It’s been well over a decade since we’ve had a full-on, brand new WarioWare title. So WarioWare: Get It Together! was a welcomed return to a favored Nintendo series. But like with any of these games, it has its own unique set of hooks to help differentiate it. For the most part, this all lands great, but a couple of playable characters fail to live up to the rest. Luckily, that’s not enough to drag the game down in any meaningful way outside of them potentially being your favorite WarioWare characters.
PLAYING FAST AND WEIRD
If you’ve never played a WarioWare game before, the point is to compete in a series of increasingly fast and difficult rapid-fire “microgames” mini-games. In these microgames, you’re given mere seconds to complete each objective. While there’s a story mode you can play to unlock all the microgames and characters, the main bulk of a Get It Together! comes from the arcade-like replayability of its games. Go for a high score in individual games, groups of games, or special challenge modes. Or just kill a few minutes while riding the bus to work. You can play as much or as little as you want.
Young Cricket meets Link in this Breath of the Wild-themed microgame.
An Appropriately Ridiculous Story for a Ridiculous Game
The story mode in Get it Together! is roughly the same as previous WarioWare games; you’ll have it done after a few hours, and everything unlocked a couple more hours later. If you’re not interested in the repeatable arcade game-like quality seen in Wario’s previous titles, I doubt you’ll be interested here. All there is to do after playing for the six or seven hours to unlock everything is replay the games in various modes. There are multiplayer modes in this game, but more on that later.
When a player really “gets into the game.”
As for the story, Wario and his friends are doing their usual thing and trying to get rich quick by making video games. However, something goes wrong, and Wario and all of his friends end up inside the games they made! In this process of being sucked into an off-brand GameBoy Advance, they’ve all become miniaturized and given unique abilities.
Now, instead of just hammering the directional pad and “A” button, players have to navigate their characters within the screen’s space in order to complete the microgame. It’s an interesting way to adapt the series’ simple mechanics to a new game that allows for more varied gameplay, even when grinding a single microgame repeatedly.
WarioWare has always had a unique sense of being bizarre and unapologetically weird. Microgames are quirky and often distract you from the task at hand by making you ponder why someone would think about an objective where you use a tweezer to remove armpit hairs from a handsome statue man. It’s a strange, strange world suitable only for the unique cast that accompanies the series.
Rock Jimmy T’s body in every direction with a swift and satisfying air dash.
IT HAS CHARACTER
As I mentioned, you play each microgame by moving a chosen character around to perform the task at hand. Wario, armed with a jetpack, can use his trademark shoulder tackle to interact with objects or escape obstacles. 18-Volt sits still and you aim a reticle by rotating the stick, using “A” to fire. He can’t move because the stick is used for aiming, but his specific microgames will supply you with hooks that he’ll grapple to if you shoot them, allowing for navigation.
Each character operates differently, although sometimes characters can feel a little ‘Samey.” There are also a couple of characters that aren’t always fun to play as. Your mileage may vary, but I found completing microgames especially difficult as 9-Volt due to his unstoppable skateboarding back and forth and having to time pressing “A” to sling up a yo-yo. If you miss your target, there’s just a lot of precious time wasted for the attack to travel. Some characters probably could have been cut overall, but at the same time, most aren’t that bad. It’s easily the game’s biggest weak point, but ultimately it’s not a major problem.
Unique characters provide replay value
Having all these characters mean that even playing the same microgame is different depending on who you use. Various modes let you pick one character, make a team of three, or even randomly get assigned from the pool of all the characters. For a game that’s based on replayability, this stretches the variety in this game a lot further than previous entries.
There’s also a lot of room for customization in how you want to play. If you just want to be Wario and play every game like that, you can! Or you can take a grab bag and see how far you can get without knowing the game or the character. A single microgame can have a number of ways to tackle it based on the characters, which is a credit to the cleverness of its design.
BETTER TOGETHER, NOT HEAD-TO-HEAD
WarioWare: Mega Party Game$! for the Gamecube was kind of a port of the original GBA game, except wrapped up in multiplayer modes that made it feel more like a fast-paced Mario Party. And the Smooth Moves! on the Wii allowed for some great hot-seat multiplayer party gaming. Get it Together!, as the name implies, is designed with multiplayer in mind. However, the offerings outside of two players being able to solve microgames together are a bit lacking.
A lot of the multiplayer party-type games are more focused on competitive activities like fighting as the characters or playing some kind of weird volleyball game with them. These feel horrifically imbalanced, allowing certain characters to clearly wreck house over others. Making a house rule where you have to pick identical characters is probably the best immediate solution to this problem, but that waters down the appeal of picking characters in the first place.
None of the games really live up to the party modes in Mega Party Game$!, which is where I had hoped we would finally head back to. Still, playing the story mode or challenging the high scores is an experience that serves well as a co-op event.
Duelius Maximus, Balloon Gang, and Sly Angle are my top pics.
FINAL VERDICT
WarioWare is about rapid-fire microgames and getting high scores. To that effect, this game continues as a worthy successor as the first new entry since 2010’s D.I.Y. or 2007’s Smooth Moves. That’s a long time to wait, but it’s every bit as good as it ever was. While the attempt to add more variety and crazy multiplayer modes doesn’t always hit like you want it to, it does little to detract from the overall experience. A smaller price tag than your usual Nintendo release also grants this game more value. A fairly sizable demo of the game is available to try now on the eShop.
It’s been a while since we’ve had one of those games that we saw in the original Switch promotions where you pop off the Joy-Con controllers and pass them around for immediate fun anywhere you go. It’s good to see something like Get it Together! reminding us how great games are when played with friends.
by Randy Marr on September 21, 2021
