WarioWare Gold

Genre: Arcade / Misc.

Players: 1-2 Competitive (Local Wireless)

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Review:

WarioWare: Gold is an Arcade-style collection of rapid-fire brief 5-second “microgames” released on the Nintendo 3DS in 2018. Coming late in the Nintendo 3DS’s lifespan after the Nintendo Switch was quickly making the Nintendo 3DS a thing of the past, WarioWare Gold acts as a “Greatest Hits” entry in the series, with roughly 260 of its 300 “microgames” derived from prior installments in the series. These microgames are mainly from WarioWare Inc.: Mega Microgame$, WarioWare: Twisted!, and WarioWare: Touched!, though I did notice a few that are versions of microgames that were in the Wii entry in the series, WarioWare: Smooth Moves.

This isn’t a copy-paste job, though – the majority of these revisited microgames have been reworked to feature higher-resolution visuals. The game still uses a mix of mostly 2D visuals with some 3D, with a wildly eclectic range of styles, ranging from pixel art, to rough child scribbles, to detailed paintings, with many of these often depicting absurd scenes. The remastered microgames are going to be divisive and vary in quality from game to game – some look great with higher resolutions, while others seem to have had their personality polished away. Overall, the game still looks quite good and definitely still fits the WarioWare style, but it sometimes feels like it would have been better if the classic microgames retained their classic look.

In between the games themselves, you’ll be treated to somewhat crudely-animated cutscenes of the WarioWare series’ various characters each contending with some issue encapsulating their series of games, with the characters fully-voiced. It’s a bit odd to actually hear these characters all talking clearly in full sentences when most of the series’ games have had brief digitized one word exclamations, but it’s not a bad change.

As for the gameplay itself, the games here start off divided into three types: Mash League (for games using the D-Pad and A button), Twist League (for games using gyroscopic motion control and the A button), and Touch League (for games using the touchscreen). Later on in the game, you’ll get to more challenging collections of these games that combine the different game types (warning you before each microgame which control input is needed), as well as adding in games that require you to blow in the microphone.

Of the included games, I think the gyroscope and microphone-enabled games are often the weakest of the bunch – the gyroscope occasionally doesn’t seem to work properly, or seemingly works opposite of the direction it seems like it should, and the microphone just seems gimmicky. In addition, throughout the game there are microgames that don’t exactly make it clear what you’re supposed to do – are you supposed to use the touchscreen to separate the different kinds of items or to divide them all equally in half? Are you supposed to select the items that match the indicated shapes or select the items to remove so only the indicated shapes remain? And at least one microgame uses character recognition to detect a number you write, but isn’t always accurate in its detection. Stuff like this can make it feel like you got hit with a “miss” that wasn’t really your fault.

There is one other issue – separating out the different microgames into the 15 or so characters means that you’ll be seeing repeats more often, at least until you unlock the later categories that mix them all together.

It is actually this “post-game” where WarioWare Gold really shines. Not only do you unlock challenges that actually help you to see the massive amount of variety present in this game, but you also have a lot of unlockable minigames and bonus content to toy around with as well. There are also a few different types of competitive minigames and game modes – some requiring multiple Nintendo 3DS consoles, and some alternating gameplay for “pass ‘n play” style multiplayer, though the latter seems to mostly just be for a few select minigames.

All in all, I think WarioWare Gold is a fitting testament to the WarioWare series as a whole up to this point. It’s messy and not everything works as intended, but this is probably an accurate representation of the series as a whole, and for the most part this is still a wonderful, fast-paced and silly grab-bag full of variety. If you have a Nintendo 3DS and enjoy this series, this is definitely a game worth adding to your collection.

tl;dr – WarioWare Gold is an Arcade-style collection of the series’ signature rapid-fire 5-second “microgames”, with most of these being remastered versions of microgames from the earlier games in the franchise. While not everything works perfectly, and things don’t really open up until late into the game, for the most part this is an excellent mix of randomness and variety, and a great encapsulation of the series up until this point.

Grade: B+

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