The Legend of Zelda: The Wind Waker (Nintendo GameCube on Switch 2 Review)

August 14, 2025 by 2 Comments

The Legend of Zelda: The Wind Waker
Platform: Nintendo GameCube
Released December 13, 2002 (Japan) March 23, 2003 (US)
Directed by Eiji Aonuma
Developed by Nintendo
Available with Switch Online Expansion Pack EXCLUSIVELY on Switch 2
Listing at Zelda Wiki

I had my family convinced that was my mascot. They were VERY impressed, until I couldn’t stop giggling and they realized I was having fun. “I’ve been bitching this whole time about how it wouldn’t have killed them to fix this stuff and you think they went in and put Sweetie in a 2003 video game?”

Dear Nintendo fans: please put down your pitchforks and torches and rest assured I’m giving Wind Waker a YES! When it’s fun, it’s really fun. Okay?

I’m trying to preemptively calm down the superfans so that, when I say “I seem to remember Wind Waker being better than it actually is” they don’t tar and feather me. I like it. It’s fun. It’s just far from perfect. It’s definitely a noteworthy release, as Wind Waker ended up with more perfect scores than Nadia Comăneci (I promise you, that’s A LOT of perfect scores), including the fourth ever perfect score from Famitsu. It’s also probably Nintendo’s most controversial game ever, at least pre-release. For my younger fans who have no clue what I’m talking about, everything I’m about to tell you, as stupid and trivial as it sounds, I promise you is 100% real. It all started when the Nintendo GameCube’s graphics technology was first shown off in August of 2000 at an event called Space World. This sizzle reel included a very brief clip of Link fighting Ganon that looked like the logical evolution of the graphical style seen in Ocarina of Time and Majora’s Mask.

These days, we dismissively call a lot of games “tech demos” but what you’re seeing above is a legitimate industry tech demo, and nothing more. It wasn’t an announcement of a new Zelda game. It wasn’t even a real video game. It was a pre-rendered example of what graphics on GameCube would look like, but it got fans excited. I had just turned 11 the previous month and I was one of them. Ocarina of Time was one of my favorite games. In fact, I loved OOT so much that I was begging my parents to let me import a copy of Majora’s Mask from Japan because the thought of waiting six extra months to play it was agonizing (Majora’s Mask came out in April, 2000 in Japan and October, 2000 in the US). They said no, by the way. I was spoiled, but not to the point that they gave into my every whim. They wanted to teach me patience, but I think they just didn’t love me enough. (sniffle) Anyway, when I saw the Space World footage, I was chomping at the bit just like everyone else. Sure, I thought the GameCube was f*cking dumb looking, and I still do. Sorry, Nintendo fans. And then there was Nintendo’s decision not to use DVDs and instead go with these little baby-sized “optic discs.” You’d swear Nintendo had entered into some kind of Brewster’s Millions-like “lose money deliberately” pact. You think I’m joking. I’m not. At 2001’s Space World event, the first OFFICIAL trailer for the next Zelda game was shown. Did they announce a new Zelda game that looks like the tech demo above? Nope. They showed the world this trailer:

And the gaming community lost its f*cking mind. Infamously, the above trailer was mockingly called “Cel-Da” because it was one of the first games to use the new-at-the-time (well, to gaming at least) cel shading technique. I wasn’t one of the angry people. I was more baffled than anything else. The GameCube already looked so damn weird compared to the PS2 or the newly announced Microsoft Xbox, which also looked kind of dorky itself but the graphics and tech and the emphasis on out of the box online play (which didn’t end up happening until a year after it launched) was enough to get anyone hyped. My reaction to the above trailer was “jeez, Nintendo just has to be weird, don’t they?” The whole thing made it feel like they were pissy that they’d lost industrial leadership to Sony and their response was to lean even heavier into changing their core franchises. The big three for GameCube turned Metroid from a 2D Japanese game into a first person shooter developed by an American company, sent Mario on a quest to clean up toxic waste with a giant hose strapped to his back, and turned Zelda into a cartoon. Everyone groaned, then all three games turned out to be REALLY fun anyway. It’s almost like Nintendo is good at this game making thing. But in 2001? It kind of felt like they were self-destructing out of sheer spite.

The Great Sea and the sailing mechanics were part of the plan long before Wind Waker utilized cel-shading. I can’t help but wonder if they switched the art style out of fear that previous experiences with water in a certain Ocarina of Time dungeon, ahem, traumatized their users.

Again, I wasn’t among the people who were angry, but I do admit it sucked the hype out of me to some degree. As a 12 to 13 year old kid, I wasn’t anti-cel shading, but it sure didn’t get me excited, either. Not like I had been for Majora’s Mask. Then I actually played the game, and now I kind of wish they did more games that look like this. I mean, ones that don’t see you controlling Link with a touch screen and a stylus. I think blowback on Wind Waker (hah, no pun intended) is the reason why cel-shading isn’t more common today, and I’ll never forgive the crybabies over it because I love cel-shading today. Too many games look samey, but cel-shaded graphics allow more personality and individualism without that creepy uncanny valley vibe that trying for realistic graphics causes. Imagine what a Zelda game developed from scratch using this style of art could look like today. Also, cel-shaded graphics hold up better to the ravages of time, which is why Wind Waker looks great for its age. The puzzle solving and combat holds up too, which is why it pains me to say that I had less fun than I figured I would have playing Wind Waker in 2025. I remembered it as my absolute favorite Zelda game. I certainly would not grant it that title today.

It’s okay, fanboys. We’ll get through this! Look at how much that Re-Dead loves Link! I love you THAT much!

And it’s not that I remembered Wind Waker as a flawless experience. I specifically remember being annoyed as a kid about how long it takes for the game to feel like it “gets going.” More specifically, I remember being so bored playing the Forsaken Fortress sequence that I was legitimately worried that the game would be no good. The structure of it doesn’t work at all, as you’re introduced to the sword, have to train with the old man using it, rescue Tetra from Bokoblins, leave on a pirate ship to the Fortress, train on swinging mechanics in the pirate ship, and after all that, the game has you drop your sword and play poorly-designed, sloppily implemented stealth mechanics that cause the game to slow to a crawl if that crawl was done by someone who had both hands freshly severed.

I think Wind Waker has the new record for the amount of times I said “what were they thinking?” about any one game. I know that I keep finding new record holders for that, but I expect Wind Waker to hold the record for a while. Sorry StarTropics, but you’re no longer the “absolute stupidest good game ever made.” Wind Waker is stupid to the point of being in a vegetative state, and not just at the start of the game. For all its virtues, Wind Waker is practically a parade of baffling, nonsensical design and/or outright bad ideas. Ignore how bad the stealth mechanics work: this whole level is BORING. Dull level layout, too.

I remembered ALL of that, and it was just as miserable to play in 2025 as it was in 2003. But, what I didn’t remember is that, even after suffering through all that, you still haven’t “opened up” the game and aren’t free to explore the Great Sea. When you sail, you’re given very strict limitations on where you can go, and you’re given the bum’s rush to Dragon Roost Island for the first proper level in the game, then the bum’s rush to the Forbidden Woods to play the second proper level in the game, and then the game tucks you in at night and reads you a bedtime story, and THEN you get to go out in to the world and explore. I often roll my eyes at people who whine about how games hold your hands too tight these days, but in retrospect, Wind Waker holds your hand until your hand is purple and has that annoying pins and needles feeling.

The whole sequence of getting the third and final pearl and opening up the Tower of the Gods is a massive letdown. Would an actual level for the third pearl have really been asking too much?

Annoyingly, after you do this, there’s only really three normal dungeons left in the entire game. Oh, there’s still lots to do, including a ton of repetitive “dungeons full of monsters that you clear out one room at a time with no puzzles or brain power needed” sequences. But the satisfying dungeons? There’s five. Hope you like them, because when they’re done, the peak fun is done too. Plus, your wallet is capped at a pitiful 200 bucks, which I had maxed out before I even reached the first proper dungeon with NOTHING to spend my money on. I found myself buying everything I could and still maxing-out my wallet in record time. They later increased the starting wallet capacity to 500 on Wii U, but again, that doesn’t help me or anyone playing on our Switch 2. Besides, I would have capped out the 500 starting wallet in just a few more minutes, anyway. You have to wait until later to increase to the 1,000 and 5,000 wallets, and that wait is maddening. I dare say they should have just started the game with the full 5,000 capacity or even higher. But that leads to an even bigger problem: Rupees are too abundant in Wind Waker while things to do with those rupees, well, aren’t.

These all went to waste. If this were real life, it’d be all the eShop sales where I loaded up on games that I never even boot up. I used to make fun of people who watched QVC or Home Shopping Network and ordered sh*t from home. Then I became old enough to have my own credit cards right around the time game consoles started having shops built right into them. I assure you, I’m ashamed of myself. Oh, I’m still going to keep buying games I never play and justifying it by saying I’m supporting devs.

Sail between any two islands and you’re bound to see enough light rings to dredge-up hundreds of bucks. It’s a mechanic that should have been killed on the drawing board and seems to only be there in order to make sure players are educated on how to use the grappling hook for the tedious task of fishing out the booty of forty-one treasure charts, eight Triforce pieces, the rewards from slaying six giant squids, and spoils of two specific warships out of dozens upon dozens in the Great Sea, both of which are located in arbitrary places, one of which leaves a Triforce Chart and one of which has a Piece of Heart. I was stunned to find out, just now, that 148 of the light rings are actually in preset locations and don’t come back. Because literally every trip between islands, it felt like I was passing by and hoisting up anywhere between two to six or seven new ones in each sector, every single time. A few of the ones at night respawn during full moons, but if there’s anything special about them, I never noticed. Except for the light rings caused by slaying giant squids or two specific warships, they always had either 20 or 50 bucks in them. In a game where you get money and supplies just for cutting grass, the light rings steal the uniqueness of the treasure charts. There’s just too much stuff to pull up from the ocean floor.

I only have one verified phobia: thalassophobia, or “fear of open water” which, despite being one of the most common phobias, the science is still out on. There’s multiple theories on it, the most common of which speculates that it’s likely connected to a broader “fear of the unknown” that’s the root of many phobias. The theory goes that, since you can’t visualize something unknown, our brains will latch onto the closest approximation of something we associate with the unknown as a visual reference and then install an intense sense of fear in it regardless of risk or rationality. For some people, that will create their fear of the dark, or others fear of strangers. For those with thalassophobia, it’s theorized that, thanks to folklore and religious iconography (like Noah’s Ark), history (like the sinking of the Titanic), urban legends (like the Bermuda Triangle) and pop culture (like Jaws) even those who aren’t close to an ocean or have no reason to fear water will still develop the phobia because we’ve been told the ocean is scary our whole lives. It makes for the easiest visual metaphor for the scariness of the unknown because a vast open ocean is where ships and planes disappear, never to be seen again, and besides, the water could have anything underneath it. Of all the theories, that sounds right to me, since one of my most common nightmares is being attacked by sea monsters. Despite playing video games in the comfort of my home, open water in games can f*ck with me pretty bad. Perhaps because of the cel shading, Wind Waker wasn’t as bad for me as, say, a couple of the bosses in Shadow of the Colossus, but there are some pants-wetting moments, specifically the giant squids. Wind Waker has six of them and, once they’re dead, they don’t come back. You can see where they are by using seagulls flying around in a circle. I intended to methodically stake them out, but instead, I hit not one, not two, but THREE giant squids by accident, startling the sh*t out of me when it happened. Funny enough, I won all six battles on my first attempt because the boomerang is too overpowered. The sharks were a lot more problematic than the squids were. If I could change one thing about the combat, it’d be eliminating every hit of damage you take on the boat being so violent it knocks you into the water. Seriously, EVERY TIME you have to climb back in, often just to get knocked right back into the sea. I think it has to be the “knock back” with the longest recovery time in gaming.

Granted, you won’t be able to do much with most islands until after you finish the Forsaken Fortress for the second time and have your first encounter with Ganon. Except, I thought the point of Zelda games was that you come across things that you know will make sense later, but you can’t do anything with them now so you put a pin in them. Wind Waker sets this up a lot, but because the game takes so damn long to open up, those moments feel like they still happen on an anal schedule instead of organically. In theory, Wind Waker should have a heavy emphasis on exploration of a vast, big sea. In practice, for the first several hours of gameplay, it feels like you’re shackled to a preset pathway. In fairness, it does feel like a defining moment when you realize the entire world is opened up to you. But that comes at the expense of a childlike sense of discovery and wonder. Compare this to my first Zelda, Ocarina of Time, where SO MUCH of the world opens up after the first level. Seriously, in 1998, I went several days between entering the first dungeon and the second. Well, that’s out of the question here.

You have to retrieve three pearls to raise the Tower of the Gods. The first two you earn from dungeons. The third one? Instead of a dungeon, you’re given the runaround on the great sea. This giant angler fish is supposed to be on one island but is instead hiding behind a solid rock wall on your native island. This whole sequence is how the game gives you bombs as an item instead of a plant that you pluck from the ground, and ultimately it’s Wind Waker’s way of letting you know that the map is now open for exploration. But it completely let the wind out of my sail to realize there was no dungeon and I just had the Macguffin now.

I also remembered Wind Waker as being much bigger than it is. As gigantic as the Great Sea is, there’s only five traditional Zelda-style dungeons: Dragon Roost Cavern, Forbidden Woods, Tower of the Gods, Earth Temple, and Wind Temple. Don’t get me wrong: they’re strong dungeons, with the Earth Temple being the best in the game. It’s just not enough. I suppose the Forsaken Fortress can be counted as a “dungeon” but by the time you actually get to play it properly with a sword, I was more than ready to be moving on to the next part of the game, and I groaned when I had to return to it later. Finally, I thought Ganon’s Tower had exceptionally uninspired design. It’s basically a boss rush of some of the previous bosses, where each boss chamber (which is done in black and white) is preceded by a short room that has the type of puzzle you would see from that stage. Imagine if every TV show’s season finale spent the first thirty minutes with a clip show and then the final ten minutes were the actual new content. That’s how Wind Waker actually ends, and Ganon is probably the dullest boss in the game, so the ending sucks just as much as the opening does.

Not only are the boss rush bosses now in black and white, but the game strips you of all items that you didn’t have up to the point when you first encountered them. When you enter the chambers, all the items (except bottles) are removed from your loadout and you have to reassign them. Then, after beating the bosses, when you return to the hub of the level, you have to re-reassign each item to each button again.

So the structure of Wind Waker is pretty weak, and so are many aspects of the open exploration. Players are incentivized to do battle against a series of platforms that are scattered throughout the Great Sea. A lot of these have cannons on the side, and taking out those cannons can be a chore, especially since getting the camera to even find an angle to see what you’re shooting at isn’t even always possible. Plus the seas might be choppy AND you’re being shot back at. For all the time and effort you have to put into taking these things out, the rewards are often a slap in the face. A golden feather, a skull necklace, or a joy pendant, all of which are things you can get by hitting an enemy one time with the grappling hook. There’s a single platform in the entire world that has a valuable Piece of Heart. It should be a joy to systematically take these things out, but instead, it’s reduced to busy work.

F*ck you, Wind Waker. F*CK YOU!

This is not an optimized world, and going off the list of fixes from the Wii U game that I never played, it would appear they didn’t fix that for the remaster. There’s so many things they could have done with the chests on the platforms that would have made them worth the effort. Here’s a thought: ditch the light rings that are so common that you’d swear they’re randomly generated and put that money on the platforms instead. Also, they could have had a lot fewer treasure charts that lead to the silver rupees worth 200 bucks. They overdid the silver rupees to such a degree that I stopped caring about recovering the items seen in the Treasure Charts altogether. I hit up a list of which charts pointed towards a Piece of Heart and went after them, and only them. Like so many other things about Wind Waker, mechanics that should have been a defining highlight are reduced to a commonplace chore long before the credits roll. What Wind Waker needed was someone above Aonuma to tell him “no. Don’t do that.”

I found myself massively over-bidding on the auction just to dump money.

What’s really f*cking infuriating about it all is there’s not enough ways to spend money until late in the game. But then, out of nowhere, there’s a dramatic spike in the need for money. The trading sequence Piece of the Heart takes around 600 to 700 rupees to complete and the Triforce charts take 3,184 rupees to translate. That sounds like a lot, but in this game, if you don’t stop every two seconds to pull up another light ring (which my father really wanted to do even if we had a maxed-out wallet), it really isn’t. At the point where I struck the killing blow on Ganon to end the game, I was holding 2,721 rupees that were functionally useless. It didn’t have to be this way. There’s a lot of stuff that they could have sold in stores like charts, bottles, etc. Only a single store in the entire game has high-priced items, and once they’re gone, that’s it. The three items being sold (a bottle, a Piece of Heart, and a treasure chart that leads you to another Piece of Heart) will run you 2,350 bucks. I’m fine with the price, but those types of prices SHOULD be a big deal that you work hard for, and they’re not. I haven’t even mentioned all the money you get out of pots or killing enemies. “Are you made of money?” In Wind Waker, yeah, you might be.

The first few “beams of light” that indicate the location of a treasure chart item had me excited. It’s damning that they lose their luster because money is so easy to come by that scooping up 200 dollars from the sea floor isn’t remotely a big deal. Out of the 41 treasure charts in the game, 11 point to a Piece of Heart and a f*cking insane 24 of them have the 200 value silver rupee. Others might have useless special charts that tell you, for example, how many Pieces of Heart each sector of the game has, except it doesn’t really act as a check list and doesn’t cross out if you found every one. There’s 44 total Pieces of Heart in the game, so having a built in checklist instead of having to use an online guide would have been nice. Same with the platform chart or submarine chart, which doesn’t tell you which ones you’ve cleared out. Meanwhile, I didn’t get the Octo Chart or the Great Fairy Chart until after I’d already found every one of those. You know, maybe you should have, I dunno, SOLD THEM IN A STORE?! The fact that it’s even possible to fish them out of the sea after they have any usefulness is just frustrating.

