For decades, Wario’s been losing out to his childhood rival Mario. He doesn’t get the big adventures, the glory, or the loot that he so desperately wants, and the fact that he continues to peddle microgames that are more or less considered shovelware isn’t going to change that anytime soon. Which, of course, is the joke of the WarioWare series, and for those of us who’ve been along for the ride, Wario’s latest venture, WarioWare: Get It Together!, is a fun and rewarding experience, not least of which for the way that it fleshes out Wario and his associates while also gamifying the fundamental unfairness of Wario’s being.
As with other entries in the WarioWare franchise, Get It Together! is a collection of irreverent, seconds-long microgames. Each has its own distinct artistic style, from crude sketches to clip art and wholesale meta-appropriation of assets from other Nintendo games (including 2004’s WarioWare: Twisted). The defining gimmick this time around is that because Wario and his associates have been sucked inside the game, you not only have to quickly interpret and follow the usual one- or two-word instructions, such as “tweeze” and “collect all,” but you must figure out how to do so with your randomly selected character. That’s often easier said than done, because each has a unique control scheme, many of which are bad fits for particular games.
Compared to his crew, Wario, who comes equipped with a jetpack, is positively balletic, easily able to glide to and punch through the objectives in each microgame. Whereas it’s a snap for him to click the stopwatch in “Keeping Track” and count up each runner that blazes past the screen, it’s near impossible to get 9-Volt to hit a slender clock-face button with his yo-yo as he uncontrollably skateboards back and forth. In “Peril-Chute,” players must keep a skydiver from hitting spikes, which is simple enough as the tractor beam-wielding alien Orbulon but considerably harder if you happen to be playing as Kat or Ana, the constantly jumping ninja twins, or the bird Pyoro, who can only stick out his lengthy tongue at 45-degree angles.
Because these are microgames, a sense of unfairness never sets in. Get It Together! doesn’t expect you to beat each mini-challenge with every character (though you can), so if you wind up trying to get the air-swimming Dr. Cygor to spin a faucet in “Sanitation Station,” you’ve lost only a few seconds and a single life and are immediately onto the next task. You might not be able to properly time 5-Volt’s teleporting blast to flip a turtle back on its feet in “Turtle Tipper,” but you can laugh at the epic fails, treating this party-game experience as Nintendo’s answer to Funniest Home Videos. Honestly, the whole thing’s a natural evil-ution for the franchise, for while Get It Together! technically only has around 200 new minigames, that number ratchets up when the unlockable characters and multiplayer options come into play.
Those unlockable characters aren’t just there for show either, as Get It Together! gives you a long overdue opportunity to get to know the WarioWare cast a little more. In the past, we only briefly met each character in the skits that introduce their preferred genre of microgame. New versions of those return with even more details: Mona’s chore-based games are centered around cleaning up after her three anthropomorphic children, and Jimmy T.’s sports-related games are framed by a frantic ’80s-set workout video. For the first time, the opportunity to outright control them during each game gives you a much clearer sense of their eccentricities, and it’s fun to figure out their likes and dislikes by purchasing “prezzies” (with the in-game currency that comes from completing microgames), whether that’s food for the ever-hungry witch Ashley or exercise equipment for the martial artist Young Cricket.
The randomness of WarioWare: Get It Together! is a clear demonstration of the old adage that when life gives you lemons, make lemonade. You never know what game or character you’ll see next, only that whether you’re temporarily playing as a hover-cab driver who can only shoot to the left or an overgrown kid who can only move by grappling between objects, you can make it something sweet, either in against-the-odds triumph or comic failure. Managing such chaos has always been a core tenet of the WarioWare experience, and in doubling down on the randomness of its microgames, the series has at last gotten its shtick together.
This game was reviewed using a retail copy purchased by the reviewer.
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