Allyse stanley
WASHINGTON POST – For how much Nintendo touted the Switch’s portability and multiplayer capabilities when it debuted in 2017, its board game library has been disappointing so far. It took over a year for Nintendo’s iconic multiplayer series, Mario Party, to arrive on Switch, and the console’s launch title, 1-2-Switch, pales compared to its predecessors, Wii Sports for the Wii and Nintendo land for the Wii U. New multiplayer games, mostly from third parties, have appeared over the years, but the latest entry in the WarioWare series, WarioWare: unite! This is the first time that I have the impression that Nintendo is finally holding its first commercials.
The story is what it needs to be, a wacky premise as to why you, as a gamer, frantically browse collections of seconds-long minigames called ‘microgames’ that are the hallmark of the franchise. Wario’s video game development company, Wario Ware, has just completed development on its latest video game console. After a series of unfortunate events, Wario and his team are sucked into the system and must play through the levels they’ve created to escape.
By design, the WarioWare series has always embraced chaos, and Do together! is no exception. It has over 200 micro-games and as many art styles and playing conventions. The screen shouts a prompt and you have a few seconds to make sense of what is being asked and complete the task: hold on a giant tube of toothpaste; the next, you wait to trap a sentient sausage that has been cut up to look like an octopus; and the next day you hurry to pull the hair out of a man’s armpits. Humor in Do together! is rude and irreverent, full of fart jokes, nose pecking, etc.
In short, this is everything gamers expect from a WarioWare game.
Each collection of microgames is built around a certain theme, such as fantasy, nature, and food. My favorite was easily Nintendo Classics, which was filled with delicious nods to other Nintendo properties like Mario and Splatoon. One game that never fails to make me laugh is a replica of the Tea Party minigame in Fire Emblem: Three Houses where you have to choose the right dialogue option to confess your feelings to a character. There is something about “Admit your feelings!” Appearing as a prompt after you frantically mashed buttons a second ago that just tickles me.
In one of the most chaotic additions to the series yet, the game has you tackling these microgames with a team of weird characters from the WarioWare universe. While they all have similar controls, each crew member has a unique movement and attack style that can make some games easy to win and others impossible.
Despite this variety, it didn’t take long for me to start sticking to the same three or four characters as much as possible, as those with a greater range of motion and access to projectiles definitely had an advantage over those. with limited movement. Namely, a character who cannot move at all and can only pull records from a distance was benched almost immediately.
In Story Mode, which can be tackled alone or with another player, the game randomly cycles through your choice of crew members or all available characters as you play through increasingly fast-paced microgames . Lose four times and it’s over. After winning a certain number of games, each round ends with a longer boss battle, although, despite the name, few put you up against a “boss” enemy in the traditional sense. More often than not, you’re doing a complex task – at least compared to simpler micro-games – like operating a drawbridge to let cars and boats pass or guiding a mechanical arm on an assembly line.
An interesting consequence of having so many playable characters is that each microgame is designed to have multiple solutions. It became a challenge in itself to understand all the different ways I could achieve the same goal. Need to protect a field of flowers from a meteor? Depending on who you’re playing, you can either fire projectiles at him, hit him to repel him, or suck up the entire meteor with your laser beam. Need to put an artist in the spotlight? Pull up on the overhead light to rotate it towards them, or simply physically push the actor across the stage – either way, the problem is solved.
After beating the main campaign, a slew of side missions, weekly online challenges, and other extras were compelling and addicting enough to make me revisit single-player mode. However, where Do together! really shines in its ridiculous number of multiplayer options. Previous WarioWare entries included multiplayer modes, but the range of playable characters in Do together! and the craziness that accompanies the random switch from one to the other adds enough unpredictability to the mix to keep you on your toes even if you’ve beaten a microgame a million times. The game’s Variety Pack includes nine multiplayer modes for two to four players, each balancing strategy, skill and luck.
I do not know if Do together! will make a convert of anyone who doesn’t already appreciate the show’s brand of silliness and chaos, but it’s an ambitious entry that successfully pushes the series into new territory in its WarioWare way. It leans into its own ridiculousness to deliver a multiplayer experience unique to the series and a single player experience that has plenty of fun reasons to return even after beating Story Mode. Embrace the chaos and, like me, you will have fun.