And while I’m whining about things I didn’t like, I encountered a ton of glitches playing Wind Waker, some of which are likely caused by an unstable GameCube emulator utilized by the Switch 2. The Link model vibrated in nearly every cutscene in the game, like he was experiencing a specifically vindictive and isolated earthquake localized entirely underneath his feet, and that was SO distracting and SO annoying, but at least it didn’t break the game, which I did more than once. I had multiple instances in treasure chambers or submarines where I had to exit and come back and start over because enemies that were supposed to spawn didn’t, thus ending the sequence before I could complete it. I’ve narrowed it down to two specific types of enemies as the likely culprits for why this kept happening. These things called Miniblins that are dead-ringers for Stitch and the infamous recurring Zelda baddies Wizzrobes, which now look like toucans for some reason, were ALWAYS involved in rooms where I was locked-out of being able to finish the stage. Of course, that was nothing compared to the soft lock that happened after I beat the second boss. Apparently I was in the exact wrong part of the room to strike the killing blow because the game would not load the dialog and was froze permanently on this screen:

I hadn’t been using the original save system and was relying on using save states to eliminate having to restart rooms with tricky jumps. Had I not laid down a save state about fifteen minutes before reaching the boss chamber, the game would have been over since I couldn’t even pause at this point. This was frozen-frozen, and that meant I had to replay the last few rooms and the second boss. Needless to say, I was laying down save states constantly after this boss. I recommend anyone else playing this on their $499.99 Switch 2 do the same and spread those save states out using all four save slots since it doesn’t seem out the realm of possibility that the “enemies fail to spawn” glitch I talked about above could happen in a locked room, leaving you with no possibility to unlock the room. Another glitch was this treasure chest next to a submarine was placed in a way that I could not open it. Had there not been a submarine there for me to enter and exit, I would have had to leave the entire sector and return to it in order to open the chest. Now granted, the chest was one of those nothingburger chests that I was whining about, but again, if it could happen in this spot, presumably it could happen anywhere.

On the left is the chest that didn’t open. On the right is the same chest, only now it was positioned further from the edge. I was able to open it now.

Chest would not open.
Chest opened now.

My final pet peeve with Wind Waker is that I feel the combat relies too heavily on the fog of war to create artificial difficulty. The Wizzrobes use this tactic constantly, because the main challenge in rooms where they team up with other enemies is just getting your targeting system to lock on to them. The Darknuts also use this when they appear in large groups. The giant worm that you fight in the Wind Temple had a similar structure, as my only issue with fighting it was, instead of locking onto its weak spot, which you have to shoot with the hookshot, the targeting system would instead lock-on to its babies, which spawn endlessly. Sometimes they really screw with you by adding the annoying-ass Miniblins into the battle, and since there’s an unlimited supply of them, it assures that you’ll lock onto them instead of the stuff that’s actually a danger to your health.

No, I don’t want to hit this thing. I want to hit the thing birthing that thing.

I’ve just done a LOT of bitching about Wind Waker. It’s safe to say that, following my 2003 play session of it, my brain deleted a lot more negative aspects of it than it did positive ones. I really always looked back on this as a mostly flawless game, at least once you get past the Forsaken Fortress at the start. Replaying it now over two decades later, jeez, Wind Waker is a deeply flawed experience, isn’t it? But, the thing is, all my positive memories of it were also accurate. Despite a problematic camera and the worthless “tornado spin” attack that leaves you dizzy for far too long, I enjoyed the sword combat of this Zelda more than any other game in the series, easily. I don’t care if the parry is overpowered (and it is). I liked using it! I liked snacking a Moblin in the noggin with a boomerang and then snagging its skull necklace with the grappling hook. I liked taking aim with my bow and shooting a Peahat out the air from the other side of a room. I never backed away from any fight because the fights were just so fun that I couldn’t say “no” to them.

Only a Zelda game could have a sequence where you briefly take control of a seagull that’s getting chased by a vulture and have it successfully be a heart-pounding moment.

I’m sure Nintendo fans will be furious at me for spending most of this review sh*ting on Wind Waker instead of showering it with praise, but I did actually 100% the game. Well, not counting the Nintendo Gallery which takes too long to open up and too much busy work to complete. Instead of figurines, why not just do something simpler, like a photo album? But in terms of ITEMS, I got everything, something I didn’t do in 2003. Yes, I even got the blue gels, though I think I did that one the first time too, or at least enough to craft the blue medicine. In my original playthrough when I was 13, there were two specific Pieces of Heart I know for sure I never got. I never finished the trading sequence, which is a lot different from other Zelda games. It’s confusing and clunky. This time, I did get every item out of it which culminates in a Piece of Heart. Finally, I never did the notorious “water every plant in twenty minutes” thing. I tried it once as a kid, but when I realized that you had to do all eight within the time limit, I said “I don’t need that last heart to beat the game.” This time, I did it, and I finished with plenty of time to spare, too. Worth the effort? Not really, but there’s a strong chance I’m never going to play Wind Waker again so I wanted to be able to say I did it.

On the Wii U version, the time limit is increased to thirty minutes AND you can get a faster sail. That’s great! Happy for you Wii U owners. But, say it with me: THAT DOESN’T HELP SWITCH 2 OWNERS!

There’s just so much to like about Wind Waker. Tetra is my favorite version of Zelda, and she’s so spunky that I kind of wish they’d give her a game. I don’t mean Navi Trackers, either, which we never got in the US anyway (and it required four players who each owned a Game Boy Advance and a Gamecube to GBA cord to play anyway). I mean give her a game where you go on treasure hunts! Speaking of which, how come, in a game with pirates, there’s no buried treasure on the islands? What could have been really interesting is pirate maps where X marks the spot and you have to suss out which map is to which island based on landmarks. Again, there’s so much left on the table that I hate that Wind Waker didn’t get a direct sequel. And no, the DS games don’t count. I tried them, besides the fact that they use touch controls, I thought the game structure with a central dungeon you have to continuously return to is lame. So in my book, Wind Waker was a one and done, and despite my whining, it will always hold a special place in my heart. Maybe a year from now, I won’t remember all the stuff I hated. It already happened to me once, so maybe I’ll still think of Wind Waker as the game where I was smiling ear-to-ear doing this:

I’ve noticed that, when it comes to key games of my youth, replaying them for the first time as an adult years later always makes the flaws stand out that much more. My sister got me the Metroid Prime remaster for my birthday last year. I started it and restarted it three times in the thirteen months that have followed and I still have never even finished the first level. It was a game I couldn’t put down at the age of 13, and now at 35 to 36, I can’t even pick the damn thing up. Maybe it speaks to the quality of Wind Waker that it wasn’t like that at all. Instead, I flew through the game in a week, whereas I think I spent close to a month with it the first time around. When I was in the dungeons, or exploring a new sector for the first time, I was having fun. The light-reflecting puzzles that a lot of people hate? I think they’re genius, especially that last one that takes a while to finish. Okay, so the ending where Link says “see ya, wouldn’t want to be ya” to his sister is a big downer. Maybe it was payback against the fans for the backlash to the graphics style. Or maybe they were just bitter that they ran out of memory to hide about five thousand more silver rupees.
Verdict: YES!

Apparently the entire ending is actually a video file that’s not rendered live in the game’s code, and they didn’t bother up-scaling it so it looks very blurry. The ending is a punch in the gut anyway so it’s probably best to just imagine that Link realized his little island was awesome and Tetra is an obvious sociopath. In my head canon, I assume her pirate crew actually know that she’s Princess Zelda and are just going along with her desire to be a pirate because it’s amusing.

Filed under Nintendo Switch Reviews, Retro Reviews Tagged with , , , , , , , ,

The Legend of Zelda (NES Review)

August 8, 2025 by 12 Comments

The Legend of Zelda
aka Zelda no Densetsu: The Hyrule Fantasy (Japan)
Platform: Nintendo Entertainment System, Famicom Disk System
First Released February 21, 1986
Directed by Shigeru Miyamoto and Takashi Tezuka
Developed by Nintendo
Available with Switch Online Subscription (Standard)
Listing at Zelda Wiki

There should be a law that any game where you swing a sword must have a multi-headed dragon. Actually I’m fine with that law being for any video game. Madden would be at least 3% better if a multi-headed dragon interrupted field goal attempts, with the percentage going up depending on the number of heads, naturally.

For this review, I played Legend of Zelda between sessions of Legend of Zelda: The Wind Waker on my Switch 2, and two things stuck out to me. The first is that I couldn’t forget that the gap between Zelda 1 and Wind Waker is five years shorter than the gap between Wind Waker and right now, today. That’s insane! Like, where did my youth go? Wind Waker released when I was 13 and it was one of those benchmark games of my childhood. I was a HUGE Ocarina of Time and Majora’s Mask fan and I couldn’t wait for Wind Waker. I didn’t give a squirt if they changed the graphics style because *I* thought it looked really cool and was confident I would love the game, and I did. But the 2D Zeldas seemed different enough that they might as well have been a separate series to me. At the age of 13, the first Zelda game was so old and primitive that it might as well have happened in the stone age. Like so many Nintendo milestones, I didn’t play it until years later when it was on a GBA cart. You can imagine my surprise that I really enjoyed it a lot. Zelda 1 is right up there with Super Mario 2 and Castlevania as far as NES games I’ve played the most times.

From the time I launched IGC in 2011 and continuing to the present day, the average age of my readers is around ten years older than me. It’s actually closer to seven-to-eight years older now, but amazingly, even though I’m now 36 years old, they’re still older than me. Well, this summer I’ve done a ton of games from the childhoods of my readers, with only WarioWare being a pivotal game of my own youth, and I don’t think anyone would call that a major milestone game. So, one of my next reviews will be for Wind Waker, which I first played at the age of 13, because MY childhood matters too, dammit! By the way, I used to make fun of people who used their shiny new $500 game consoles to play retro games and now I’m one of them. Remember kids, you will grow up to be that which you mock now, so try to mock lovingly. You’ll feel like less of a horse’s ass in the future.

The second thing that stood out was how, of all the NES games that serve as launching points for franchises, the first game in the Legend of Zelda series is easily the title that aged the best. Playing it now, in 2025, I admit I was a little surprised by how much of the core Zelda formula has remained unchanged from this first game. The overworld format with distinct areas like lakes, deserts, graveyards, coastlines, forests, mountains, rivers, etc? It all started here. Really, the only major area not debuting is any form of a town. The dungeon format is in the same boat. The map, compass, enemy pacing, and goal of finding the key items and slaying a boss to collect the macguffin? It all started here too. A lot of the enemies that would be Zelda staples are introduced here, as well. Mummies? Here. The centaurs that are major characters in Breath of the Wild? They debuted all the way back here. So did Octoroks, Moblins, Zoras, Tektites, Wizzrobes, and Darknuts. Some have evolved more than others, so maybe the roster isn’t as close to modern counterparts as, say, a Mario game, but they all feel kin to their modern counterparts. For a series as complex as Zelda, that’s pretty remarkable.

Actually, the weakest enemy to battle with in all of the original Zelda is easily Ganon himself. The gimmick with him is he becomes invisible and teleports around the room, and the only way to beat him is to just mash the attack at NOTHING and hope he eventually teleports his intestines into your sword, then after the fourth hit (assuming you have the magic sword), you have to finish him off with a silver arrow. That part is fine, especially since the silver arrow is hidden within the final dungeon itself. But the fight up until the killing blow? What were they thinking? Who the hell wants a final boss that’s beaten by stabbing blindly at air? Ganon, as generically evil as he is, is still one of my favorite gaming villains and he would eventually go on to become a great final boss (Ganon > Ganondorf IMO, the human version of him is TOO generic), but his debut is one of the very worst boss battles Nintendo ever did. Actually, I think it might be at the bottom. A terrible idea executed horribly.

I played both the first and second quests of Zelda 1 for this review, and in the case of the second quest, I had never played it past a few minutes. It really was like a brand new experience, and it was refreshing given what happened in the first game. In the first quest, I had doubled my hearts from three to six and acquired every item you could get out of the overworld or purchase in shops (except the Magic Sword and two heart containers) before I ever played the first dungeon. You can’t exactly tackle the levels in ANY order because one requires the raft to reach and others require the ladder to win (assuming you’re not using glitches), but there’s still a lack of tightness of design. Really, the modern Zelda format as seen in Breath of the Wild and Tears of the Kingdom feels closer to this original game than the Zeldas of my childhood, in that both lean into a sense of overwhelming vastness.

LOOK AT THAT ARTWORK! I want an anime that looks like that! Now, I grew up in the tail-end of the instruction book era, BUT I STILL READ THEM! Instruction books have since gone the way of corded controllers and game rentals. Mention instruction books to my nieces and nephew and they’ll sort of cock their heads to the side and say “in….truck…..shun…… books? What’s a book?” Kids these days, I swear to God. But I checked and if you bought this game for the NES back in the day, the book would give you pointers to get to the first level and then a map of where the second level was, but THAT WAS IT. While researching this feature, I also found out that Nintendo published a pocket-sized guide to Zelda called “Tips & Tactics” that also says “instruction book” on it. I’m not sure if this was sold separately, bundled with the game, or originally sold separately but then bundled with later pressings. If you had Tips & Tactics, let me know in the comments! I want to hear if you remember how you got it! I’ve mostly heard from readers that they got their Zelda maps from Nintendo Power or the precursor to Nintendo Power, the Nintendo Fun Club Newsletter. So, I went through those. The third issue of the newsletter has a complete overworld map and maps for the first four levels. The fourth issue has a guide to the bosses. NOTHING offered a complete walkthrough, though the first issue of Nintendo Power did include complete maps for the second quest’s first six levels and the overworld. If you truly got stuck, you had to call a 900 number to have someone walk you through it. “What’s a 900 number?” Kids these days.

On the other hand, nobody can bitch about Zelda 1 getting off to a slow start. My Wind Waker review will probably contain a lot of complaining about how damn long it takes for the game to feel like you’ve actually finished the tutorial section and are now playing the game properly. Seriously, it could take hours. Zelda 1 just kind of drops you off into the world with no real direction on what to do or where to go. In the above caption, you can see the lengths gamers had to go to in order to find help with Zelda. If you didn’t have access to those things, well, you’re on your own. I only played the first quest as well as I did because this was like the fourth or fifth time I beat the game. The first time? Oh, it’s overwhelming. But, that loose structure also opens up the possibility to make a mockery of the developer’s intent.

In the Famicom Disk original build of Zelda, you can use this heart container, combined with the whistle, to max out your health early. By blowing the whistling and summoning the whirlwind while standing next to this heart, you’ll collect it, but when you return, it’ll be back. I SHOULD have played the FDS build but instead I played the US game, where the only glitch I activated was the famous Level 1 door glitch.

This especially extends to the dungeons. You can purchase keys for locked doors within the dungeons in the overworld’s shops. That’s weird enough on its own since the dungeons provide more than enough keys that nobody should have to search too far to find one, which was a mechanic MY era’s Zeldas leaned heavily into. In playing Wind Waker, I realized the small keys play a larger role in maintaining the game’s tempo than I initially realized. When you get a key in that game, or any of the future Zelda games, it’s a MOMENT. That is not the case in Zelda 1 at all. The original game might have incentivized exploration, but it didn’t put a premium on maximizing the real estate. You actually don’t need to fully explore the overworld OR the dungeons. When I did the second quest, I realized there were large parts of the game, especially in the upper left-hand corner of the overworld’s map, that I had never been to in any of my previous play sessions.

Amazing how many icons of the franchise are in Zelda 1 and FEEL like prototypes for the ones I played as a kid. Gohma, who is the first boss in both Ocarina of Time and Wind Waker, debuted in Zelda 1 and is probably the scariest villain. A gigantic one-eyed crab that spits fireballs? Jeez, that’s nightmare fuel.

The keys show off this haphazard use of space the most. By the second level of the first quest, there are so many alternative routes within dungeons that you can completely circumvent MOST of the locked doors. As a result, I had collected so many keys that went unused that I decided to not grab the magic key in Level 8. I had eighteen keys going into Death Mountain and was curious if I could still beat Death Mountain, and if so, how many would I have when I rescued Zelda? Would I need to use ten keys? Five? Would I finish with a dozen keys? Because surely Death Mountain won’t drop keys when a magical unlock-all key is one of level eight’s items. Well, to my surprise Death Mountain also drops normal keys, and like any other level, it had pathways I didn’t need to take. I ended up finishing +1 over what I had when I entered the level and beat Zelda with nineteen total unused keys (having bought none in stores). It’s safe to say that what evolved in Zelda wasn’t so much the sublime combat or the format as it was the tightness of design.

Zelda is probably wondering who the f*ck is this locksmith that rescued her. I assume the keys in the shop thing was some kind of holdover from an earlier build that was put into the game as a means to prevent a soft-lock if a player (1) used every key as soon as they found it and (2) picked the wrong sequence of locked doors. Perhaps at some point, it was possible to pick the wrong door to unlock and end up with no option but the shop. But given the layouts of the final game, with the sheer amount of destructible walls, I can’t imagine it’s possible to do that now. Even if you somehow found yourself stuck or missing a key, it’d be quicker and cheaper to grind Moblins until one drops a bomb pick-up than it would be to spend $100 on a key.

