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Wario: Master of Disguise Review
Written by Cody Musser on Monday, March 19, 2007
Variety of unique ablities, frantic boss fights
Poor touchscreen gestures, tired humor
The hardest game to review is a game that is perfectly and clearly middle of the road. A brilliant game is an easy review, and a terrible game always provides a worthy flow of things to complain about, not to mention a chance to use those colorful adjectives. Wario: Master of Disguise is unquestionably that game, the very definition of average. However, that's not to say Nintendo didn't have noble intentions with this one, but it seems Wario ultimately fell victim to being the guinea pig in an experiment with touchscreen functionality. If the experiment were to have succeeded, this game could have easily been one of Nintendo's best explorations into mashing together old school gameplay with the new touchscreen. Unfortunately for Wario, the experiment failed.
The old school Wario gameplay that Nintendo was striving to reproduce wasn't from the recently popular WarioWare mini-game outings, but from the Wario Land series before that. This game takes some great ideas from Wario's platforming roots, but they don't seem to carry over too well to the DS. The source material might have been excellent, but trying to reproduce that material with the touchscreen is where the trouble comes in. Wario: Master of Disguise is centered on changing Wario's abilities just like other games, but now this is done through touchscreen gestures. He can become Cosmic Wario to shoot lasers, Genius Wario to spot hidden pathways, and even Captain Wario to float along the water. The abilities are very different and they add nice depth to the gameplay, even if some of the abilities carry the added weight of moving slower or in the case of Artsy Wario, not moving at all.
The real problem lies in changing from one ability to the next, as the touchscreen gestures grow in number, so does the opportunity for the game to misinterpret them. In the more frantic boss fights this becomes a terrible nuisance and even in regular gameplay it can be equally frustrating. Expect it to happen often and particularly when the gesture seems to be perfect. Master of Disguise has a very blatant disgust with perfect gestures, so the game decides to consider those as mistakes. Trying to return to Cosmic Wario form will be the games best example of how you're just not good enough despite your 5th attempt at drawing a perfect circle.
Because the game requires that all the transformation gestures, as well as any ability of each outfit be performed with the stylus, things overall end up feeling a little too slow for the average platformer. Moving Wario is done by the d-pad, and even jumping doesn't have a dedicated button, it is simply mapped to up on the d-pad. This makes for movement that feels awkward and even clunky. This part is where the game seems like such a noble idea, considering the marriage between regular platforming and the touchscreen is pretty obvious. However, it seems we're not so much ready for an obvious combination of the new and old, but rather both ideas work well enough on their own.
Wario: Master of Disguise wouldn't attempt to go the platforming route all alone, so the game makes sure to nab some mini-games from the more popular WarioWare series. Opening each chest in the game presents the player with a mini-game. Things like coloring a picture, tracing an image, aiming the poo into the toilet (seriously), are all included. The biggest problem is that they're never that much fun. The mini-games are for the most part easy, and there are so few that players will be repeating them over and over and over again.
Everything else about Wario: Master of Disguise falls right into that average category. The story is nothing special, and also nothing if not long-winded. Expect lots of dialogue between Wario and his new nemesis Count Cannoli, otherwise known as the master thief Silver Zephyr. The two exchange witticisms far too often for a platformer, and the same jokes that were only marginally funny at the beginning of the game are all but played out by the later levels. Level design, enemy design, and damn near every other category of this game are in short, unimpressive. This won't be the worst game to see the DS this year, and it definitely won't be the best, if it's guilty of anything it might be in failing to meet the potential generated by reviving a sidescrolling Nintendo franchise. Mario's outing was excellent; Yoshi and Kirby each pulled their DS games together well enough; it's too bad Wario, probably from all that poo running around, just stinks.
