept was so good it usurped Mario Land as Nintendo’s premier 2D handheld franchise. I mean, holy crap! Do you realize what an accomplishment that is?!

Those first five Wario Land games (1 – 4 + the Virtual Boy game), aka the ones good enough to END the Mario Land franchise for multiple generations, were made by Nintendo R&D 1, which today would be Nintendo EPD. The series didn’t fall down the crapper until Nintendo started passing it off to other companies that didn’t seem to understand the character or the design mentality that made the series work. You know what I think? A treasure hunt like Super Mario Odyssey or Donkey Kong Bananza starring Wario could be sick. I don’t think the Wario Land franchise is dead. I think it’s homesick.
Verdict: NO!