Don’t get me wrong: most of Zelda’s play mechanics hold up to the test of time. It might have the best offensive mechanics in the entire NES library. The sword is VERY satisfying and the concept that it shoots a laser out when you have full health is both bonkers and inspired. Unlike the majority of classic gaming tropes where you say to yourself “someone WOULD have come up with something like this eventually” I don’t think the laser-shooting sword is the type of idea that was inevitable, you know? And honestly, I still think the NES version of it is the best one in the franchise. It’s kind of weak in future games, but here, it feels powerful and cathartic, with perfect sound design and that little explosion it makes at the end being the chef’s kiss.

In the second quest, these things that you can grease with one arrow show up long before you get the bow. In the Famicom Disk version, you can blow into the microphone to kill them. In Zelda’s second quest, you have to just hack at them with a sword for a few hours until they croak. HAVE FUN!

To go with the excellent sword, the enemies are generally well made. Probably the best roster of enemies of any early NES game, if not the best overall roster on the entire platform. Given the limitations and the overall experimental nature of the game, the cast is HUGE, but the enemies do feel distinct. Okay, so the mummies are kind of just the skeletons with more hit points (well, at least until the second quest) and the bosses are a little too cinchy. Actually, with the exception of the multi-headed dragon, I found the Wizzrobes and Darknuts to be worse to deal with than ANY boss. Like, they certainly overuse the dinosaurs and the four-headed Manhandla. Uh, this thing:

Overused or not, one-shotting it with a bomb is one of those “stand up and cheer!” moments.

But they utilize the enemies in a way that gives both the dungeons and especially the overworld personality. Zoras always show up in the water to give those areas a sense of menace. The moblins rule the forests, while the centaurs control the mountains, and the spider-like Tektites only appear where it’s rocky. Forty years later and Hyrule STILL feels like a real, living world because of where they put the enemies. It’s just so smart. The Legend of Zelda’s offensive game gives you everything you would want in combat with no real downside besides not getting the best out of the roster of enemies (see the below caption). Nearly forty years later and the combat STILL isn’t boring. What else can you say at that point?

I don’t think they maximized the potential of the roster at all. There’s a lot of repeat bosses, some of which are just baffling. The dragon that’s at the end of the first level also shows up as the boss of the seventh level, but without being buffed-up. By that point, he might die in two shots. Why not replace him with one of these things, called Patras, that are only found in Death Mountain? I get that they wanted that level to feel climatic by having some dangerous creatures, but the Patra feels like a boss. Hell, there’s even two types of them, one of which has the orbiting eyeballs curve differently. There’s also fast moving, dangerous worms called Lanmolas that feel like bosses that are exclusive to Death Mountain. If I didn’t know better, I’d swear that they intended for these creatures to show up earlier and then lost their nerve because they didn’t want the game to be too hard.

However, Zelda’s defensive game isn’t as strong. It feels arbitrary when the magic shield works or not. Like, it’ll shield you from the blasts of the Zoras in the water but not from identical looking blasts from bosses. So frustrating, especially since hearing that PING of a shot successfully deflected is just delightful. Also, the difficulty scaling is pretty bad in general. Level seven could have easily been level three for how much of a cinch it is. I assume they placed it near the end on the assumption players would be hard up for the cash to buy the enemy bait since it’s the only time you NEED it in the first quest. Meanwhile, levels five and six feel like they could be bumped up a slot or two.

“Hey bats, if you have a moment I’d like to have a word with you about our lord and savior Jesus Christ.” “Ugh, someone hit me with a boomerang, already.“

They also ran out of ideas for useful items to fill out the stages. The magic wand and book are just about the most useless items in any Zelda game. One of those “sh*t, we gotta put SOMETHING here for the players to find!” And there were other options. Hide the letter to the lady in a level! Hide the arrows! Hide the ability to carry bombs in a level! Hide the power bracelet in a level! That one really befuddles me. It’s found in some arbitrary spot on the map under one of the statues that comes to life in both quests. It’s so subdued for such an important item. Except, it’s not really important. All the power bracelet does is make it so you can shove rocks that reveal warp zones, at least in the first quest. They could have changed it so you need the bracelet to shove anything in the overworld, making it essential towards getting the magic sword out of the graveyard. My point is, they had better options and the wand sucks. But Legend of Zelda doesn’t suck. It’s one of the best 8 bit games ever, to this day.

The second quest doesn’t f*ck around. Yes, you permanently lose a heart container if you choose the first option.

Even with the rough pacing, sloppy difficulty scaling, and somewhat underwhelming boss roster, it goes without saying that Zelda is a masterpiece that leaves the test of time laying dead with a sword through its heart. There’s nothing I can say that you’ve not already heard before, and the world certainly wasn’t aching to hear what Cathy Vice thinks of the first Zelda game. Finding something unique to talk about was tricky. And then I beat the game, saw that Link was now holding up a sword, and I remembered that Zelda had a second quest that rearranged a lot of the locations and order of the items and upped the difficulty. This is so underplayed that the famous wiki Zelda Dungeon doesn’t even have a walkthrough for it. Until I started this review, I genuinely don’t remember hearing anyone really talk about the meat of the second quest in features or casual conversation. Even the GOAT of NES coverage, Jeremy Parish, pretty much glosses over it. So let’s talk about it!

Famously, you can also enter “ZELDA” as your name and skip right to the second quest. If you’ve never done it, trust me, it’s worth a look.

The second quest of Zelda is a completely different beast. Of the nine dungeons, only the first one remains in the same location. The other eight? They’re somewhere out in the world. Good luck! Some are where dungeons were already previously located, though in different orders. Level four in the first quest is still a dungeon, only now it’s level five. Other levels are in such arbitrary locations that I would never have found them without a guide. Level eight especially is insanely well hidden. The starting sword, white sword, a couple of the heart containers (including the ladder one and the raft one), the bracelet, and some of the burnable bushes are the same. But, the item order is totally different. The bow? You don’t get it until the fifth level. The whistle you normally got in the fifth level? It’s now in the second level, and there’s a LOT more hidden stuff to uncover with it in the overworld, in places you wouldn’t normally think to look. You don’t even get the ladder until the sixth level, and it’s impossible to grind-up heart containers and get the white sword before you start gathering the Triforce pieces.

Even the letter from the old lady that you need to buy medicine isn’t found until VERY late in the game. It was literally the last thing I found before entering the new Death Mountain. In the first quest, it’s in the above door, but it ain’t there anymore. Instead, this is just a shop now. I did manage to grind up enough money to get the Blue Ring before playing the first stage. The shop that sells it I found by accident, as it had previously been a location of a high-yielding coin drop.

And then there’s the dungeons, which have an entirely different vibe to them. They’re MUCH more maze-like this time and some are pretty hard to find their way through. That’s not just because a lot of them put tougher enemies much earlier than you previously encountered them, either. It’s how you find your way through them. Instead of just having a ton of bombable walls (dear auto-correct: bombable is a word, dagnabit), you might have to just walk THROUGH the walls, like this:

The design logic dives really hard into the invisible doors. In fact, a key item is hidden in one of the levels BEHIND the Triforce piece. The second quest’s progression is based more around confusing players after the first quest and having no real rules or flow to the progress, though it mostly works. Mostly, but the level design itself can be problematic. The layouts of the first five stages spell out the word E-A-L-D-Z. I have no clue why the letters are not in the correct order. I assume they were at some point in development and it was changed due to the difficulty, but either way, the third level, the “L” is probably the single worst dungeon in the entire history of the franchise. Hell, it doesn’t even climax with a boss battle. You know those things that throw boomerangs? The big finale to the third stage is a room full of them.

The locked door? It’s the Triforce room. Yes, really! The room on the right directly across from the Triforce room on the map contains the blue boomerang, and you have to use the enemy bait to get it. So these things are the bosses. They’re not even the tougher blue versions! I thought this was supposed to be the harder second quest?! She said after already dying once.

Okay, so when the second quest is bad, it’s REALLY bad, but it never gets worse than that third stage. Other levels have several clever twists to them. The skeletons? Their swords shoot lasers now, just like Link’s does when you have full health. Full sized bosses appear more frequently in dungeons (in fairness, that happened in the first quest too, but not to this degree). There’s red herring keys laying around that there’s hypothetically no way to get since you won’t have the ladder yet. I mean, unless you return to the dungeon at some later point in the game to collect them. It feels like the second quest’s main objective is to trick players and take away any sense of predictability. Some of the staircases might send you to a room that doesn’t have a return staircase, and it becomes easy to get lost or go around in circles.

The “staircase drops you off in a room without a return staircase” gag that I found hugely annoying is paid off in a big way during the game’s climax. It’s actually the key to solving Death Mountain in the second quest.

While some aspects of the second quest can be taken out of order (for example, I beat level four before level three), it’s a lot harder to cheese by getting the sword upgrades or other key items before the game wants you to have them. It wasn’t long into the second quest that I started to wonder if some of the locations and dungeons were actually the original concepts for the main quest that were moved to the bonus after-game content because they were too hard. Like the mechanic with the bubbles in the caption below? That just feels like something that was meant to be in the game all along. It’s too elaborate to have been an afterthought. The same with the walking through the walls bit. While the Z-E-L-D-A shaped dungeons probably weren’t part of the main design, I think most of the gameplay mechanics from the second quest likely were. Maybe. The story behind the second quest is kind of one of those “spilled mold into bacteria and it killed” moments.

Like (like) I’m pretty sure I can’t reach this key yet. I think they did these things to send players on wild goose chases.

Because of how the memory on the NES worked, all the Zelda maps had to be made to fit like a jigsaw puzzle on a grid, and the second quest only exists because Takashi Tezuka only used up half the available space for the nine dungeons of the first quest. Okay, fine. It was a happy accident. But I’m still willing to bet that they used the opportunity to dump gameplay ideas that were deemed “too hard” and deleted from the original build back into the game. These are just too elaborate, too thoughtful, and dare I say it, too elegant to have been throwaway bonuses that only happened because someone only used up half the memory they were supposed to.

The biggest change to the monsters is with the bubbles. In the first quest, if you touch a bubble, you temporarily lose your sword. In the second quest, bubbles come in three colors: the normal ones that shift between red and blue that temporarily take away the sword are still around. But now, there’s also ones that are always red and ones that are always blue. The always-blue ones are harmless and have no negative effect on Link besides causing him to recoil as if he’s taking damage. The always-red bubbles are by far the most dangerous and annoying things in the entire game. If you touch one, you lose your sword permanently until you do any one of the following things: (1) touch a blue bubble (2) visit a fairy fountain, and yes, the effect will linger even if you leave a dungeon (3) use a potion or (4) get a Triforce piece. This isn’t a rare thing, either. Many rooms will have multiple red bubbles and a single blue bubble, while others might have quite a journey between rooms that have red bubbles and rooms that have the blue bubbles you need to regain your sword. There’s a couple REALLY annoying rooms full of red bubbles where you have to hug the wall and there’s no room to dodge in any direction. Since the bubbles have no preset attack pattern and can change direction without any warning, they’re very, very dangerous.

And it’s not a throwaway bonus. In the second quest, there’s an undeniable method to the madness that should make it a stronger experience for veterans of the franchise. I’m SO happy I finally played it. Again, nobody needs me of all people to recommend playing one of the most famous games ever made. BUT, I suspect a lot of my readers have never tried Legend of Zelda’s second quest. It’s not just more of the same. There’s hints of that, but what the second quest really has going for it is that sense that the gameplay is what Zelda 1 would have been like all along if they didn’t have to consider how new this whole idea was. Because there had never been a game like Legend of Zelda (well, except Tower of Druaga, the NES version of which I reviewed for Namco Museum Archives Volume 1), I’m guessing they had to significantly tone back aspects of it. The speed of the darknuts. The red/blue bubbles. The skeletons shooting swords. I suspect that somewhere between the first and second quests is the definitive version Big Shiggy Style and Tezuka WOULD have made if they weren’t breaking new ground. And I think you’ll get that vibe too if you give it a try.
Verdict: YES!

Filed under Nintendo Switch Reviews, Retro Reviews Tagged with , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

Wario Land: Super Mario Land 3 (Game Boy Review)

August 1, 2025 by 6 Comments

Wario Land: Super Mario Land 3
Platform: Game Boy
First Released January 21, 1994
Directed by Hiroji Kiyotake and Takehiko Hosokawa
Developed by Nintendo
NO MODERN RELEASE*
Listing on Mario Wiki

*I made a mistake when I first published this and said Wario Land is on Switch Online. It is not.

From here out, if there’s an option to do color versions of classic Game Boy titles (meaning more than just four Super Game Boy-like colors), I’m taking it. If home developers are going to go to all the trouble of colorizing these games, at least one person with a semi-big review platform should acknowledge them. All the color screenshots in this feature are from Wario Land: Super Mario Land 3 Color Edition by korxo, who did a very good job given the limitations.
Link to the Patch

The fire attack and the dash attacks don’t show up all too well in screenshots. Thankfully, I barely used the dragon hat.

Okay, I’m pretty sure this is the last game that’s officially part of the Super Mario franchise’s 8 bit and 16 bit era that I haven’t reviewed. Like Yoshi’s Island, it’s only technically part of the Super Mario franchise thanks to a subtitle and really exists to act as the starting point for its own spinoff franchise. As of this writing, there’s been eight Wario Land games (assuming you count Wario World for GameCube and Wario: Master of Disguise for Nintendo DS as “Wario Land” games, and I do), and it all started here with a game that built to the strengths of the Game Boy. It’s certainly not Mario-like. Wario Land is actually more of the spiritual successor to the legacy of Doki Doki Panic and later Super Mario Bros. 2. It’s a much, much slower action game with a focus on exploration. There’s no B-running and no fast reaction times required. Even when you’re being stalked by a killer Thwomp, the tempo is kept pretty low and the focus is on creating tension, not panic.

Actually, it does the “chase” gimmick twice, with the second time turning the Thwomp into a boat at the end.

Which isn’t to say there’s no action in Wario Land. Wario’s tackle is satisfying enough, and it’s always fun to pick up a downed enemy and throw them off their perch and to their death, hopefully involving lava. If it worked perfectly, the combat would be S-tier for 8-bits, but that’s not the case. Wario is one of the first 2D retro games I’ve reviewed where the physics are wonky to the point of being genuinely unpredictable, mostly thanks to the level layouts. If you attempt to pick up an enemy with any structure nearby, whatever you’re carrying will be knocked out of your hand, and the enemy might instead shuffle around like they’re square dancing upside-down around your sprite. There’s a roughness to Wario Land that’s obvious right from the start and sticks around until the bitter end.

This is not a traditional hop ‘n squash game. I took more damage fighting the most basic enemies than I did in all other Mario games in this marathon combined. I don’t know if a single goomba so much as nibbled at the tip of my boots in the Mario games, but these little things called Pirate Gooms got me several times. Usually because they recovered right as I was reaching them. I may or may not have lost lives to them as well. (cough) Hey, it wasn’t MY fault. It was the physics. I swear.

Thankfully, the combat takes a deep back seat to stellar level design, but even that has this undeniable roughness to it. Wario Land has one of the strangest progression structures I’ve encountered, as some early levels have multiple exits and branching paths, one of which leads to an entirely different game world that’s otherwise inaccessible. Hell, the very first level in the game takes place on a beach, and the level’s format changes after you beat the first game world and the tide comes in. It’s a great idea that had me so pumped-up to see what other wacky changes would happen to the game world.

And then, after the 23rd of 40 stages, the “multiple exits” concept is abandoned completely, never to return. In total, only five stages have hidden exits. Imagine if Super Mario World didn’t have any key holes after the halfway point. Well, Wario Land actually does that, and it’s so goddamn weird for it. The idea of changing world maps is also largely abandoned, as I’m pretty sure there’s only one instance of it with any consequence after the secret exits stop. A lot of games give off the impression of having more ambitious plans that were left on the drawing board, but with Wario Land, I really think that might be what happened. The only way I can make sense of the structure is that they ran out of time and had to delete multiple exits and possibly stages when the time came to code the game, only many earlier ones had to be left in because they stuck a game world off in the corner, where nothing else on the map can logically reach it, and there was nowhere else to hide the treasures within.

Unlike Mario World, the keys that unlock the fifteen hidden treasures are often placed away from the skull doors that hold them. Sometimes, they’re on the total opposite end of the level, and carrying the keys from Point A to Point B is a pain in the ass. In a good way, I mean. Thankfully, the keys don’t vanish if you scroll them off screen, and you can also use them to kill enemies.

The good news is that hidden doors aren’t the main thing you’re searching for in Wario Land. What you’re really trying to do is accumulate money to buy a bigger house than Mario lives in after Wario’s attempt to claim squatter’s rights in Super Mario Land 2 didn’t work out. The plan is to steal back a gold statue of Princess Peach that was stolen by Captain Syrup, the ruler of Brown Sugar Pirates (why is it always food-based names? Does Nintendo not feed their developers? It would explain a lot!). Surprisingly for a Nintendo game, Wario doesn’t intend to fetch the statue in order to court Peach. Oh no. Wario might be a greedy Mario doppelgänger, but he’s a greedy Mario doppelgänger who follows the golden rule: don’t stick your d*ck in crazy, and when the ruler of a country commissions a golden statue of themselves, it’s a safe bet they’re f*cking nuts. Go ahead and cringe, but Wario played Super Princess Peach. He knows what’s up. So he plans on ransoming the statue to raise funds to buy a castle. It’s the most petty reason to go on a harrowing adventure, and it ends with Mario stealing the statue anyway.

