WarioWare Get It Together! | Review
For those who have never heard of it, WarioWare is a series with a decidedly peculiar concept: hundreds of micro-games, lasting a handful of seconds, which ask the player to think quickly to complete them victoriously. All adorned with a decidedly over the top artistic sector and the exasperated characterization of Wario.
The last chapter of the series, WarioWare Gold, was released in 2018 and exploited the ploy of the anthological collection, to offer fans a compendium of the best experiences proposed over the years. The final result, however, was a production that clearly showed all the symptoms listed above, failing to return the same freshness of the episodes released in the first decade of the 2000s and clearly showing the need for a rethinking of the franchise.
With WarioWare Get It Together, Nintendo has managed to win a decidedly difficult bet: to make its collection of micro games once again captivating, and addictive; succeeding in not distorting the original concept of the series while strongly modifying the play structure.
Damn bugs!
As per the tradition of the series, the storyline of WarioWare Get It Together is very basic: Wario, and his team of developers at WarioWare Inc., have finally completed their new video game. While they are celebrating the good news, a series of bugs alters the handheld console they are testing the game on, sucking Wario and all his employees into their own creation.Reduced to a heap of two-dimensional sprites, Wario and his employees discover they have acquired peculiar abilities; Wario, for example, finds himself a jetpack on his shoulders that allows him to fly in any direction, 18- Volt discovers that he can no longer move but that he has acquired the ability to throw an infinite number of music CDs in any direction he wishes and so on for each of the characters that make up the roster of WarioWare Get It Together.
With their new skills, Wario and his employees will have to explore all the levels that make up their creation to "manually" eliminate the bugs that they afflict her, challenging the latter with micro-games. The structure of the story mode is very simple: you choose a level on the game map, make up a team of characters and launch yourself into a series of micro-games which, once passed, allow you to face a Boss Battle to eliminate the bug that afflicts the level.
And it is in the renewed structure of micro games that the greatest novelty of WarioWare Get It Together resides. Where the previous chapters required the player to take a very linear approach, based on quickly understanding how to solve the micro-game and act quickly, the introduction in this new episode of a roster of playable characters, all characterized by different movement patterns, distorts the formula. original, requiring the player not only to understand how to solve the various micro-games but also how to do it with the character at his disposal.
To give you a quick example: if a micro-game requires you to collect an object, Wario can safely go there in flight, 18-Volt will have to throw her discs in that direction, Mona will be able to launch her radio-controlled boomerang to direct it towards the object and so on.
The randomness with which the characters of the team composed of the player and with which the micro-games present in each level are chosen and ordered, adds a further strategic element to the formula offered by WarioWare Get It Together. Even knowing the solution of micro-games, and which characters' abilities are most functional to solve them, the random element will never give the player full control of the situation, forcing him to think quickly and constantly.
As much as the mode history of WarioWare Get It Together proves functional in presenting the various characters, unlocking them by progressing with the plot and learning the game mechanics, the short experience packaged by Nintendo is only the tip of a production strongly devoted to arcade and party game. Each level in the story, in fact, once completed can be replayed as many times as you want in infinite mode.
This mode is nothing more than a challenge with no time limit or objective that will require the player to overcome a infinite number of micro-games, of a given macro-category, until the available lives run out. The aim is very simple, to be able to overcome your personal best and complete at least once all the micro-games available to make them available in the mammoth Wariopedia.
This section, present in the game menu of WarioWare Get It Together, more it is just an encyclopedia of all the micro-games in the title, which allows you to replay them in total freedom to train, improve your records or achieve the many objectives present in the game. The latter, once achieved, will reward you with coins ... coins which we do not want to reveal the uses within the game to avoid unpleasant spoilers.
Story modes and Wariopedia are not the only activities available in WarioWare Get It Together. As you progress through the main adventure, you will be able to unlock two other modes designed to showcase the game's more arcade and party game natures. Grand Variety is a corollary of sheer madness: a conglomeration of mini-games ranging from single-player experiences to four-player battles.
