5/5 ★ – Manic_Zucc's review of Wario Land 4.

Nintendo used to be weird. I miss that. Wario Land 4 was a game I liked as a kid but never considered among my favorites on the GBA. I rediscovered this game a couple years ago while playing through some of my old GBA collection and absolutely fell in love. Since it was just added to NSO I have an excuse to play it again and talk about it. Wario Land 4 feels like a weird step child to the Mario series. It still has the high quality controls and impressive for the time visuals, but everything else feels like it was infused with a healthy level of LSD. Enemies are weird and abstract, the soundtrack oscillates between competent compositions and odd vocal nonsense, and the bosses are borderline disturbing. All of this helps the Wario games feel distinctly different from the Mario games they spawned from in a similar way the vibe of the Donkey Country games helped set those apart. To me this game is emblematic of a time when Nintendo was okay getting a little weird. The beauty of the time that Nintendo had more than one console they were supporting was they could put out more budget titles like this with less risk and that lead to some genuine creative masterpieces coming out. I’m sad that the Wario Land series didn’t have the staying power that Wario Ware seems to (especially because my opinion on that series is fairly mixed) but hopefully we’ll get a new addition to this excellent series one day. (Sadly since I played this a couple years ago it won’t go on my 2025 ranked list, but if it did it would be right up at the top)