WARIO
Super Mario Land 2 (GB)
Super Mario Land 2 (GB)
Super Mario Land 2 was a strange game, possibly stranger than all Mario games before it, and that's saying a lot. In this adventure, we see Mario go through completely bizarre and random worlds. At some point you'll be fighting bees in the treetops, knocking over gravestones the next, and even climbing up and down a giant building made entirely of you. Along the way we see spiky beetles, cute bears that run you over, sharks, and haunted brooms among a plethora of other baddies for us to face. At some point we're even reunited with our good friend Tataranga, the final boss from the first Super Mario Land. You fight him on the moon, briefly. He's pretty easy.
A strange game requires an equally as strange end boss, which is where our friend Wario is introduced. This would be the first game in which he appears, and it certainly was worthy enough of his presence. After all, we all didn't know that a decade later he'd show his ugly mug in nearly every Mario game thrown at us, but at the time he was the freshest thing to hit the Mario universe.
Wario is sort of a beau ideal of Mario boss characters as he did something no end boss had done before him: he got his own game right after his debut. Not only that, but it still had the Mario name in the title, possibly just to ensure that the game would sell more than five copies.
The battle with Wario pits us against him in a castle he stole from you. That's right, he took your castle, made it dark, and changed the "M" on the front to a "W". You figure with Mario's gigantic ego of having a whole zone dedicated to him, he'd be content enough letting Wario take over a dark, damp castle, but Mario is a man of principle and morals and he simply could not let this one go. When we face Wario he uses all the tricks in the book, he even uses the same power-ups you've been exploring the entire game. He'll don his awkward bunny-ears and try to hop on top of our poor plumber, who was roughly 1/8th Wario's size. When our mustachioed villian is finally had, he shrinks down to a tiny baby crying and begging for his mommy, and then he throws his shoe at you like the pouting brat he is.
Honestly, who throws their shoe?