As luck would have it, the final boss is a genie and, once Wario has won the fight, he gets to make a wish. He probably should have made it “I hope that my action-adventure franchise doesn’t completely evaporate by the 2010s” but I’m getting ahead of myself. Because the absolute monarchy of the Mushroom Kingdom is so capitalist that even a genie needs to get a bag, to make Wario’s wish come true, you need to accumulate as much money as possible. The hidden treasures are given value in coins after you beat the genie, and I’m fairly certain that if you find all fifteen of them (and complete all forty courses as well), you will max out the coin bank and get the best ending, which is Wario getting his own planet.

Update: WRONG, you will need about 10K in coins plus the fifteen treasures plus have an all-clear for the forty courses to get Planet Wario.

Mario would later top this by getting his own galaxy. Always a bridesmaid, huh Wario?

Finding the treasures IS hugely satisfying because the game doesn’t tell you where they are. While the five stages with hidden exits are marked on the overworld map, there’s no indicators for which levels have treasures (something Virtual Boy Wario Land did). The only thing you can really use to help is the fact that the fifteen treasures have spots sequentially on the scoreboard. So if you’re missing the “G” treasure, it’s going to be found in one of the levels between where you found treasures “F” and “H.” I love this, and the only thing I wish for is that, once you found the treasures, the game told you what stages you found them in. I also wish Nintendo would build a much bigger game based around this idea. I found MOST of the treasures on my first playthrough, but the act of getting them was rarely a layup. In fact, the second-to-last one I could not find for the life of me.

When you do find the treasures, it’s a moment. It never feels anything short of great.

As a proof of concept first attempt at a new franchise, Wario Land holds up shockingly well. I don’t think it will be for everyone. The slow movement will be a major turnoff for a lot of players, as will be the clunky mechanics. It also has some exceptionally weak bosses. At one point during a boss fight, I was dodging attacks and hunkering down for a typical “three hits and your dead” type of battle. But after a few passes, nothing was happening, so I charged at the boss and it worked. When he was stunned, I picked him up and threw him in the lava and the fight was over. Curiosity got the better of me so I rewound the fight and this time, I charged as soon as I could. It worked.

Even with satisfying combat, I wouldn’t recommend playing Wario Land specifically for it. It’s just not polished enough for that. From an action perspective, it’s for sure the roughest 2D combat I can remember Nintendo doing, including Kid Icarus. But as a true treasure hunt game, I was constantly surprised by how much fun I was having. Wario Land has NO bad levels among the forty total courses, which is nothing short of remarkable given the limitations of the Game Boy. And, as I said, even the basic enemies can pose a threat, so you can’t sleepwalk through it like you can the Virtual Boy sequel that was the only Wario Land I really ever played through all the way. Okay, so the difficulty is largely thanks to the janky physics and stiff jumping, but it’s charming even when it feels like it doesn’t work the way the developers intended.

The later levels that take on maze-like characteristics are so strong that I wouldn’t have minded if EVERY level had been that way. They basically did have that mentality for the sequels.

I’m sure a lot of people will say Virtual Boy Wario Land is the superior game, but I’m not going there. Both games are vastly underrated, but once you stack the eagle helmet and dragon helmet in VB Wario Land, it’s all over but the shouting. The game becomes too damn easy, and that broke my immersion a lot more than the eye-melting red and black visuals did. While there’s a few pits that I feel are too touchy and the collision is never as good as you want it to be, Wario Land: Super Mario Land 3 never allows you to go on cruise control. It’s an imperfect build of the perfect 8-bit mix of platforming, action, and exploration. But even the imperfection feels like it fits Wario like a glove. What other character could get away with a game that feels this unfinished? I assume since it was 1994, they thought the Game Boy was near the end of its life cycle and they had to rush it out. Hah.
Verdict: YES!

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Donkey Kong Country (SNES Review)

July 31, 2025 by 5 Comments

Donkey Kong Country
aka Super Donkey Kong (Japan)
Platform: Super Nintendo Entertainment System
First Released November 18, 1994
Directed by Tim Stamper and Chris Stamper
Developed by Rare Ltd.
Published by Nintendo
Available with Switch Online Subscription (Standard)
Listing at Mario Wiki

Well, um, the rain still looks like rain! Or oatmeal. It kind of looks like oatmeal. But RAINING oatmeal.

I swear to God that I didn’t deliberately review this back-to-back with Super Mario Land 2 because both games were more focused on looking pretty than being mind-blowing from a gameplay perspective. Actually, I thought Donkey Kong Country had a much better chance of scoring a YES! than Super Mario Land 2 because it would still have the horsepower to pull off clever level design. And sometimes it does! Like, take a look at this:

Oof, that does not look beautiful. I bet it did in 1994, and that’s literally the only time it had to. No matter what anyone thinks, even Nintendo games (or games Nintendo paid to have made, as is the case with DKC) are ONLY made to appeal to gamers at the time of release, and if they happen to be valuable as catalog titles later, that’s just a bonus. I know people want to believe the mighty Nintendo plays 4D chess and has this big roadmap of when catalog titles will be worth money again, but they don’t. Nobody does. That’s why gaming licensing planks are so very, very one-sided and sh*tty. 

You have to hit those STOP/GO barrels to freeze the red-eyed enemies, which turn into stones. You never know how much time you get for each barrel, and they staged the level in a way where the last few only give you a split second. It’s quite exciting, and the enemies are creepy enough. I just wish there were more stages that made me sit-up like that, but that wasn’t the point of Donkey Kong Country. It was made only to be 1994’s big smash hit, and if it’s worth some scratch in the 2020s, hey, lucky us. So when people say “Donkey Kong Country doesn’t hold up” it’s okay to say “well duh!” It accomplished exactly what it set out to do in 1994: curb stomp the 3DO into oblivion while keeping Nintendo fans on the hook while they got the platform that would come to be known as Nintendo 64 ready. “Holding up to the test of time” was not on the agenda.

You can’t say that they overplayed level gimmicks. Despite the fact that the STOP/GO barrels had legs as a gimmick, they only show up in that one level. These parrots only show up once too, though they’ll be featured characters in the sequel.

So in a sense, it’s kind of remarkable that any aspect of DKC holds up at all. I think my frustration with Donkey Kong Country is that it doesn’t feel like it squeezed all the potential out of the gameplay concepts it has. Maybe they were saving-up for the inevitable sequel, but I dunno. I’m a big fan of leaving it all on the court, and Rare sure as hell didn’t do that. It’s actually one of the most conservative games I’ve reviewed lately. As a franchise builder, few first steps are rarely this enticing and leave you wanting more in a bad way. Maybe any more bold ideas were canned for being too difficult when they were trying to make a game to appeal to everyone, including very young gamers, whom I’m guessing will like DKC in 2025 more than I did. I hate to guess on these things, but Donkey Kong Country seems like a great starting title for introducing young children to platforming. From what I can remember about the sequels’ difficulty, I’m guessing I won’t be able to say that about them.

Then again, there’s moments that feel like the bottom of the barrel is being scrapped. No pun intended, but this evil barrel is my least favorite boss trope: fighting the same regular enemies you’ve been killing en masse this whole time.

Even the Stampers recognized the game was too easy, but I think that could have been fixed by adding a difficulty toggle. A hard mode wouldn’t have been too hard. Just remove a lot of the DK barrels from stages. I took plenty of damage playing DKC, but I never had to wait more than a few seconds to undo that, so there was no tension. Still, the addition of Diddy Kong was probably the smartest move. What Donkey Kong Country really does right is removing hit points in favor of having two different characters, and whoever you’re playing as is lost when you get hit, at least until you find the next DK barrel two seconds later. Being able to swap between two characters who have different skills was also inspired. Diddy Kong can cartwheel through enemies and seems to have more hangtime when you cartwheel off a ledge before he has to jump. Plus he carries barrels in front of him, which makes it easier to uncover hidden doors. Meanwhile, with Donkey Kong you can do such tactics as tagging Diddy so you can use him instead. Again, a great idea that would be utilized better in the sequels. Are you noticing a theme here?

The only time I used Donkey Kong was when I was afraid of losing Diddy. It became clear really quickly why he’s not playable in the first two sequels.

Unlike Super Mario Land 2 which, besides having a lot of pointless bonus levels, really did nothing wrong besides having too basic of level design, Donkey Kong Country did PLENTY to leave me terminally annoyed. The methodology of 100%ing the game (or 101%ing because ain’t that quirky?) is strange. Every level has K-O-N-G tokens to find, some of which are so well hidden that I couldn’t find them. Sounds great, except they don’t contribute to the final completion percentage. Instead, acing the game only requires finding every bonus room. Probably not the best way to do it since there’s too many of them and they completely bust the game’s flow. My favorite levels were usually the ones that back-loaded the bonus rooms near the end of the stages. Those tended to have above-average level design. Hell, I normally hate swimming stages, but at least none of those have bonus rooms, so they were some of the better levels.

I found myself carrying barrels and walking up against walls because I was more focused on getting 100% than I was just enjoying the boilerplate, paint-by-numbers level design.

What wrecks the game’s tempo even worse than the bonus rooms are the animal tokens. No matter what you’re doing or where you are in a stage, once you collect the third and final token of any set, you drop what you’re doing and enter that specific animal’s bonus stage. It would make so much more sense to instead bank the reward until after you beat the level. That’s a time honored gaming tradition, right? But no, it’s an interruption, and not always (or ever) a welcome one. The levels take a while to finish, and it gets worse, because sometimes after the round is finished, it takes you quite far back in the level you were playing. Maybe even to the start of the stage.

Okay, so the animal bonus rounds are fun. Well, until you have 99 lives. Then they become annoying.

I did end up 101%ing Donkey Kong Country, but the irony is, I probably would have enjoyed my time with the game a lot more if I hadn’t bothered. I mean, not enough to give Donkey Kong Country a YES!, but it would have been a lot closer. I found myself deliberately avoiding animal tokens and losing the bonus rounds as soon as they started just to make them go faster. When just the act of finding the rooms is all you need, why bother? DKC is a game where lives are so plentiful that you’ll almost certainly not game over even if you struggle with some later stages. That’s a big if, by the way. The only stage I died more than twice on was the second mine cart stage, which shows up pretty late in the game. And it’s not that I never enjoyed the exploration aspect. Actually, I was happy that, if you miss a bonus room and have to replay the level, you don’t have to finish it to get credit for the stuff you missed. As soon as you locate the bonus rooms you missed, you can pause the game and press select and return to the map with full credit.

If the game had required all the letters, I would still be playing DKC, but it didn’t, and instead I’m trying to finish up this review as fast as I can.

There are a handful of gimmicky levels to keep the experience somewhat fresh, like the above screenshot. That treadmill runs on fuel barrels that you have to collect, and it kept my attention for the full length of the stage. The mine cart stages are some of the stronger auto-scrolling types of levels I’ve experienced, and a stage where you slide up and down ropes automatically actually provided a solid, enjoyable challenge. I’d say around a third of Donkey Kong Country holds up and remains clever today. But two-thirds of the game is too basic to hold up to the test of time. You never quite shake the proof-of-concept feeling when playing it, and that makes sense because the gameplay isn’t what they had to get working. Nintendo paid for a game that looked high tech enough to buy them time for the Nintendo 64. Donkey Kong Country for the third best-selling SNES game, so they got it. But being more bold and experimental with the level design? That came later, with the sequels.

Donkey Kong Country’s bosses are all dull, but King K. Rool takes the cake. His arena is much bigger than the screen, and his attack pattern is basically adding one pass across the full length of the arena after every hit. So when he drops cannonballs across the screen, instead of an exciting pattern like dodging them for several seconds, the cannonballs drop one at a time across the length of the screen. It’s the most unimaginative way of handling any boss, let alone a final one.

As a prototype for better games to come, Donkey Kong Country is a good start. It’s never BAD from a level design point of view and the barrels that you fire out of are fun enough, though not quite barrels of fun. The controls are pretty good, and it’s easy to get a feel for how long you can roll or cartwheel off a platform and float in the air before you have to jump. But the level themes are basic and dull and there’s not a big enough cast of enemies. The bosses are REALLY bad, too, and since they take even longer to fight than enemies in Mario games, they come across as punishment for finishing a world instead of a reward.

The barrels are certainly a great idea and probably the one aspect of Donkey Kong Country that I feel they didn’t hold back on. They got every molecule of gameplay out of them without being boring. I really think they’re why this ended up such a potent franchise.

The test of time is cruel, and no games have a tougher time facing that test than games based around cutting edge graphics first and gameplay second. Since the graphics were the main selling point, I figure I should mention I thought the game was pretty damn ugly. The character models are fine, I guess, but the architecture is really rough, with backgrounds often looking like Sega CD levels of splotchy. The funny thing is, after Donkey Kong Country became the last big mega hit for the SNES, Nintendo would have given anything to have Yoshi’s Island look like this game, and the only reason it didn’t happen is because it was too far in development to change the entire art direction. That’s kind of hilarious, because Yoshi’s Island still looks good in 2025 including all its cutting edge special effects. Donkey Kong Country, well, doesn’t. These days, DKC is just another middle of the road SNES platformer that looked better in 1994 than other middle of the road platformers, but it did leave a franchise with much better games in its wake, so it has that going for it. Take that, Plok.
Verdict: NO! But I want to talk about one last thing.

Donkey Kong Country: Competition Cartridge

My best score for Competition Cartridge. I couldn’t find what the highest scores were but there’s people who have scores in the 3,000s. Most of my runs also ended around the same spot, too.

There’s a version of Donkey Kong Country that acts as a spiritual successor to the 1990 Nintendo World Championships cartridge (which I reviewed in Tetris Forever: The Definitive Review’s bonus section). It’s really well made, too and actually the one aspect of Donkey Kong Country that unambiguously holds up. The timer stops during all transitions. There’s no overworld map, so finishing one stage takes you automatically to the next. They even redid what’s inside the bonus rooms to make the scoring for entering those rooms more logical, and the scoring system is, you know, fine. I actually had a lot more fun playing this than I did in anything in Nintendo World Championships: NES Edition. It’s fast-paced and genuinely exciting. So, why isn’t THIS on Switch Online? Unless Blockbuster Video’s IP holders also hold the publishing rights (don’t rule this out) I can’t think of any good reason. If you get a chance it’s worth checking out, though it’s probably not worth the $5,000 it fetches on Ebay.
Verdict for Donkey Kong Country: Competition Edition: YES!

The math checks out.

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Metroid: Zero Mission (Game Boy Advance Review)

July 28, 2025 by 3 Comments

Metroid: Zero Mission
Platform: Game Boy Advance
Released February 9, 2004
Directed by Yoshio Sakamoto
Developed by Nintendo
Available with Switch Online Expansion Pack Subscription
Listing at Metroid Wiki

ARE YOU SH*TING ME? How the heck did I miss 33% of the items? I knew I should have used a guide. Oh, and ignore my completion time, because I did rewind and use save states a lot to undo backtracking. At one point, I spent close to an hour trying to figure out how to get one super missile pick-up (this one) when I knew I had the stuff to get it, but I also wanted the best ending. I really thought I’d be further along in my Nintendo marathon, but trying to 100% every game is getting to be a pain, especially since I missed an energy tank in the first Metroid anyway (I didn’t get the one in Kraid’s chamber). For Zero Mission, I really did think I got most everything. I’m genuinely stunned I missed so much. I thought, at worst, I’d have like 90%.

It’s really not accurate to call Metroid: Zero Mission a remake of the original game that I just reviewed. There are winks to the original game, but calling this a “remake” is like saying the 2025 Superman movie is a direct remake of the old 1950s Kirk Alyn serial Atom Man vs. Superman. I mean, they’re both about Superman fighting Lex Luthor, who uses an artificially-created Kryptonite to neutralize Superman while unleashing a doomsday device on Metropolis. They’re practically identical! Except, no, they’re not really that similar at all. Zero Mission is barely even inspired by the original, and instead shares a small handful of similar rooms and a couple gags from the first game. Like, remember this GOTCHA?

I could have also done the Captain America “I understood that reference!” meme here.

But otherwise, this is basically more of a direct prequel to Super Metroid, like Nintendo said, “what if in 2004 we released what the 1986 game would have been like if we had made it in 1994 instead?” It’s Nintendo’s version of wish fulfillment. Which isn’t to say you should expect a game with as grand a scale as Super Metroid, either. I was actually surprised by how small the world of Metroid: Zero Mission is, even if you count all the Zero Suit stuff. I remembered the game being much bigger, but there really are only two “benchmark” boss fights before you tackle Mother Brain. Nintendo’s own version of Bulk & Skull, the dynamic duo of Kraid and Ridley. There’s other boss fights but not a single one of them shakes the “mini-boss” vibe, and hell, I beat Ridley in about twenty seconds. I even called my nephew and his friends over to watch the fight since they’re big Smash Bros. fans. “Hey kids, want to see me beat Ridley?” and the fight was over before the kids even finished talking about how cool a design it is.

Maybe I’m just good at fighting Ridley. I died against both Kraid and Mother Brain, but later on, I beat Robo Ridley only getting hit twice.

