Wario’s Woods ・ ワリオの森
Developed by: Nintendo R&D1
Published by: Nintendo (JP, NA, EU)
Released in: February 19th, 1994 (JP) | December 10th, 1994 (NA) | Some time in 1995 (EU)
Have you ever heard of the Tetris effect? Not the game Tetris Effect, but the psychological effect that Tetris can have on the human brain. You can read all of the technical babble about it on Wikipedia here, but here’s the gist: people who get addicted to puzzle games may start to see traces of that game in real life, such as seeing flashes of it while falling asleep at night, seeing certain shaped holes in reality as places blocks could fit in, and so forth. Basically, you Tetris‘d so much that you see Tetris blocks wherever you go.
Something akin to this happened to me recently. I was playing Wario’s Woods before bed, and when it was time to put it down, all I could think about was blowing up baddies. I closed my eyes and saw Toad’s stubby little body running around the playfield behind my eyelids, shuffling around bouncy rabbits and turnips. I’m not sure I’ve experienced that since I was little, and I think that speaks to the addictive nature of Wario’s Woods.
Wario’s Woods was the final game officially released for the North American NES, at the tail end of 1994. You can’t talk about this game without bringing up this tidbit, and for good reason. Nintendo’s old gray mare was finally put out to pasture after a staggering ten years of being a staple in American living rooms. This final sendoff may not have meant much to kids with shiny new Super Nintendo’s, or the kids who had grown out of video games with the coming of high school and such, but it would mean something when those kids were old enough to get hit with a nostalgia bomb years down the line. Everything’s got to say goodbye eventually. Even the NES.
This is a game I played a ton of through the 2000’s thanks to its inclusion in Animal Crossing on the Gamecube. In that game, you could obtain Nintendo Entertainment Systems to stick in your virtual house. And those NES furniture items were fully functional! That’s how I played Tennis, Clu Clu Land, Balloon Fight, and many more old games I didn’t have as a kid. Wario’s Woods was one of the tougher NES’s to get a hold of; there was this whole faff with plugging a Game Boy Advance into your Gamecube using a special wire, and plodding through a minigame over and over again until you got the item you wanted…but dammit, I did it. Never did end up beating Wario back then – this game gets ridiculous in its later levels – but I loved every minute of enjoying a brand new NES game all the same. New to me, anyway.
Wario’s Woods is a complex puzzler for the time. The enemies are all colour coded, and bombs that are also colour coded drop from the top of the screen. If matched in groups of two (or more) enemies and a bomb, or two bombs and an enemy, the matched pieces will explode, and the board will get a little emptier. You can chain the bombs and enemies from above, from the side, diagonally…even as you’re falling, so long as you’re holding a bomb and brush up against two enemies of the same colour. Toad is also capable of running up walls and plucking things out of the middle of a stack, shuffling a small stack around, kicking things across the ground of the playfield, and so on. There’s a great rhythm to this game once you get a feel for it.
There’s so many different ways one can work on clearing the board that it never gets boring, but it’s also something many gamers haven’t gelled with over the years. Common complaints about Wario’s Woods tend to be that the controls are complicated for a NES puzzle game, and they sort of are. But c’mon. This thing only uses 3 buttons. Writing off Wario’s Woods because of its controls might be less a critique of the game and more a critique of how allergic we’ve become to learning curves over the years.
Every round of Wario’s Woods starts with Birdo being responsible for dropping bombs for Toad to do away with the bad guys. When it’s Birdo’s turn, everything is hunky dory. But after a set amount of time, Wario will replace Birdo, and all hell starts breaking loose. He drops bombs, as well as additional enemies, at a crazy fast pace. He also rams into the playfield, making the ceiling drop so you have less room to maneuver with. Of course, if you can’t move around anymore, it’s game over. If you manage to survive Wario’s onslaught, Birdo comes back out and everything calms down again…
But Wario will be back.
Wario always comes back.
This rigid approach to difficulty is a lot of fun, and does a great job of building tension for the player. You know Wario’s coming, and thanks to a small bar beneath Birdo – which she’s constantly gesturing at to remind you of your impending doom – you know exactly when he’s coming, too. The key to getting good at Wario’s Woods is managing your time well during the Birdo phase; if you can do away with lots of enemies and make loads of space before Wario pops up, you’ll come through on the other side alive. Hell, sometimes you might even beat the level before Wario shows up at all, which is crazy satisfying in the higher stages.
Speaking of the higher stages…they’re hard. Like, HARD hard. Whenever I’d try to play this game back in the day, I’d get to level 80 or so before tapping out, because it felt simply unconquerable. The tiny amount of room you have to run around in, as well as a lightning fast pace, makes for one of the toughest puzzler experiences on the entire console. You don’t have to beat the whole game in one go, though. Wario’s Woods has battery save, and lets you restart your game from any fifth level once you’ve cleared it. But there’s 99 of ’em to get through, and that final string of 15 eluded me for a long, long while. I can’t tell you how many aborted runs of this game I’ve had over the past two decades. Finally closing the book on Wario’s Woods feels deeply satisfying to me, but the satisfaction was marred by hours of frustration. My wife can attest to the amount of groaning and cussing that went into earning this clear.
I’m gonna close this review on a RED-HOT RETRO GAMING TAKE: other than Panel de Pon/Puzzle League/Tetris Attack/Whatever else they’ve called the fun shuffly block game, I think thatWario’s Woods is the only truly great puzzle game conceptualized by Nintendo during the early-to-mid 90’s.[1] Most of their in-house efforts were half-baked attempts to capitalize on the Tetris craze, some of which even bear the Tetris name[2]. I doubt it’s a popular opinion, but I stand by it.
As you can see, I take my puzzle games very, very seriously. I’ve lost friends over this.[3]
Anyhoo, I won’t harp on about it. I really like Wario’s Woods. A personal puzzler favourite on the system, and a game I’d easily stick in the upper tiers of the NES library. A lot of people dislike it for its complexity, so that’ll be a make or break for a lot of first time players. If you’re willing to put in a few minutes to learn the mechanics, it’s well worth a go to see the final swan song of the Nintendo Entertainment System; the end of the most influential era in video game’s history. And if not, stay away, else Wario’s trickery and chicanery curse you with mild irritation for minutes to come…
Final Rating:
[1] Just to clarify, Nintendo’s first party versions of Tetris for the NES/Game Boy are not Nintendo’s own conceptions, as the original game design was by Alexey Pajitnov.
[2] No NESJunk review of Tetris 2 yet, because that means I have to finish it first, and, spoiler alert, I fffffffucking hate that game, so that won’t be a post that’s forthcoming anytime soon.
[3] I haven’t actually lost any friends over this, but hyperbole gives me a giggle.
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