We deliberately used the term minigames because WarioWare's Grand Variety Get It Together offers a plethora of over-the-top experiences that on multiple occasions are not bound to a specific time limit. It ranges from a horde mode that requires you to eliminate as many enemies as possible, to a breathtaking race between home and office where you have to collect the largest number of contracts, to experiences designed specifically for multiple players where you can battle with micro-games.
To complete the range of game modes present in WarioWare Get It Together, we find the Wario Cup: a series of weekly challenges that overturn the rules of micro-games, offering always different experiences and giving aesthetic objects to the winners. The Wario Cup also includes the online segment of WarioWare Get It Together, which is limited to allowing you to upload your records online to compete against players from all over the world.
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If the gameplay changes are intended to break with the past of the series, the microgames that make up WarioWare Get It Together will endeavor to keep the original concept unchanged. Real experiences lasting a few seconds created designed to elicit a laugh thanks to their over-the-top style with an evident Japanese matrix.Quickly squeeze a tube of toothpaste from which a Shiba will come out; understand in a matter of seconds who has won a game of Splatoon 2; slip between the chipped teeth of one jaw to avoid being crushed inside; lower the shutters of a castle to let its vampiric tenant sleep in peace ... these are just some of the over two hundred crazy experiences that you will face within WarioWare Get It Together.
Each of the micro-games featured in WarioWare Get It Together, maintains that mix of Japanese comedy, madness and madness to which the series has accustomed us over the years. The new gameplay mechanics have allowed the developers to be more daring in certain aspects, managing to propose some more complex and articulated experiences than in the past. Just think of the Boss Battles present in the story mode, sometimes structured as mini-games divided into different phases and in other cases as real portions of two-dimensional levels.
Variety is king in WarioWare Get It Together, managing to mix the over two hundred experiences proposed by Nintendo with the different approaches offered by the various characters on the roster, although a criticism must be leveled against the developers: having exploited the features of Nintendo Switch in a too timid way.
Where the previous chapters, calling the player to interact directly with the micro-games in the first person, exploited the intrinsic characteristics of the consoles on which they were made, WarioWare Get It Together behaves in a much more timid way on this aspect.
Don't get us wrong, the various characters available offer a truly huge plethora of different approaches but the absence of micro-games based exclusively on some Nintendo Switch features has made itself felt over the long haul, although we understand the need to make WarioWare Get It Together usable on all Switch family consoles and in all game modes offered by the latter.
WarioWare Get It Together! On Nintendo Switch
Needless to go around it, WarioWare Get It Together is a production that offers the best of itself on the go. Its very "hit and run" nature is perfect for beating down times, snatching a smile during a lunch break or relieving boredom in a waiting room. However, there remains undoubted commitment by Nintendo to make it an enjoyable experience even for those players more inclined to long gaming sessions.Although it is true that a level of the story mode can be completed in about ten minutes, it is also true that the variety of situations offered, combined with the increasing level of complexity, manage to entertain for hours without ever leading to boredom. In the same way, local multiplayer is perfectly integrated into every game mode, transforming WarioWare Get It Together into a ferocious party game capable of ruining numerous friendships in a few seconds of play.
The limits are always those of the productions of this genre: Once the story is complete and all the micro-games have been played, if you are not inclined to this genre of productions WarioWare Get It Together will have very little to offer to hardcore gamers. However, this is a production designed primarily to entertain in a disengaged way, although Nintendo has really worked hard to make it enjoyable for every type of player.
The micro-games, as well as the various characters on the roster, are all characterized in an excellent way and the solutions proposed by the game almost always manage to snatch a laugh from the player. Between citations to the Nintendo universe, tons of Fan Service and constant references to Japanese pop culture, the art sector of WarioWare Get It Together is undoubtedly one of the strongest points of Nintendo's production.
Where the sector audio turns out to be well packaged but devoid of really memorable songs, it is the dubbing in Italian that has literally blown us away. Excluding the fact that normally games dedicated to the Mario universe are never dubbed in any language, hearing Wario say a few words in Italian surprised us in the same way as the first Breath Of The Wild trailer. Obviously, this is not an actor's test of who knows what caliber but it remains an important change in the philosophy that Nintendo has always perpetrated.