I guess I just expected to like Metroid: Zero Mission a lot more than I did. I was certain I’d be saying it’s one of the all-time great Game Boy Advance titles, but I’m not going there. Much like with Super Mario Bros. 3, eh, it’s fine. It just brings very little new to the table. The disappointing thing is, when it does manage to bring fresh ideas, they usually are fantastic. It’s such a small thing, but at one point you’re attacked by these annoying-as-hell space parasites. You can’t shoot them, and once they’re on you, you have to bomb them off. I kind of figured they only existed to be a tutorial for the bombs. Later in the game though, you have to deliberately infect yourself with the parasites, then lead them to these otherwise indestructible heart-shaped barriers. Apparently the parasites like them more than the taste of Samus’ armor.

Chow down, gang! Whoever eats the most will become the new Khaleesi of the Great Grass Sea! (My sister read that and said “that’s not why she eats the heart. It’s to prove she’s carrying the Stallion who Mounts the World you idiot.” I feel so loved.)

It’s such wonderful world building that helps make Zebes feel like a genuinely organic, thriving ecosystem, but those moments are few and far between. Zero Mission just never successfully loses the vibe of being a lesser-version of Super Metroid. It sure doesn’t play as well. The movement and aiming is clunkier and the sense of exploration is muffled. The level design is fine, but it’s not amazing. If they were aiming for a sense of claustrophobia, great. I was kind of surprised that’s something that people craved from Metroid, but again, I got into the series through Metroid Prime. While it has plenty of moments of feeling closed-in, the thing *I* most directly associate with Metroid is the believable alien world. At the time I played Metroid Prime, I’d played a lot of first person shooters that controlled better and had better action, but it was the atmosphere and the settings (and the enemy design to a lesser degree) that immersed me like few games ever had. For a 2D game, Zero Mission does okay at that, but there’s not enough of a push towards giving it that lived-in feel.

This is the only cutscene that works, and it’s for one of my favorite game bosses. A giant one-eyed brain with spikes and tubes coming out of it that’s submerged in a giant glass jar is objectively terrifying. On the other hand, the one right before the Zero Suit section of the game was so damn silly that I chortled. It looked almost identical to the opening of the Mighty Mouse in the Great Space Chase, which a young Cathy Vice most certainly didn’t watch so much she wore out the VHS tape. I showed this joke to my parents and they both looked off into the distance like they were having flashbacks. You know, come to think of it, I “wore out” an awful lot of video tapes that my parents hated having to watch over and over again. I just gave them the stink eye, but they claim innocence. “We would never have broken your treasured video tapes, Cathy. We might have lied about our ability to find replacements, though.” Well, that’s fair.

Everything that happens until after the Mother Brain fight has the feel of going through the motions. There’s not really any new items or abilities. There’s lots of gizmos in the levels themselves that you can use to get around, but otherwise, this is just a boilerplate, paint-by-numbers Metroid adventure, and it’s good, really. It’s pretty much impossible to not enjoy Metroid once they perfected the formula. But I found myself waiting for something to happen that really made me sit up in my chair, and it just never happened. You beat Mother Brain, run away, and it feels like a decent but unspectacular game is over. Everything that happens afterward feels almost like a completely different game. I’m guessing they were aiming for an epilogue vibe. They failed badly at that.

The home stretch leading up to the battle with Mother Brain is probably the part of the game that feels most closely pulled from the original. In fact, it’s actually a safe bet to say that the only twist really is that you’re not playing the original game. It’s a little easier to dodge the bullets shot by the indestructible guns and you presumably have super missiles to make breaking through the barriers go faster. Then you get to the Mother Brain fight, and I felt it’s a massive letdown. It’s staged very poorly, with two single-block platforms and a pit of lava underneath you, with two guns continuously shooting at you AND those orange circles. This was a chance to fix one of the worst last boss fights Nintendo ever did, and they just made it SLIGHTLY more tolerable. The only new aspect is now Mother Brain’s eye must be shot, and it’s just not enough. How come Kraid and Ridley get whole new fighting styles but Mother Brain is only slightly updated? “Because she’s the last boss!” BUT SHE’S NOT! It’s a boring Robo Ridley fight that’s basically the same type of fight as Mother Brain with a small target that’s covered in glass that has to be shattered, then you have to wait for the glowing dot (an eye, if you will) to be vulnerable to shoot it with missiles. Only THAT fight doesn’t have lava and over four other things shooting at you from all angles while you balance on two small blocks. I would have preferred something truly fresh over a retread of the same old sh*t. Have the glass itself fight back, T-1000 style or something.

Yes, the Zero Suit stuff is fantastic. So fantastic that I kind of wish they had the guts to do that as the entire game. It pulls off genuinely scary stealth mechanics in 2D just about as good as a platforming-shooter can do. Okay, so it’s nowhere near as hair-raising as the evil Samus in Metroid Fusion was (the first time I realized a 2D game could be scary), but running from the Space Pirates was always exciting. Even if some of the moments chosen as the spot you run to that makes them give up and turn around made no sense at all.

“Duh, let’s see, I was right on her tail when she ran into this room, but she’s not here. All that’s here is this wall that both her and I can easily jump over. I’ll just assume she was so scared of me that all her atoms depolarized and she vanished. Good job, me! The literal brain that’s my boss would be so proud of me if she hadn’t just been killed by some blond chick wearing a superhero suit. Hey wait a second! I wonder if that blond chick wearing a different kind of superhero suit that I was just chasing knows her? Well, too late to ask, I suppose, on account of her atoms depolarizing. Hopefully when they make a game about this some day, all the little space pirates who play it won’t have their immersion completely shattered when they see how my victory over the blond girl who I’m pretty sure isn’t the same blond girl who killed Mother Brain plays out.”

Okay, so Zero Mission requires a LOT of suspension of disbelief at the ends of the chases, but most of the sneaking and running is very well done. I just wish it lasted a lot longer. Once you get the suit back, not only does the game go back to being paint-by-numbers Metroid, but the final stretch leading to the ending leans too heavily on a poorly-designed Space Jump. Metroid: Zero Mission’s jumping I think is the weakest link of the game. Even when you have the high jump, it never stops feeling too heavy to the point of being slightly uncomfortable. Oh, it’s not a deal breaker or anything. You’ll adapt to its limits and timing because they did a first-rate job of designing the levels in a way that puts a focus on the limits of your jumps. Eventually it’ll be intuitive, and that must be harder to do than it seems from a development standpoint because a lot of games where the jumping isn’t comfy never manage to recover like Zero Mission does, especially as quickly as it does. But it’s always the elephant in the room, and that elephant goes on a murderous rampage once you get the Space Jump.

This is one of those mechanics where you have to pause and shake feeling back into your hand.

Unlimited jumping WITH heavy jumping physics is a really, really bad idea, and so course it’s the primary gameplay mechanic of Metroid: Zero Mission’s climax. It’s actually exhausting to use, and in some (thankfully limited) instances, it crosses the line into outright bad game design when enemies shoot you out of the air. Since the heavy jumping leaves no elegance to the timing of when you have to press the button to jump higher, it turns what should be a fun superpower (it’s basically flying when you think about it) into a mindless button master. A chore that you have to do a lot at the end of the game. After the stellar Zero Suit stuff, it pretty much sours the finale of an otherwise perfectly decent Metroid game.

“Nice shootin’, Tex!”

So Metroid: Zero Mission blew-up what should have been a historically amazing ending to a game that already suffers from feeling more like DLC for Super Metroid with little in the way of worlds that are “new” to explore. BUT, the important stuff is all here. Zebes does feel like a living alien world at times. Instead of feeling like a series of samey platforms in a video game, it feels like you’re an intergalactic bounty hunter exploring caves and structures on a hostile planet. That’s what I want, so giving Zero Mission a YES! was easy. And yet, that Zero Suit stuff was such a tease because it worked. As silly and convoluted as it is, hell, stealth stuff in video games, even games more serious than this, are usually silly and convoluted. If I can’t deal with that sh*t, I wouldn’t like the genre at all.

I wonder if the underwhelming reaction to Metroid Fusion was the reason why Nintendo hasn’t done a full Zero Suit game in the style of Zero Mission’s finale, including using a stun gun instead of a deadly weapon. You know, Fusion had a weird suit instead of the normal one, therefore it’s not what people what. No, that’s not true though. I think people sh*t on Fusion because it’s basically a linear game, and the enemy/item format was lame as f*ck. You can learn lessons in critical failure (and Fusion didn’t fail critically. Nobody hates it or anything like that. It’s just not Metroid as we want Metroid to be) but you should never lose your willingness to experiment. I just find it hard to believe that the company that made an RPG series where the Mario cast are instead paper dolls or a Kirby game where he’s made out of yarn don’t have the balls to do a full 2D Zero Suit Samus game.

All I care about is having fun, and the Zero Suit gameplay is the highlight of Metroid: Zero Mission for the twenty to thirty minutes it lasts, if that. It’s one of the best sequences in the entire franchise regardless of whether I’m talking about two dimensions or three. Of course, the timing of when it happens is jarring and awkward. It makes it feel tacked-on, and it kind of is. The whole Chozo origin story is, too, and while the level themes when the Chozo drop awkwardly in and out of the narrative are cool (apparently the way to my heart is having hieroglyphs or petroglyphs in games) it feels shoehorned. I can’t help but wonder if they originally intended to start the game with the Zero Suit, since that would have made so much more sense, and they simply lost their nerve. I would have also been fine with a game where Samus has to abandon the suit multiple times throughout, perhaps to retrieve other times. They can come up with reasons why to do that. They’re smart. Either way, the Zero Suit deserves its own game. I think Zero Suit Samus could be a huge franchise for Nintendo. Not that they’re hurting for those, but there’s so many Mario spin-offs. Would one Samus spin-off kill them?
Verdict: YES!

“Well…… she can’t draw worth a sh*t, so I guess our experiment to create the greatest artist in the galaxy was a complete failure. I haven’t been this disappointed since that giant, spiky, one-eyed brain we created went evil. Who could have seen that coming? Well, I suppose we should toss Samus in the incinerator and start over. She does pack a mean punch though. Meh, just slap some armor on her and tell everyone to pretend like we were trying to create the galaxy’s greatest bounty hunter. Also, maybe we should stop toying with mother nature.”

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Metroid (NES Review)

July 27, 2025 by 9 Comments

Metroid
Platform: Nintendo Entertainment System/Famicom Disk System
First Released August 6, 1986
Directed by Satoru Okada
Developed by Nintendo
Available with Switch Online Subscription (Standard)
Listing at Metroid Wiki

Metroid is one of the original “looks like it’s going to be fun but it ain’t” games.

Well, I reviewed Kid Icarus so I suppose I should also review the game that Nintendo thought was the better bet. They were probably right, too, though I can’t stress enough how miserable I was playing Metroid. I’m not ignorant enough to call it the worst Nintendo-developed game ever, but it certainly ranks among my least favorite games by them. Until this review, I’d never actually finished the original Metroid. Like most people my age, my first experience with the franchise was Metroid Prime, which I LOVED as a kid. It was a major milestone in my gaming life, but the larger franchise really wasn’t. I didn’t even play Fusion or Zero Mission on the GBA until many, many years later and my first experience with Super Metroid was on Virtual Console around the same time I played the GBA games. It wasn’t out of malice or anything. The funny thing is, my older readers probably couldn’t have imagined Metroid as a first person shooter, whereas myself and I imagine many people from my era couldn’t imagine it as anything else!

All credit where it’s due that they really did invent a lot of nifty ideas for how exploration could be handled in a 2D space. Metroid is a bonafide pioneer, and I’m saying that to remind the hardcore Metroid fans who do NOT like people talking smack on the original game that nothing I can say can take away from Metroid’s legacy.

I actually did own the original Metroid for my GBA. I hated it so much that I almost didn’t put Fusion and Zero Mission in my Game Boy Player. It wasn’t just the clunky, laggy mechanics either. By the way, if you’re curious why there’s lag, this is an excellent explanation video from Displaced Gamers, one of the absolute best gaming content creators on YouTube, who I discovered thanks to his video on the infamous dam stage from Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, broken down into layman’s terms for dummies like me. But the movement, lag, etc? That didn’t turn me off Metroid, and hell, I think the jumping is pretty dang good, all things considered.

Since this is a largely negative review, I wanted to start off right away by saying the Morphing Ball is an inspired idea. One of the all-time great gaming concepts. It would have been really easy to just say “meh, make her crawl, whatever.” But no, she turns into a ball that even bounces when you fall. When I was a kid, I wondered “does that mean you can play basketball with Samus?” Ooh, I smell an idea for the next Camelot-developed Nintendo sports game! And while I’m on the subject, bring back Metroid Prime Pinball you bastards!

I could handle a challenge, but what I couldn’t handle was taking damage when the controls weren’t in my hands. I couldn’t handle not being able to aim in any direction but straight ahead or straight up. I couldn’t handle having no built-in map, which seems like a massive oversight even for the time period. Hell, even the original Zelda had a map. Many maps, actually, one that gives you an idea of your position in the overworld and one for each dungeon. I really couldn’t handle the repetitive level design. So, I put Metroid away, but thank goodness I plugged my nose and popped in Metroid Fusion, because THAT was the game where I became a fan of the larger franchise, and eventually I would be blown away by Super Metroid and Metroid: Zero Mission, both of which are a LOT better than Fusion was.

This and the Ice Beam are just about as far as I’d made it in any previous attempt before I was too bored and/or frustrated to continue. But a review requires a full playthrough. And morphine, but despite my pleas, my family said it would count a relapse.

After close to twenty years and probably around three or four attempts to play Metroid, I finally told myself I HAD to finish it because it was the next, logical IGC review. Then I quit after thirty minutes and booted up Zero Mission. But then I rebooted Metroid and decided, screw (attack) it, I’ll cheat. So, yeah, I’m not following the rules of my Mario Marathon, IE no rewinding, no save states, no walkthrough. I used all three for Metroid because my ultimate goal is “find the fun, by any means necessary.” Now to clarify, I rewound only to shave time off exploration. In other words, if I went the wrong direction, I rewound it instead of turning around and fighting my way back. I used save states only at the end of the game with the Metroids, and I did use a full walkthrough of the game from WikiStrategy. BUT, I wasn’t glued to it, and not just because the map was small and couldn’t be zoomed-in without making it blurry. I swear! Armed with these tools, which leaves the raw combat and gameplay, did I find the fun that I never found in Metroid before? Well, no. Because, you know, it’s not a very fun game. Hell, the last hour was spent trying to inch my way towards Mother Brain with no means of fighting back. DOES THAT SOUND FUN?!

Actually, I used a combination of save states and rewind to deal with the Metroids because I couldn’t fight the f*cking things and running away was my only option. It turns out that the first Ice Gun I picked up I got out of order. Weirdly, that part happened before I went full tilt into cheating. Later, I got the second Ice Gun THEN the Wave Gun. Well, doing it that way took away my Ice Gun(s). I didn’t know you couldn’t kill the Metroids if you didn’t have the Ice Gun! The Ice Gun I didn’t intend to trade for the Wave Gun! I figured I’d have a wavy Ice Gun! What I’m trying to tell you is that I HAD NO MEANS TO KILL THE TITLE MONSTERS OF THE GAME! WHY WOULD THEY EVEN MAKE THIS A THING THAT COULD HAPPEN? YOU SONS OF BITCHES AT NINTENDO! I HATE YOU! I HATE ALL OF YOU! I HATE YOUR STINKIN’ GUTS! I HOPE YOUR OATMEAL GETS REPLACED WITH MANURE! MANURE!!!

Metroid is even higher than Little Nemo: The Dream Master on my list of NES games that I seriously do not understand how anyone can be a fan of them or justify some of the level design or mechanical choices made by its developers. There’s some VERY bad game design in Metroid. The pain of the above screenshot is still pretty fresh, literally because I think I injured my throat from all the screaming. I think I had a half-dozen rage quits before reminding myself “you’re right at the end.” I also had to remind myself that I was originally tickled pink when I realized the Ice Gun was gone. When you pick up the Ice Gun, it MURDERS the combat. You can’t turn it on or off, so from the moment you have it, it actually increases the sponge of enemies, which are seemingly not damaged from the act of being frozen, but rather only from being unfrozen. Unless you want to freeze them, jump on them, and plant a bomb on them. If I were a space marine and had to do that, I think I’d probably die because enemies would ambush me while I stared longingly at my gigantic arm cannon saying “what happened? You used to be so cool.”

Or how about this sh*t? In Super Mario Bros.: The Lost Levels, VERY late in the game players encounter fake Bowsers in the middle of the levels, and it’s pretty awesome when it happens. I wonder if Metroid’s designers were sneaking a peek at that game’s development and saying “hey, we should do that!” Because this is a fake Kraid that uses the exact same sprite, only I encountered it well before the real one. And now I’m sparing a thought for someone who saw the Kraid statue in Brinstar, thought this WAS Kraid, beat it, then left this area and returned to the original hub world only to later realize the one they killed wasn’t the real one. IT HAD TO HAVE HAPPENED AT LEAST ONCE! There is some poor bastard out there who remembers the time they walked all the way to Mount Doom, then returned to the Shire only to realize they disposed of the mood ring they got at a flea market instead of the One Ring.

There’s been plenty of people who mention the sloppiness of getting life slapped when you enter a door by an enemy who is placed right on the other side, or the wave gun going through blocks, or the inconsistent item drops. But ignoring all those things, I think Metroid is just not that exciting of a game. There’s no elegance to the combat or the level design. Even for its era, it feels very un-Nintendo like in terms of intuitive combat or navigation. While the enemies explode with a nice crunch, there’s just not enough of them that are actually fun to kill. The lack of flexibility for the combat hurts a great deal. There’s also so many jumping corridors or areas of the game where the platforming layout feels samey. They even recycle the logic of the hidden areas. There’s a few duplicate rooms, the first of which usually has a fake-out hidden door that leads to a dead-end while the second has something in it at the same spot. And now that I really think about it, I’m guessing this is the case because it saved on memory space.

