As I mentioned in my last post, my first game consoles were hand-me-downs. While the Super Nintendo was my first home console, my first handheld was an original grey brick Game Boy. Even after my parents took away the Super Nintendo, they relented and let us keep out portables. We were a Game Boy and DS household more than any other system until I started making enough to buy my own home consoles.
It was my dad's Game Boy. I think my mom bought it for him. I remember finding it in a desk drawer in the house I grew up in, under an obscure drawer I never looked in, with a good handful of cartridges: Super Mario Land, Baseball, Tetris, and some compilation games with stuff like Asteroids and Battleship. For the life of me, I cannot remember if Wario Land was part of that set or if it was a gift. Of every game I plan to discuss here, this might be the only one of unknown origin.
This is also the first game I ever beat on my own. Aladdin was a communal effort, but no one was ever passing around the Game Boy. Wario Land was all mine. I didn't have to replay it for this list; I actually replayed it a couple years back and I was pretty underwhelmed. It's not a particularly challenging game, unlike the other two Mario Land games. Super Mario Land is classic Mario on the go, and while it's easier than the NES Mario games, it's still a classic Mario game. Six Golden Coins is even easier, but it's still a really interesting and engaging platformer. The art is revolutionary for the tech, and it is one of my favorite examples of innovative and engaging design on portable systems which outshines home console contemporaries. I never beat Super Mario Land when I was a kid, and I only got around to Six Golden Coins last year. But I know why I beat Wario Land way back when: it's because it's an easy slog.
Wario moves like a tank, and uses his immensity to barrel through enemies, chuck them off screen, or absolutely flatten them. His power-ups iterate on the hats introduced in Six Golden Coins. And his goals veer into the collectathon realm by expanding on the backstory given to him in Six Golden Coins. He likes money, and shiny things, and especially taking others' money and shiny things, so the game actually makes a point of overselling just how much wealth the player accumulates as Wario throughout the game, and the ending changes depending on how many treasures and how much money you collect. While I didn't enjoy this game as much my last time around, I can definitely say that it provides an excellent foundation to build a spin-off franchise from.
But that's not all there is to say about Wario.
Content Warning: The rest of this post discusses fatphobia, self-hatred, bullying, and suicidal ideation.
Getting bullied when you're a kid really messes you up inside. Depending on how your brain works, that stuff never leaves you, it just twists itself into you and becomes part of you. In my case it twisted into an intense self-hatred that I am still untangling today, when I am almost 30 years old. I wasn't picked on for being fat, but I was relentlessly bullied for a lot of things I couldn't help about myself. I've forgotten what these things were, but my mom hasn't.
Around the same time that I replayed Wario Land, my mom and I were talking about what it was like for me growing up, what our home life was like, what my school life was like, all of that. I've been in and out of counselling therapy since I was 8 or 9. I thought it was because I had been diagnosed with, what we called at the time, "high-functioning Asperger's Syndrome" (we don't use those terms anymore, "high-functioning" because it is an ableist term, and "Asperger's Syndrome" because the good Dr. Asperger was a child-torturing Nazi bastard). But that's not why I'd been in therapy from such a young age. My mom reminded me that I used to call home every day after school with the office phone, asking if she could come pick me up because I had a headache. We lived very close by; it was not a long or difficult walk by any stretch. But I was genuinely in pain every day. Somedays I even told my mom that I didn't want to keep living over that same phone. Imagine being 8 and already feeling so hated that you'd rather die, then imagine actually trying to do something about it: running away from school, trying to yell so loud no one could ignore you, threatening violence in response to verbal aggression, becoming everyone else's problem because no one was helping you solve yours -- not that you could articulate those problems, you were only 8.
I really didn't fit in with my class at that age, and being in that dynamic was not healthy for any of us, but especially not me. My psychologist worked with my school and teacher to place one of his assistants into the class covertly, introduced as a new student teacher, but actually there to monitor and assess what was happening to me. Before she was even done her placement, her report was damning -- not of me, but of the school. It was very clear the school was purposefully not doing anything to protect me, and that was only proved when the principal told my mom that even if I was moved to a different school, I'd just cause problems there, too, no recognition that they were enabling the problem in the first place. Sure enough, when I did finally get to middle school, and the principal and the staff actually gave a shit, I had a much better time. I think I'm the only person who ever had a good middle school experience.
But after all of the hell I went through in my early childhood, I kept coming back to Wario. I saw myself as Wario. I thought I was a fat piece of shit. I did gross things to get attention. If we were playing a Mario Kart or a Mario Party I would always pick Wario or Bowser. I was so excited when Wario was announced for Super Smash Bros. Brawl. I made it a point to choose to be someone who made other people uncomfortable because I was so convinced that the world hated me and I was put here to make other people miserable. I chose to be Wario every day because I thought that was who I was and who I was supposed to be.
And he slots in so well to take another character's place. Wario hoards and steals treasures not for any curiosity for their purpose, but because they're worth a lot of money. His voice is not so much like gravel as it is a newly sealed driveway; I would never want to hear him sing. He wants to subjugate the world, like in the 100% ending of his game, instead of break free from something genuinely oppressing him. There were characters I wanted to be instead of him for reasons I couldn't grasp until I learned to recognize just how much help I truly needed. Men are a prison to themselves, each other, and everybody else.
Other games I've enjoyed from the year 1994:
Super Return of the Jedi (SNES), Sonic & Knuckles (SG), Mega Man X (SNES), Mega Man 6 (NES)
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