Technical Information
Developer: Nintendo R&D1
Publisher: Nintendo
Release Date: February 19, 1994
Wario and his gang invade a peaceful forest, taking it over and transforming it into “Wario’s Woods” (or “Wario no Mori”, Wario’s Forest in Japanese). The place that was once calm is now turned upside down, leaving all the creatures frightened.
Your mission is to control Toad and kick Wario’s butt out of the forest, restoring peace to the kingdom.
A fun and casual puzzle game, but not as easy as it seems at first try!
Final Thoughts – Analyzing the Game as a Whole
Graphics and UI
Despite the limitations of the NES, the game turned out very well made and faithful to the SNES version.
Even with a very limited color palette, the adaptation was great!
The main menu is easy to comprehend, and during gameplay, the HUD displays clear information about your level and accumulated gold.
Soundtrack and Sound Effects
The game is quite simple, unfortunately, it lacks many music variations. However, the present music and sounds can well set the tone for the game, not being annoying (which is essential for a puzzle game with repetitive mechanics).
Fun Fact: I noticed that the “danger” music (which plays when you’re almost losing the game) is quite similar to the battle music from the RPG Undertale. I believe it served as inspiration, since they really do sound alike!
Gameplay
The gameplay is very good, I found the physics well calibrated! Toad’s actions are very “fluid” to execute, and after a few hours of playing, I didn’t have any problems with collision caused by poorly adjusted hitboxes.
The game has a story mode, where each stage gradually becomes more difficult. There are no passwords, but the good news is that every 5 stages, the game saves, so the player doesn’t have to start from scratch after turning off the console.
In the main menu, there’s a tutorial that explains how the game works. Basically, you need to make a combination of 3 identical colors, with at least one piece being a bomb. The tutorial is divided into lessons that are easy to complete. However, when playing, the complexity of the game increases slightly, and the learning curve is not as fast as in the tutorial – and maybe this could be an obstacle for those who aren’t very fond of puzzles – and the difficulty starts growing gradually in later stages.
There are 2 game modes, A and B. The only difference between them is that in mode B, there’s a boss to defeat after a few stages. He’ll appear in the middle of the screen and will require you to pile up bombs on top of him… and it’s a significant increase in difficulty.
Overall, this isn’t an easy game! Besides motor skills, it will require a lot of patience and perseverance from the player.
In addition to story mode, there’s a time attack (with ranking for each difficulty level: easy, medium, and hard) and multiplayer. Unfortunately, in multiplayer mode, you can’t play against a bot. :/
Replayability and Game Retention
The game is quite repetitive, but with significant difficulty, it doesn’t get annoying.
I only felt the lack of an “endless” mode, where you can play a single match to accumulate as many points as possible.