One aspect of the game I didn’t really struggle with was the bosses. Well, two out of the three of them. With autofire and the Wave Gun, I beat Ridley in a few seconds. Curiosity got the better of me and I tried the fight without it and it didn’t end so well for me. My props to anyone who actually got through this back in the day.

I already said the roster of enemies isn’t quite big enough, but you can still take steps to get the most mileage out of a limited roster by spacing them out or mixing them up the right way. Look at all the mileage Super Mario Bros. got out of its smaller roster of baddies. Or maybe I’m wrong. Hell, maybe Metroid’s enemies just have boring attack patterns and there was no actual usage to get out of them besides what we already got. None of them are implemented in a particularly clever way, or at least the ones that aren’t meant to be used as frozen platforms. Or perhaps it’s a combination of poor level layouts with inelegant enemies. The best way I can describe it is the original Metroid’s level design and enemy placement feels like the type of design you would commonly see if a game called Metroid Maker existed today. Tons of single block platforms to navigate and the same clusters of enemies spammed on them until they lose all their excitement, just like so many Mario Maker levels.

For all my bitching, the one mechanical part I don’t mind is the jumping. If Metroid’s platforming physics felt the same way Kid Icarus did, with floaty jumps and heavy momentum upon landing, Metroid would probably not be around today. This original Metroid game relies very heavily on single-block-wide platforms. They’re all over, and the big “escape the planet” finale is ONLY single-block platforms. Hell, these platforming layouts would have been tough even with Super Mario 1’s jumping physics, and that game was considered a major milestone in the history of video jumping. So, why isn’t Metroid? Because I think the jumping is reliable and solid, as long as you’re not buried in the lava. For all its problems, Metroid is a genuine step forward for Nintendo’s education on how to do perfect jumping in platform games.

An even better example of poor pacing is the locations of the items. Nintendo is good at hiding stuff in the Metroid games, but not in this one. Some of the missile upgrade locations reminded me of when I’d pester my exhausted and likely annoyed parents to re-hide easter eggs for the fifth time on Easter Sunday and they’d just lay them down around the couch, whining the whole time about how they thought I’d grow out of this by 36 years old. At one point, you can get five missile pick-ups in a span of a minute or two. I’m guessing they figured players would be overjoyed to find a treasure trove of missile upgrades. They didn’t know yet that hiding five upgrades so close together doesn’t leave any cool down time for players. By not spacing them out, they give players one exciting moment for the price of five. That’s a really lousy deal, especially when there’s plenty of dead spaces that could have been given new life by relocating four of those upgrades.

OH how I hated the whole finale. These indestructible guns combined with bubbles that just spawn from the void. I had to restart this last stretch of the game probably a dozen times just to have enough life to make it through, and it’s not like I was full of life after having no means of fighting back against the Metroids. Then Mother Brain nearly gave me a seizure at the end and I had to take a nap. Man, I hated Metroid. I really, really hated it. But, I got Metroid Prime out of it so, you know, thanks Metroid 1.

The good news is that Nintendo did get something priceless out of Metroid: experience. They also learned that gamers were very interested in the concept of fully interconnected, exploration-based space adventure. The concept was solid. This version might not have been very fun and was sure to age worse than most NES games, but as proof of concept for an entire genre, they could have done a lot worse than Metroid. It does a lot right. Shooting bubble doors to open them. The missiles. The Long Beam being an upgrade instead of the default range of your gun, which should be frustrating but instead feels like an earned moment. The Morphing Ball. Freezing enemies to use as platforms. The Screw Attack. Mother Brain. The whole vibe to this world. The Metroids themselves. And of course, Samus Aran. These are way cooler ideas than an Eggplant Wizard or building up to a climax where a character who already has had wings this entire f*cking time finally gets to fly. Metroid on the NES is one of the greatest foundations in gaming history. But I could have lived without actually playing through Metroid. Every house needs a solid foundation to build up from, but you can’t live in the foundation.
Verdict: NO!

FYI, I played the Famicom Disk version, which has less lag, apparently. I tried to give myself the best possible way of having fun. I didn’t. Sorry, Metroid fans. For what it’s worth I plan on drooling all over Super Metroid soon.

Filed under Nintendo Switch Reviews, Retro Reviews Tagged with , , , , , , , , , , ,

Super Mario Bros. Wonder (Nintendo Switch Review)

July 21, 2025 by 7 Comments

Super Mario Bros. Wonder
Platform: Nintendo Switch
Released October 20, 2023
Directed by Shiro Mouri
Developed by Nintendo
Listing at Super Mario Wiki
$59.99 paid for Mario’s visit to the Betty Ford Clinic in the making of this review.

It took 38 years but Nintendo finally figured out to just run with the “Mario on Drugs” joke.

The above screenshot is from the second level in the game. During the first stage, I was worried that I was heading for another New Super Mario Bros. “I guess this just isn’t for me” experience. And then in the second level, I dropped acid and the piranha plants started singing and having a parade, and I was hooked. Oh they don’t call it “acid.” They’re called “Wonder Flowers” but they have a psychedelic glow to them and they do things like make the pipes come to life like they’re inchworms or cause missiles dropping rainbow smoke trails behind them, and yes, even make you see dragons. This isn’t symbolism, people. This is as on the nose as it gets, and I’m there for it.

The only proof this isn’t really drugs: Mario actually caught the dragon.

For a while, I really thought Mario Wonder was cruising to the title of “best 2D Mario game” with no if’s, and’s, or but’s about it. This was based largely on the stellar level design and batsh*t insane Wonder Effects. But some really head-scratching decisions made it an actual debate, which I’m grateful for because this would have been a pretty boring review for me otherwise. Which isn’t to say you can get bored playing Mario Wonder. Oh no. This is far and away better than any of the games in the New Super Mario Bros. franchise and a return to form for Mario as a 2D gaming stalwart. MOST of the levels are pretty damn amazing, and the three new power-ups are a lot of fun to use. I can’t really pretend this wasn’t the absolute best time I’ve ever had with a 2D Mario game, even with all the problems. Actually, the levels are so phenomenal that it’s kind of shocking the game did anything wrong at all, but it did.

The “Mario on Drugs” stuff really isn’t helped by the fact that the screen becomes trippy during the Wonder Effects. Again, this really isn’t winking. This is a drunk tapping you over and over saying “DO YOU GET IT?”

For one thing, the levels don’t scale right at all, nor are they ordered correctly. In the Magma World, there’s a level where evil popcorn kernels walk across giant rocks that heat up and cool down, and if they touch a hot surface (or are shot by a fireball) they pop and become evil popcorn. But, you can permanently deactivate the heating rocks by hitting them with water, either by throwing a pot of water at them or using Elephant Mario’s ability to store water in the trunk and spray it. It’s a fun stage, but then the stage you unlock is one of the “break time” stages. These are tiny micro levels that have a gimmick attached to them, some of which aren’t even real challenges and are just for funsies type of deals. Well, the break time stage in question is like a tutorial type of stage for the whole “get water on the heating/cooling rocks” concept. That’s not an exaggeration, either. It’s genuinely the type of brief micro stage that you would build to introduce a brand new gameplay concept, except you just finished a massive, difficult world built around the mechanic. What the hell?

This is the big stage in question. I had to beat it a third time to get the hidden exit, which a couple stages in each world has. Mario Wonder, from a pacing point of view, is heir-apparent to Super Mario World. They even have the same initials. Except they don’t because it’s not “Super Mario Wonder” but rather “Super Mario Bros. Wonder.”

I don’t want to imply that the “Break Time” or “Badge Challenge” micro stages are a complete disaster, because that’s not the case at all. Some of them had me smiling ear-to-ear. But the structure of the game, or rather the lack thereof, causes a lot of pacing problems. Sometimes the overworld maps are walled-off and sometimes you’re free to wander off the paved pathway and take a large cluster of levels, full-sized or micro, in any order you want. You also can’t rely on Wonder’s built-in quick travel to give you a proper level ordering either, because it always puts the full-sized levels ahead of the micro-levels. There is an attempt to tell you the scaling. The levels are given a one-through-five rating on their challenge, but I really didn’t feel they were accurate. I beat many four star levels on my first life and died a lot on plenty of two star stages.

Where you’re free to roam around the map, there’s lots of hidden stuff. Rarely a stage, and more typically Captain Toad who gives you 50 purple coins. Since you’re practically picking purple coins out of your ears, I don’t think the trade-off of a less logical level progression was worth it. I’d rather have the game follow a semi-strict linear progression with the occasional branching path. If 1991’s Super Mario World can do it brilliantly and still offer a sense of exploration and discovery even with paved pathways, then it’s proven that there is no need to suddenly allow players to walk around the map.

It feels like the developers just threw together the game’s courses and couldn’t decide on an order, so they gave up on the process almost entirely. But the example in the lava world I cited above was one of those pathway parts of the map. It wasn’t MY choice for how it played out. It was the development team’s choice. This isn’t a nothing-burger complaint, either. Pace and tempo matter a great deal. I put a very high premium on a game’s maintaining one consistent tempo of quality, and Wonder is all over the place. And some of the “break time” levels really are a complete waste of time, offering neither quirkiness nor challenge. It’s been a long, long time since I played a modern Nintendo game that had so many aspects of it that felt like placeholders for something bigger that just never got finished. They also should have probably somehow incentivized the badges that are outright handicaps. The one I hated the most sees you perpetually bouncing. I would never use it voluntarily, but they could have easily added some post-game content just by offering rewards for beating specific levels with specific badges. Without that, most badges will go completely unused outside of their micro-stages.

The new bubble power offers the same type of instakill satisfaction of the classic Super Mario fire flower (which is also in this game) but with the added benefit of being able to use the bubbles as boosts for your jumps. But, what really makes it work well is that it’s not effective enough to be able to use it to cheese stages. Its usefulness for platforming, even in multiplayer, is very situational, but in a good way. Actually, none of the power-ups are overpowered. There’s no p-wings or hammer bros. suits to wreck the difficulty curve. Probably a good thing, since Nintendo screwed the pooch on curve from the format alone. Also, since I couldn’t find a spot to talk about it, the drill power is one of the most satisfying Mario powers when you do a Bugs Bunny attack on enemies. Ain’t Mario a stinker?

And while I’m complaining about things, Mario Wonder has the typical mediocre 2D Mario bosses. Yeah, yeah, I know I’m deeply in the minority on that opinion, but I just never enjoy the traditional Mario “jump on the head” boss fight style. I can, and have, enjoyed it in other games, but for some reason, it’s always a letdown for me in a Mario game. Maybe it just doesn’t feel like it matches the epic scope and scale of the worlds themselves. But the fights with Bowser Jr. in Mario Wonder, even though it tries to change up the formula by giving the battles the “Wonder Effect” after the first hit, never felt big or climactic to me. I couldn’t wait for them to be over with and my motivation for them was purely “I don’t want to go through this again.” Hell, the “bosses” of the airships are a literal single button that must be pressed, and the act of getting to that button was so simple and easy to bypass the “logic” of the chamber, especially if you have a badge that boosts your jumping ability, that I was always startled that the fight was over when it was. I guess I just assume based on the enjoyment of the levels that they’re capable of better bosses.

I don’t think this was the wisest spell to cast, Bowser Jr. It’s right up there with Ralph Wiggum getting the first swing of the sword and stabbing himself through the heart. Holy crap, Bowser Jr. IS the Ralph Wiggum of Nintendo. I just spent five minutes staring off into space, imagining the implication of that. By the way, Mario Wonder’s co-op doesn’t have the old fashioned New Super Mario “bounce off each-other” mechanics, and so I actually had a really great time playing co-op with Sasha.

There’s fifty-six total Wonder Effects throughout the game, but a lot more levels than that, so many effects repeat, and not every effect is a winner. Some are typical video game stuff, like running away from the giant spiked ball, or even returning an old Mario item like Balloon Mario from Mario World. Others are more outlandish, like requiring you to jump in sync with a musical beat or answer trivia questions where, if you look closely, the things doing the trivia look kind of like the viruses from Dr. Mario. All of the Wonder Effects are fun, truly! Well, they’re fun ONCE, and if they were each unique to a specific stage, I wouldn’t even have this paragraph. But I grew bored with several effects. The most annoying repeat is “Wubba Mario” which they must have been really proud of because all four of its appearances happen around the same time and it’s even highlighted in a story-driven level where you rescue a bunch of trapped miners. But it’s really nothing special. I’ve played plenty of games where you’re a sticky mass that sticks to every surface. This has been done, and yet they gave this over to a not-unsubstantial portion of the game, and I kind of hate that they did that. The kids loved it, though.

And actually, I think the levels with Wubba Mario were some of the weaker ones in Mario Wonder. Between its four appearances, they could have constructed one ultimate level that took all the best bits of them and made a full stage out of it, and it would have been awesome and welcome. Or hell, spread it out! It’s a great big game. Nope. It really does kind of hit close to four in a row and it just kills the excitement of getting Wonder Flowers. By the way, you then have to repeat one of those levels, literally just play it one more time, to open the path to that world’s Special Stage level. It might be the best 2D Mario ever, but Super Mario Bros. Wonder is NOT perfect.

There’s also an “easy mode” in the form of the Yoshis or Nabbit, who only can die from things like lava and pits, but enemies don’t damage them and Nabbit doesn’t even get stun-locked. This is important, but first let me say that, like Super Mario World, there’s a bonus Special World where every stage is designed to be extra difficult. When I reviewed Super Mario World and didn’t struggle all that much with Special Stages (which, for the record, I did, the first time I played the game as a kid), someone said “have you considered that you’re just really good at video games?” Which is flattering, but if it were true I wouldn’t have needed over one-hundred combined lives over the course of three days just to beat this one level:

This is one of those levels where whole new swear words had to be invented. I think I got up to eleven syllables for one of them.

It’s called “Special Climb to the Beat” and allegedly jumping to the rhythm is the key to winning. Okay, so I’m tone deaf and I have shaky hands, so this was fated to be my mortal enemy anyway, but it also annihilated the kids too. I sincerely thought I would not be able to finish the game.  I actually finished this review, but that niggling little voice that says “come on, you’re so close to acing the game” started screaming in the head, and I did eventually get to the top. And by the way: I HATE that getting the top of the flagpole is one of the requirements for 100%ing the game, because when I had to replay a few levels to unlock the ultimate final challenge (which is just a marathon of using ten of the badges, though there are a few checkpoints so it’s not THAT bad), for a few of them, the only thing I was missing was touching the top of the flag. There’s nothing worse than replaying a full stage just to do one thing at the very end differently. Anyway, back to the problem with the Yoshis and Nabbit.

Finally!

After beating the wall-jumping stage from hell, Sasha hopped on for co-op, and in fact, we beat four of the Special World levels on our first attempt WITH the purple coins and flagpole. But this is not a +1 in the “maybe she’s just good at video games” pile because co-op made it kind of easy AND the Yoshis made it even easier. Sasha, playing as Yoshi, could not be killed by enemies, and if only one of us was dead, we could come back to life just by our ghost hitting the other within “five seconds” but it’s really closer to eight or nine seconds. So after that stage that killed me a ton, we sort of flew through the Special World. If it took us twenty minutes total, I’d be stunned. Solo? Oh, these stages are brutal. But in co-op? We both died a lot AND beat the stages on our first try. Also, the Special World really isn’t THAT special. What made the Special World stand out in Mario World is that the levels were weird, experimental, and crazy. Well, that’s sort of the whole game of Mario Wonder, isn’t it? Wonder’s Special World stages are harder, but they’re not creatively better because the whole game is this kind of weird, experimental, and crazy.

Now here’s the good news: when Mario Wonder is at its best, it’s pure gaming euphoria. Well, I’d hope so since that’s sort of the point of drugs. One of the many reasons it stands tall over the New Super Mario games is that those always felt like they used the original 8-bit/16-bit games as little more than a checklist. “These are the things we need to put into the games, because nostalgia.” Not Wonder, though. It feels like it used the original games for inspiration to do a game that feels modern and not like a throwback. Which isn’t to say that the games don’t fit with those. The jumping physics are as intuitive as Mario World’s. The cast of enemies is right up there with Super Mario 3’s. The effort made to give each stage its own personality also matches Mario 3’s, and that’s where Wonder really shines. It feels like a true evolution instead of a cash-grab homage.

There are multiple levels in Mario Wonder that are very obviously not designed with co-op in mind. I’m totally fine with that because, say it with me: CO-OP RUINS EVERYTHING. One of the reasons the New Super Mario series is so f*cking bland is because Nintendo put such a heavy premium on the co-op gameplay that came at the expense of the single player experience. Every single stage had to work with four players bouncing off each-other. They clearly didn’t give a crap about that with Wonder, because levels like this one, where you launch super high with each jump, caused more fatalities than a Mortal Kombat tournament. I’m all for it, too.

Like Mario 3, if any stage doesn’t “do it” for you, that’s fine because you’re one stage away from a completely unique experience. Even if the Wonder Effect is a repeat, how the stage is built, and the ebb and flow of it, will almost certainly feel like a one-off. It must be hard to do, because there’s not a lot of 2D platformers that can maintain that for the full length of the game. Even Mario World didn’t completely succeed there. With Mario Wonder, Nintendo has now done it twice in this franchise (probably three times since Yoshi’s Island kind of did it too).

