Wario Land II

Wario wakes to a catastrophe. The pirate captain Syrup has ransacked his castle and stolen his treasure, and so the insatiable antihero sets off on a quest full of smashing, ramming, and greedy coin-collecting. But Wario Land II hides a brilliant twist that turned the very rules of platformers upside down.

Wario, you see, cannot die. Yes, you read that right. The traditional system of lives and death is gone. Instead, various transformations act upon Wario. When an enemy strikes him, he can turn into a burning, raging Wario, grow fat, shrink, or petrify, and each of these states opens up different paths and solves different puzzles. The platformer thus became more of a puzzle game about experimentation, where injury is a tool, not a punishment.

This conception set Wario definitively apart from Mario, from whose shadow the series emerged. While Mario leaps with the ease of an acrobat, Wario is a tank that plows forward by force, smashes blocks with his shoulder, and barrels after the gold. The goal is often not merely to reach the end of the level but to gather as many coins as possible and find hidden treasures, which gives the game a collecting and exploratory dimension.

The game was developed by Nintendo and launched first on the original Game Boy, later also in a version for the Game Boy Color that added color graphics. It was a sequel in a series that followed on from Super Mario Land, and the character of Wario built an identity here strong enough that he later got his own distinctive spin-off, WarioWare.

Culturally, Wario Land II showed that a platformer need not rest on the fear of death but can be a playground for playful experimentation with the character's body. This courage to break established conventions makes it one of the most imaginative platformers of its era, a game that wasn't afraid to be different, and that's exactly what made it compelling.

Why play it: A platformer where you can't die and injury is a puzzle. An imaginative, greedy, and original Wario at his very best.