WarioWare Gold excels when it goes back to Nintendo’s roots, and only rarely struggles when creating new spins.
I religiously played WarioWare: Touched! as a kid. The game was my favorite car ride go-to, seeing as it was quick, addictive, and didn’t require much reading.
Playing WarioWare Gold, I started to feel the same exhilaration that I once did in the simple Nintendo DS days.
This game is built for nostalgia. There are a good amount of Nintendo flashbacks, and nearly all of them had me involuntarily smiling. Seriously, I could not stop grinning in delight while playing WarioWare Gold.
The issues of the series may be seen as challenges rather than design flaws. However, when you’re consistently failing at a random game due to lack of instruction or non user-friendly UI, you can’t help but wonder if the game may be more at fault than you.
There were rare instances of my playthrough of WarioWare Gold where I felt like there was nothing I could do but pray to the RNG gods that I wouldn’t get the same horrible mini-game again.
There are over 300 minigames in this run of WarioWare, with very few re-releases from previous games in the series (at least to this Touched fanatics’ eyes). To have only a few games that didn’t work out of all of those 300 shows that a lot of time and effort went into making this polished final product.
The fully voiced cutscenes are a joy to experience. Hearing fan-favorites like Mona and Kat & Ana all interacting with each other was more than I ever could’ve wished for.
There are plenty of great challenge modes, including the ever-stressful Gamer with Mom’s deadly glare. I found myself most enjoying playing through the wonderful surprises of Nintendo’s classic games ad nauseam. While I won’t ruin any of those surprises in this review, just know that I was more than pleased with their selection of games to represent in Gold.
WarioWare Gold‘s story mode can be beaten in only a few hours. Don’t let that deter you from picking up this golden title. The very difficult and rewarding challenges are worth mastering the mini-games for, even if there are a couple of seemingly impossible ones. Completionists will be delighted to collect every Nintendo easter egg while beating records in the addictive mini-games.
Whether you’re a Nintendo newbie or WarioWare superfan, there’s no doubt that WarioWare Gold is a must-have Nintendo 3DS title.
Grade: A
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