Yes, yes, we all liked Limbo, Nintendo. I wonder if the elongated Mario being framed in silhouette like this was a joke against Limbo the indie game and limbo the thing drunk people throw their backs out doing. “Limbo under the bar when you’re stretched out like this, bitch!”

Super Mario Bros. Wonder is the polished, modern Super Mario Bros. 3, and to a lesser extent, Super Mario World. What stood out to me in Mario 3 is how, in retrospect, Nintendo did a pretty poor job of incentivizing exploration of the stages. They jammed plenty of content if you do explore, but didn’t effectively corral players into it. The most important question a game designer can ask is “why?” As in “why would players find this stuff?” And I don’t think “just because” is a good answer. I don’t think Nintendo knew that “WHY?” was the be-all, end-all design question in 1988, but they sure did by 2023. Mario Wonder is the most effective 2D Mario for convincing players to see everything through natural gameplay mechanics. They asked themselves “WHY?” and came up with answers, and as a result, for all of its glaring flaws, Mario Wonder is the best 2D Mario game. Sorry, Super Mario Bros. 2 and ROM hacks of Super Mario Bros. 3, but you’ve finally been beaten.

As I stated in my Super Mario Advance 4 review, Mario 3 was a game made in Nintendo’s adolescence. As amazing for its time as the game was, it was also still a game being made by people who were still learning how to develop “Nintendo” style games. Almost exactly thirty-five years to the day after Mario 3 released for the first time and Super Mario Bros. Wonder hit stores, and it’s a game made by Nintendo designers who have graduated as game designers. They know what they’re doing now. They ask “WHY?” a lot, and they understand how to maximize every gameplay mechanic. Mario Wonder IS Mario 3, all grown-up. The irony is, there’s still a lot of gamers out there, 50-somethings, who insist they will NEVER play “modern crap” because they just know in their heart the classics can never be beaten. They refuse to grow up, and I’m very happy the people designing games at Nintendo aren’t like them. Growing up ain’t so bad after all.
Verdict: YES!

They really did need better unlockables than this, though. Couldn’t they have given costumes for the characters?

Filed under Nintendo eShop Reviews, Nintendo Switch Reviews Tagged with , , , , , , , , , , ,

Kid Icarus (NES Review)

July 14, 2025 by 11 Comments

Kid Icarus
aka Hikari Shinwa: Palutena no Kagami
Platform: Nintendo Entertainment System
First Released December 19, 1986
Designed by Toru Osawa
Directed by Satoru Okada
Developed by Nintendo
Available with Switch Online Subscription (Standard)

This grim reaper is just so not cool. Sure, this is much better than being Dracula’s flunky, but nowhere near as righteous as teaming up with a pair of time traveling teenagers who are in the afterlife because they were murdered by evil robotic clones of themselves sent from the future by a gym teacher angry that the future is boring.

I’ve been a little too lovey-dovey with Nintendo this month, so how about a game that doesn’t get a YES!? Actually, Kid Icarus is a heartbreaker. The game is no good on its own, but it could have been an excellent first step. There’s something here that’s highly compelling that just doesn’t overcome some terrible design choices and really sloppy play control. I don’t really like the original Metroid either, but it’s in the same boat as Kid Icarus in that both games laid a foundation for something much, much better. But Metroid did get more chances to build upon the first game, and already fun games like Super Mario Bros. and Legend of Zelda got to grow out the base formula with the sequels that improved upon the core game design and especially the play control mechanics. Within just a few sequels, Nintendo had literally perfect jumping physics for Mario, combat mechanics for Zelda, and level design for Metroid. And then there’s Kid Icarus. The franchise that didn’t catch the bouquet so it gave up and became a nun. It’s not fair, really. It had just as much potential as any of their other tentpole IPs.

If you play Kid Icarus, have a second controller ready. In the American/Europe builds, pressing A+B on the second controller haggles with the shopkeepers, who may lower their prices or dramatically increase them. In the FDS version, you have to just blow into the microphone to trigger it. I’m pretty sure no FDS games actually require you to actually speak words to make the mic work. It’s like how I beat the mic games in WarioWare Touched by scratching the microphone. Also, you don’t want to ever max-out your money because you will not get enough credit for collecting money, thus failing to impress the Gods, thus not allowing you to get all four arrow strength upgrades, thus gating you out of the best ending.

Kid Icarus is among the jankiest Nintendo-developed games ever made. It’s sloppy in so many aspects that it’s tough to know where to begin. Play control is the obvious one. I should have saved “skid to my doom my darling” for this game because my most common method of dying was slipping off platforms. But, that could have been a non-factor if the levels were designed for these physics, and they clearly aren’t. Kid Icarus is riddled with things like slip-slide ice platforms, ultra-slow moving platforms, and single-block platforms. Each presents a problem on its own just based on how rough the platforming physics are, before you even take into account that you often have to perform combative maneuvers while navigating all this crap.

Son of a bitch! See, those evil mouths fly around in erratic patterns that make them hard to shoot, and then you have this spongy snowman thing that shoots projectiles at you. It seems like you can duck those projectiles, but if you duck on certain platforms, you almost instantly fall through them. That’s what I found out here, and I burned through a valuable feather.

And then there’s the ultra-jarring tonal shifts. Despite only having thirteen levels, Kid Icarus features a whopping four different styles of level design. The most famous of these is the vertical levels, which represent six of the thirteen stages, and they’re fairly notorious because, as you climb, you also create a bottomless pit, logic be damned. If a platform that had been right at the bottom of the screen is barely scrolled off it, you die if you fall where it had just been. The punishment for falling should be having to make all the jumps again and the risk of losing more health from enemies or hazards. Kid Icarus has too stiff a punishment for failure to stick the landing, and that’s especially true with the rough controls and sloppy coding. Like, look at this:

I’m not ON the platform in this picture. I’m IN the platform. I didn’t do anything special to get there except somehow short the jump without shorting it. It does matter too. Many times, while firing my bow without moving the direction pad at all, I fell off platforms. It’s so inelegant in basically every way movement in a 2D game can be. When there’s nothing under you to catch you, that’s a big problem. especially since the game leans extra-heavily into nail-biting platforming segments. MAYBE if you had the accuracy of Super Mario 1’s controls, this could have worked. But Kid Icarus instead is too floaty and has too unpredictable of momentum. So when the level design is like this:

Kid Icarus is kind of fantastic, at least in terms of the big picture. Navigating the stages, which includes a wrap-around playfield, is exhilarating. The levels look great too, so the game really shines brightly as a thoughtful, original action-adventure with solid combat and a memorable cast of baddies that are satisfying to shoot. BUT, when the level design is like this:

These are moving platforms.
These are moving platforms.

Kid Icarus becomes an unbearable slog and the platforming is NEVER exciting because it controls so poorly and the physics are so inconsistent that it never feels like YOU’RE failing. It feels like the game is screwing you, and it often is. And mind you, this is just one of FOUR play-styles in this game. There’s three more. Three of the thirteen levels are traditional side-scrollers. I guess I must be weird, but I think these levels are much, much stronger than the vertical levels.

The test chambers sadly don’t have you shooting portals. Rather you have to just stay alive until the game says “okay, you’re good” and gives you one of three really fun upgrades. One puts a shield around you, one adds a flame to your arrow that spins around it, and the other gives you additional range. They’re awesome, but the catches are ridiculous. The flame requires you to have two full bars of health, the added range three bars, and the shield four bars. The other catch really sucks: you can’t use these items in the dungeons.

Oh, they’re often still not good. Well, let me clarify: they’re haphazardly designed. For example, level 2 – 2 starts out with not one, not two, NOT three, but four goddamn doors before you encounter a single enemy. You’re supposed to use two of the doors to build up XP in order to get the arrow upgrade. This is where I learned that saving money makes no sense because the Gods get pissy if you’re stingy. But there’s nothing else like this section in the entire game. It’s total amateur hour game design.

Like this here. Kid Icarus utilizes low ceilings to cut off Pit’s ability to jump over enemies, and that COULD have been used to greater effect if they hadn’t put the most basic enemy as the “risk” side of the “risk/reward” scenario. Or if they had given you a way to logic-out which path is the best path to take.

The problem with the side-scrolling levels is they contain none of the exhilarating boldness of the vertical levels. For all the problems that those stages have, it feels like they come from a place of inspiration and there was careful consideration for enemy placement and how it relates to the jumps. I really don’t get that vibe from the side-scrolling stages at all. They certainly make fewer mistakes, nonsensical room placement aside. That’s why I think they’re stronger overall, but they also feel like they’re going through the motions. Hell, large stretches of the stages (like the aforementioned nonsense doors) feel like placeholders that got left in the final design. Don’t rule out that’s what really happened. If you don’t already know, you’ll soon find out why.

Yeah, yeah, I used a guide. The treasure rooms (pictured here) have a sequence to them where you can win every time. What I didn’t know is that the Gods frown upon breaking pots in the treasure rooms. So I didn’t get the final arrow upgrade and thus I didn’t get the best ending.

And then there’s the grand finale of Kid Icarus, where all the janky but memorable platforming action is dumped in favor of one of the worst shmups I’ve ever experienced, and I’ve been playing a whole lot of shmups in 2025. Hoo boy, what a dumpster fire Kid Icarus is at the end. In it, you have to shoot bland targets like falling tiles and an enemy that splits into three over and over and over until you reach a certain benchmark for “doing things.” After the game is satisfied you’re not on cruise control, it’ll let you fight Medusa, which has a safe zone so big that you could build a nursery in it. The level getting there is what drives a stake through Kid Icarus’ heart because suddenly the act of moving is hard. The controls are heavy and unresponsive for the finale, and even if that wasn’t the case, the last level would be a disaster anyway because this style of game is not at all compatible with all the gameplay that came before it. It’s one of the worst final levels and final bosses in any Nintendo game.

How did Kid Icarus turn out so janky when games like Mario, Zelda, and even Metroid, at the very least, control well? Actually, Metroid is kind of to blame, but really it was just bad corporate decisions. Metroid was considered a very high prospect game, so Nintendo devoted all their resources to it while one guy, the debuting Toru Osawa (who went on to direct games like Mario Clash and Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time) had to spec out Kid Icarus all by his lonesome. He had to design the world, the enemies, and most of the levels. He only got a full working team to help him once Metroid was mostly done, and then the team he got were exhausted from doing the already dead-serious space adventure so they usurped his concept of a dead-serious mythological adventure by inserting “humorous” things like the credit card and the Eggplant Wizard.

Kid Icarus was the first game released in North America with the revolutionary MMC1 chip that allowed the NES to do bigger, more detailed games. In screenshots, it looks amazing. But you actually have to play it.

But the thing is, while the staff liberally plied Kid Icarus with humor and stuff like the haggling with the shopkeepers, what nobody bothered to do was refine the actual gameplay. Then the release date was set for the end of 1986, well ahead of when the game could reasonably be completed, so everyone just hung around Nintendo HQ in the freezing cold (apparently the building wasn’t heated) to finish the game. They BARELY finished in time, and in fact, Kid Icarus was only sent to manufacturing three days before it was set to release. Consequently, it wasn’t subject to the same type of play testing and polishing that other games from this era got. Kid Icarus is Nintendo’s E.T.: The Extra-Terrestrial, and it speaks volumes to how talented they really were even back then that the final product is as good as it is. But what we got is a fraction of its potential. Nobody did the responsible thing and delayed it.

Yet another example of jank are these things. Touching them even once costs you the power items you won in the test chambers, which you either have to win back in another test chamber or buy back on the black market. MAYBE this could have worked if you could fight back and reclaim the item before they vanish off the screen. That would add proper risk/reward balance. Well, you can’t because they’re indestructible. What an overall terrible game. Well, except one aspect………

“Cathy, you left out one gameplay type.” I know, but I saved it for last for a reason. Because the one thing Kid Icarus unambiguously does well, it does it so well that I almost want to cry that it’s not the whole game. It’s the dungeons, which are kind of like side-view versions of Zelda’s dungeons. I mean much more than Adventures of Link’s dungeons. They’re designed like legitimate mazes, where you might think you’re plotting the right course only to find out the room you’re making your way to has no means to continue on the path you’re trying to take. Well, at least two out of three of them are like that. Because I enjoyed these levels so much, I put away the guide and it took me quite a while to beat levels 1 – 4 and 2 – 4. Then in the third dungeon (3 – 4), I found the boss so quickly that it took me a moment to process it. I literally couldn’t believe it was placed where it was, which was next to a shop.

The hammers you collect in the levels via the harps or treasure rooms can be used to smash these statues in the dungeons, which free the Centurions that were turned to stone by Medusa. You want to do this because they’ll help you fight the (relatively spongy) bosses. Too bad they have absolutely no survival instinct.

But the dungeon levels worked for me. Oh, did they ever. And that’s why it’s such a punch to the gut that there’s only three of them. I can’t help but wonder if Kid Icarus would have been better off being based entirely around this specific style. Instead of nine total vertical and side-scrolling stages and the lame-ass shmup finale, I would have preferred a game that had eight to ten dungeons. Had they gone that route, I honestly think Kid Icarus might be remembered as highly as Metroid or Zelda. I think the combat-focused maze explorer done in this style and with these themes, separate from Nintendo’s other flagship IPs, makes Kid Icarus stand tall in a crowded field. The problem is, in order to play these three amazing dungeons, you have to play nine mediocre-at-best levels that are really nothing like the dungeons.

There’s no happy ending here, because Kid Icarus is one of the few early Nintendo franchises that they never put a good faith effort into building upon that initial foundation. There’s a Game Boy sequel that I might take a look at soon (Update: the review is up) that apparently has most of the same problems, and then there’s the 3DS game which basically is nothing like the original game, changing the genre and gameplay. These days, Pit is more famous for his role in Smash Bros. than he is as the star of his own franchise. This despite the fact that Kid Icarus was big enough decades ago that it contributed a main character to the unwatchable animated series/Nintendo infomercial Captain N: The Game Master, and then was still memorable enough in the present era that it was one of the games featured in 2024’s Nintendo World Championships: NES Edition. Granted, Kid Icarus had the challenge that took me the most attempts to get an “S” rating and that outcome was largely the result of the sloppiness of the whole thing. But, nearly forty years later and Nintendo actually said “yeah, we better put Kid Icarus in this thing.” But the one thing they’ve never done is redeemed that original base concept.

Okay, so the boss graphics aren’t strong. That’s supposed to be Cerberus in the corner, but instead it looks like two dinosaurs humping. After having unforgettable sprites for the Eggplant Wizard, grim reaper, and even the basic enemies, having this thing look like someone sneezed while filling it in is such a let down.

What Nintendo should do is take all the space age technology they’ve since invented and do a true sequel to Kid Icarus. Not a third person shooter either, but a REAL sequel that builds much more heavily around the best part of the game: those dungeons. If you want, go ahead and make a few vertical levels as well. I’m fine with that because they would certainly have to apply everything that’s been learned in the fields of level design and play control. They could keep the humor or dump it like Osawa wanted. That doesn’t matter because gameplay is king. Kid Icarus is a bad video game, but not ALL bad. It just never got the redemption that Nintendo’s own game design evolution would have given it. Those amazing dungeons still feel fresh in 2025 because, really, there aren’t a lot of Nintendo-made games where their exploration feels like Kid Icarus’s three dungeons. It might not be a game worth playing in the 2020s, but the idea of Kid Icarus is an idea worth saving.
Verdict: NO!

Can’t be unseen. 🖕😶🖕You’re welcome.

Filed under Nintendo Switch Reviews, Retro Reviews Tagged with , , , , , ,

Super Mario World (SNES Review)

July 13, 2025 by 6 Comments

Super Mario World
Platform: Super Nintendo Entertainment System
First Released November 21, 1990 (JP) August 23, 1991 (US)
Directed by Takashi Tezuka
Developed by Nintendo
Available with Switch Online Subscription (Standard)
Listing on Mario Wiki

Is Mario pointing at what to eat or is he slapping the side of Yoshi’s head? Because if it’s a slap, and since all dinosaurs are birds, is this just the first step towards preparing a meal of foie gras?

Gosh, uh, this is awkward. Because when I reviewed Super Mario 3 last week, I said that Super Mario World was the gourmet meal to Mario 3’s bag of highly addictive potato chips. Now that I just played through Super Mario World using the same rules as the other games in my Super Mario 40th Anniversary Marathon where I have to play through every level without using any items to bypass the action (see my reviews for Super Mario Deluxe, Lost Levels, Doki Doki Panic, and Super Mario Advance), I really thought I would enjoy Mario World’s level design the most of any “traditional” Mario game. Super Mario 2/Doki Doki’s level design is hard to top, but that’s a totally different style of game. I thought Mario World was the peak of “pure Mario” design and I would have the time of my life studying it. Well, I didn’t. It wasn’t that I was bored playing Mario World, either. It’s awesome. One of the best 2D platformers ever made, easily. Even needing to immediately replay some levels so I could score a 100% didn’t bother me at all. But the massive upgrade over Super Mario 3 that I remembered never showed up. What just happened?

Remember kids: pick the middle file or they win.

For years now, I’ve always held World up as the benchmark of platforming mechanics. THAT I’ll still stand by that. Super Mario World has the most intuitive jumping physics of ANY Super Mario game, 2D or 3D. It’s so intuitive that you can launch yourself off Yoshi, fly through the air and hit a question mark, and then stick the landing on Yoshi’s back without even needing to really think about it. It becomes second nature in record time. Okay, so the cape takes practice, but it also offers a lot more versatility than the raccoon tail. It can also be used to bypass large sections of the game. More on that later. But the point is that Mario World is the most polished 2D playground that ever existed up to this point. You’re provided the tools to make the controller vanish in your hand. You can tell that Nintendo realized they had to make the best controlling platformer ever in order to make sure players adapted to the new six-button SNES controller, and they nailed it. The controls are perfect.

Like Mario 3, I found the bosses overall to be weak. Before the Bowser fight, I guess I liked the Reznors the most. It’s really not that different in the way you fight it than, say, dealing with Hammer Bros. in any other Mario game. But it’s staged differently and it works. The first time, at least, but then an identical fight happens three more times and the thrill is lost.

The levels are less than perfect. Oh, they’re certainly better than Mario 3’s. Most of the seventy-three full-sized stages are bigger in scope and scale than anything in Mario 3. They also better incentivize exploration. On the map screen, you’ll notice that normal levels have yellow and red dots. Stages with red dots have two exits, and acing the game requires you to not simply beat every stage but find every alternative exit. But, only a little over a third of the levels actually utilize that, and if you miss an exit, the game doesn’t tell you. After I thought I had everything, I played the second form of the Bowser stage, won the fight, and then reset the game after the credits to find out I had 93 out of 96. I found two exits I was missing, which got me up to 95, but then I was stumped. It was actually Star Road 3, which can be beaten in about three seconds. I just never crossed the tape on it. But I had to figure that out on my own. It didn’t indicate which levels I’d found everything on.

The haunted ship feels like a missed opportunity. It’s just an underwater ghost house that doesn’t utilize the maze concept as well as it should. Simply swimming around enemies isn’t as exciting to me.

The actual gameplay is also a clear upgrade over Mario 3. Okay, so I don’t think the cast of enemies is quite as memorable as Mario 3’s. The dinosaur-themed basic enemies just don’t feel very Mario-like. Even though the Adventure Island games don’t really use evil dinosaurs, the dino-cast part of Mario World’s roster feels like it would be more at home there. On the other hand, Mario World’s non-enemy obstacles are stellar. It has a much wider variety of indestructible hazards, and with the new spinning jump, you might even be able to use them to your advantage. Like in this level:

You could play it safe, like I did this time. Or you can throw caution to the wind, take a deep breath, and do a running spin jump and try to bounce across them and hope like hell you’ll eventually reach land, and it’s exhilarating. Or you can use Yoshi to do it since Yoshi’s feet are immune. Speaking of Yoshi, this was his debut game and he’s a lot of fun to use. He also adds an interesting risk-reward dynamic to the exploration. It’s tougher to explore with Yoshi. You can’t climb vines with him. You can’t use the cape’s parachuting mechanic with him. That’s one of the biggest differences between Mario 3 and this game: there’s a lot more consideration for tempting the player to choose the wrong thing. Instead of the game funneling you by providing you with the exact right tools you need, it might do something like offer you a fire flower when you really need the cape. There’s small hints of this in Mario 3, but it happens constantly in Mario World, and I love it for it.

YOU ARE A SUPER……. OVALTINE DRINKER?! Son of a bitch!

So why didn’t I have as good a time as I thought I would? Maybe Mario World is just a one-and-done experience, and I’ve done it before. Unlike Mario 3, I remembered where almost everything was. Even if I didn’t remember the specific locations of keys or the solutions to the Ghost Houses, I remembered enough to have a general idea of what I was supposed to do. Worst case was I mixed up the solution for one ghost house with another, which I did a couple times. Otherwise, I apparently didn’t forget anything about Mario World. Okay, well, how much difference could THAT make? After all, Super Mario 1 and Super Mario 3 offered me no surprises either. Well, except for one key element: challenge. Mario World didn’t. I died four times this entire play session, and two of them were in the “Special Zone” area. All but one death was the result of mistimed jumps. I even stuck to the rule of playing the levels instead of bypassing them with the cape, and I just utterly shredded Mario World. It’s too damn easy. I had the max 99 lives before I even got out of the third world.

You know the bonus stage that you get for breaking the tape, pictured above? After a while, curiosity got the better of me and I tried to see if I could not win any lives playing it. I needed eleven total cracks at it before I finally did it. Twice I got one life, and every other time I deliberately tried to lose, I got two or more. I couldn’t even lose a mini game on purpose. Yeesh.

I think the reserve items were a bad idea in general. But, I also think the cape is too powerful and allows you to cheese stages too easily. Mario 3 had a similar problem with the raccoon tail, and while I noticed Mario World did a better job of limiting places you can build-up a running start, if I had wanted to I could have easily skipped several sections. It got me wondering if flying is a good idea at all in Mario games. If you’re going to do it, the way Super Mario 64 did it seems like the best way to handle it. Instead of the flying cap being a permanent upgrade, you have a time limit to accomplish what needs to be done. It seems to work, because I had very few “cheer out loud” moments with the 2D flying sequences, but plenty with the cap in the 3D game.

It’s no coincidence that the most exciting flying sections in the game, at least for me, used the balloon, which has a strict time limit.

Mostly, I think it’s because Mario World is more of an experience than a game. As colorful and interesting as Mario World is to just gawk at, you just have too big an advantage over it even if you force yourself into the thick of battle, especially if you know what’s coming. So this leaves me in a weird position where my gut still tells me that Super Mario World is the better game because of the more elegant level design and historically great play mechanics, BUT, it still wasn’t the game I enjoyed the most during this marathon. That still belongs to Super Mario Advance 4: Super Mario Bros. 3, and not just for the eReader levels, either. Subtract those and I still give the slight edge to Mario 3 based on the fact that I couldn’t just sleepwalk my way through it. I might have had more fun playing Mario World over Mario 3 in 2003, but in 2025, my replay of Mario 3 required me to actually focus and think about what I was doing. It’s something I just learned: challenge matters more the second time than the first. It’s the real replay value.

The one and only boss in the game that ticks all the boxes (except maybe challenge) is the Bowser fight. Mario World has TERRIBLE boss fights, right up until the finale, where Bowser has a memorable design and a fun way of attacking him. Each of the six shots you need to land on him feel great. If you ignore “the weird one” in Mario 2, this is the first truly great Mario boss.

I had the same problem with Shadow of the Colossus once, too. The second time I played through it, even though it was as good as I remembered, it wasn’t as fun as I thought it would be, either. Maybe that’s the paradox of historically great games. Once a game reaches the status of “unforgettable” in the literal sense, it actually becomes harder to hold up to replaying. That’s because all that’s left is the base challenge the game has. So while Mario World is truly excellent the first time around, it’s never going to come close to being as enjoyable because too much of it is based around the sense of discovery or other surprises. Besides the cheesable stuff with the cape, it doesn’t even really lend itself to the type of scrutiny that comes with reevaluation because Super Mario World is so damn awesome that it’s almost boring to reevaluate. Almost.

I still loved the “find key and insert it into keyhole” bit but that was quite muffled by the fact that most of the keys are right next to the hole. This feels like Mario World’s biggest missed opportunity to crank-up the difficulty. Just place the keys further away from the holes.

Again, I had fun yesterday. It’s hard not to when the controls are this perfect and the gameplay is as fine-tuned as you see here. I just didn’t have as much fun as I expected. So I can take the glass half-empty approach and say that Mario World has too many slow and dull auto-scrolling levels and not as strong of a basic enemy roster as Mario 3 so I may have overrated it before. Or I can take the glass half-full approach and say that Super Mario World is so well made that it’s perfect your first time playing and doesn’t lend itself to fun retrospective looks. I’ll go with Option B because that way it’s not my fault I didn’t have as much fun as I wanted.
Verdict: YES!

 

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Super Mario Advance (Game Boy Advance Review)

July 1, 2025 by 11 Comments

Super Mario Advance
Platform: Game Boy Advance
First Released March 21, 2001
Directed by Toshiaki Suzuki
Developed by Nintendo
Available with a Switch Online Expansion Pack Subscription
Listing on Mario Wiki

Oh, sweet Clawgrip. How did they ever do Doki Doki Panic without you?

I’ve already said everything I need to say about what masterpieces Super Mario Bros. 2 and Doki Doki Panic are. All that’s left is the game that introduced me to that world, which I first played in the wee hours of the morning following the GBA’s launch. I probably clicked-on my GBA at around one o’clock in the morning on June 11, 2001. At about 1:01 A.M. I was probably red in the face angry over how sh*tty the GBA screen was. It didn’t matter how many launch games I got, because I could only see two of them: this and ChuChu Rocket. It’s funny that I look back on 2001 with such fondness, because two of the three major launches SUCKED! My hands were too small to properly wield the Duke, and I couldn’t see the GBA’s screen. At least the Xbox issue was fixed by my father snagging an imported S-controller for me relatively quickly. Nothing could save the GBA though.

I wasn’t even into puzzle games during this era, but I liked the versus mode of ChuChu Rocket, which was the first console game I ever played with online play. Except it had seriously horrible, ruinous lag. That was fine. On Dreamcast, I played the hell out of this against CPU opponents, which is why I wanted a copy for my new portable game device. Would have been nice if I could have seen the screen. ChuChu Rocket, like Super Mario Advance, is pretty bright, but still not bright enough to overcome the GBA’s horrible original screen.

I was pissed because the game I had actually been hyped for, and the one that was the first game in my brand new Game Boy Advance, was Castlevania: Circle of the Moon. I can’t believe there’s apologists for the GBA screen, because I thought it was un-f*cking-playable. Circle of the Moon was clearly not fine-tuned for THAT screen. I’m actually certain the only explanation was the development team didn’t know the screen wouldn’t be backlit. Meanwhile, ChuChu Rocket was obsolete because I already had a version of it that I could, you know, actually see! I wanted ChuChu Rocket for car trips, but even in sunlight, I thought the screen sucked. So the only reason why the GBA’s launch wasn’t a complete letdown for me was Super Mario Advance. Even though I really enjoyed it, I had no idea what Super Mario Bros. 2 had actually accomplished. To my credit, I was still 11, about to turn 12.

If you want to be mean about it, you can steal Birdo’s bow. They should have had it get pissed and fire eggs like a machine gun if you do this.

In that original 2001 session, I remember thinking that Mario Advance was maybe the easiest video game I’d ever played up to that point. I’m pretty sure even back then I didn’t die more than a couple times, with world 5 – 1 and 7 – 2 being the only levels that got me more than once. I only remember one specific death: when the door came flying at me right before the Wart battle, I was so startled that the damn thing killed me. Otherwise, besides the odd jump to my death, I quickly got through Mario Advance, and while I enjoyed IT well enough, I enjoyed the squinting required to play it so much that my GBA went into a drawer, pretty much never to see the light of day again. I never got another new game for that model. I was excited for another installment of Pokemon, but when those came out, so did the GBA SP, and the Game Boy Player followed soon after. So really, the only game I ever played with my original GBA was this one, and while I really liked it a lot, it wasn’t exactly like it blew my mind. I think the reason it didn’t was entirely that f*cking screen.

The funny part of that story is that I had no idea that Nintendo had actually made this version of Super Mario Bros. 2 unfathomably easier than the already pretty damn easy NES original. How?

  • They added a third hidden mushroom in every stage, so now your max health is five.
  • Health refills are just sitting around pretty much everywhere.
  • Including inside boss chambers.
  • And you get health refills for every thrown object (be it an item or enemy) that results in a kill combo of two or more. The POW blocks are the exception to this.
  • Just the act of throwing the new giant Shy-Guy, even if you throw it at nothing, gives you a heart every throw, meaning every single appearance by them is basically a full life refill.
  • There’s significantly more enemies, which sounds like it should make the game harder, but instead, they’re there specifically to be combo victims. That means even more opportunities for health refills.
  • They’ve significantly increased the amount of weapons you can pluck from the ground.
  • And they added more weapons tailored towards mass destruction of the enemies.
  • They also added many more extra lives in the stages.
  • They made it so you can bet all your coins on a single spin of the slot machines, paying off tons of lives if you win.
  • A kill combo five gives you an extra life.
  • Plus you get an additional extra life for every enemy after five.

There’s just no way I can spin these decisions in a way that makes logical sense. This goes beyond simply nerfing Super Mario 2. This is like full-on baby proofing of a game to a level never before done, unless you count emulator stuff like save states and rewinding. If you manage to Game Over playing Super Mario Advance, you should seriously consider another hobby because this gaming thing just isn’t going to work out for you.

The Birdos especially get it bad, as there’s usually additional weapons in their chambers AND life refills.

Everything I disliked about Super Mario Advance as a soon-to-be 12 year old is still 100% accurate. I’ll tell you this: if you have a REALLY young child, you might want to consider this as the game to break them into platform games, or even gaming in general. I mean, it’s colorful, has a wide variety of levels and enemies, tons of stuff to do, memorable characters, satisfying bosses, controls like a dream, and it’s basically the most easy video game this side of playing Pong against someone with a broken paddle. If you’re a challenge seeker, there’s nothing here for you. Okay, so the whole “games an experience instead of a challenge” is my driving force, and was my driving force even back when I was 12. But there’s SOME limit to that. Games need to push-back. Mario Advance is the game that not only doesn’t push back, but it practically switches sides and pushes with you against itself.

It wouldn’t be until years after it launched that Mario Advance grew on me. I’d just finished Mario Galaxy and realized I’d never REALLY played Super Mario Advance 4: Super Mario Bros. 3. After that, apparently I still had to work Mario out of my system because I played Mario Advance 1 again. Back then I DID NOT replay games once I finished them. That just wasn’t something I ever did. But my Mario Advance experience had been tainted by Darko Nintendočić, so I popped it in my Game Boy Player. It was almost like it was divinely inspired, because I remember thinking “how did I never notice this game is f*cking brilliant?” I hadn’t aced the game the first go around and didn’t expect to this time, either. But I did. Every Advance Coin. Every Yoshi Egg. Okay, the Advance Coins weren’t THAT hard to find and neither are the Yoshi eggs. Why it matters is nabbing a 100% completion means playing EVERY level.

In a sense, the Yoshi egg hunt could be considered the game’s “hard mode” since the eggs replace two of the mushrooms. This would be swell, except they’re almost always hidden close by where the mushrooms they replaced were originally found. Plus you have to unlock the egg hunt by beating the game. Thankfully, you don’t need to nab every Advance Coin to do this, something I forgot. I wish I had just warped really quick to the end, but I didn’t. I beat the game with Mario, and realized quickly I didn’t want to get every egg again. I think I’ve overdosed on Mario 1 & 2 and need to move on.

In my first replay of Mario Advance, I enjoyed experiencing all twenty levels so much that I was crushed when I found out getting a 100% completion didn’t unlock more content. I was blown away by how all twenty of them feel completely unique from each-other, and how playing them with each character also changes the, for lack of a better term, personality of each level. I came to realize that they really went all-out on the layouts and enemy design and fine tuning the controls for the characters. Mind you, it wouldn’t be until decades later, when I played Doki Doki Panic, that I realized how truly fine-tuned it actually is. I think that actually speaks volumes about how good Super Mario Bros. 2 is that so many people who love it are completely unaware that the version they’re playing isn’t even the game at its most idealized.

I swear to God, the first time I played the NES version of Super Mario Bros. 2, I had no clue there was no Robo-Birdo. When I got to the end of World 3 and another Mouser was waiting for me, my heart sank. I really thought the game was going to alternate between Mouser and Tryclyde until the Wart battle. This is such a fantastic boss battle that I think it sucks they didn’t replace the second Mouser with a second new boss. Maybe for the next remake, Nintendo? I’m kidding. Please don’t remake this again. Make a brand new game with this type of gameplay.

I first played Super Mario Advance as a soon-to-be 12 year old. Now I’m a soon-to-be 36 year old, and like so many things in life, my opinion on Mario Advance has changed dramatically over the years. Of the four versions of Mario 2 (not counting BS Super Mario USA, a modified version of the Super Mario 2 found in Super Mario All-Stars that made for the Satellaview, which isn’t even the full game), Mario Advance I’d put third, with only the version found in Super Mario All-Stars behind it. It’s still an amazing experience. Veterans of Mario 2 or even Doki Doki Panic can enjoy playing “spot the difference.” with the subtle changes made to level layouts or enjoy one of the easiest collect-a-thons ever made. I did one single full playthrough for this review and I got 99 out of 100 coins.

Son of a bitch. Forgot one f*cking coin in World 3 – 1 and somehow never noticed. Yes, I went back and got it. You can collect the coins in the Yoshi Challenge. Unfortunately, by the time I unlocked that, I was too burned out on Super Mario 2 to go get all the eggs.

But, I do question why they took such extreme measures towards lowering the difficulty. It’s almost unprecedented in the history of gaming. The irony is Doki Doki Panic became one of the biggest games in the entire history of the medium because the original Super Mario Bros. 2 was too hard, yet they subtracted from its difficulty in Super Mario Bros. 2 USA. But that version still does little things that prevent you from going on complete cruise control, like having you be committed to a single character every stage. Pick someone not as suitable for a level? Tough sh*t, and in retrospect, I’m fine with that. But then they removed even that from the Super Mario All-Stars version, which allows you to swap every life. (shrug) That’s why, as much as I love Super Mario Bros. 2 and even Mario Advance, I really hope they don’t remake it again, because what’s left to nerf at this point? Have it literally rain hearts? Have enemies surrender on sight? When you pull Birdo’s bow off, the brain spurts out of a hole? Get to Wart’s chamber only to find him dead with an empty can of V8 laying next to him?
Verdict: YES!
It’s my little blog’s anniversary! Thank you everyone for fourteen incredible years! I love you all! For keeps!

Filed under Nintendo Switch Reviews, Retro Reviews Tagged with , , , , , , , , ,

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