Mario & Wario (SNES)
When I heard the Nintendo Switch 2 would have mouse controls, one thought immediately excited me: the potential for the Super Famicom puzzle game Mario & Wario finally getting an international release. Originally a Japan-only title despite featuring exclusively English text, the game never made it stateside, partly because of its reliance on the unpopular SNES Mouse peripheral. Prior to the Switch 2, it felt like the kind of game that would never see an international release because of its reliance on the mouse, Nintendo famously averse to releasing games on PC where it would have been all too easy. Sure enough, Nintendo did fairly quickly add Mario & Wario to their Nintendo Classics service after the Switch 2’s release, meaning after hearing tell of this game since the early 2000s, I’d finally be able to satisfy my curiosity.
Mario & Wario leaves its set-up to the manual that will still require translation if you wish to know the tale. There’s not really much to the story though, Mario, Yoshi, the Princess, and Luigi exploring a nearby forest when Luigi goes missing. While the others look for Luigi, Mario’s mean doppelganger Wario swings by in his plane and drops a bucket down over their heads, disorienting them so much they can do nothing but wander around aimlessly. A helpful forest fairy named Wanda sees their plight, but despite her magic, she can’t remove the bucket herself, instead using her spells so that they can reach Luigi who has the strength to remove the bucket. It is a rather silly plot almost worthy of being something in a children’s book, especially since the bucket somehow ends up back on a character’s head every stage and as you head to later worlds, new objects are dropped on their heads instead of the bucket. The pot of the fire cave isn’t a big departure in concept, but then you have the legitimately dangerous underwater levels where a jellyfish is placed over their heads instead or the very silly situation in the desert where it’s simply just too large a hat.
Whatever might be obstructing their view, it’s up to you as Wanda to repeatedly guide them to relief through 110 levels (although the final 10 are bonus levels). The game first asks you which character you wish to help in the adventure, each one having a material impact on how the puzzle solving will go. When the characters are ambling about in a side-scrolling puzzle stage, they’ll usually move in a straight line, taking ladders or dropping off ledges as they reach them. The Princess walks slowly, giving you more time to set things up safely for her, but when she reaches an edge, she’ll fall rather quickly. Mario moves at a normal speed and teeters twice on ledges before falling, while Yoshi moves at the quickest pace and lingers on an edge the longest. You can go back to character select between worlds if you’d like to change which character you’ll be helping, and as you might have guessed, it’s not as straightforward of a pick as you’d expect. The Princess can sometimes feel too slow for larger levels or leave you scrambling a bit more in ledge heavy places, but Yoshi naturally being so speedy means you need to really be good with your mouse to keep up despite the ledge leniency. There are two mouse speed options to help you find what works better for you at least, but the actual content of the game does not change depending on who is heading out to get saved by Luigi repeatedly.
In a level of Mario & Wario, technically all you need to do is safely guide your chosen character to the goal. Wanda serves as your mouse cursor, the little fairy able to affect the stages in a few different ways. The most important is the adding or removal of blocks at indicated spots, the player needing to make ground to walk on or remove obstructions so the blindly wandering heroes can make it to level’s end in time and without coming in contact with enemies or spikes. Wanda’s magic wand does allow her to defeat certain enemies and impact others. She can take out bats with a quick whack, but some flame-spewing cannons are made of tougher stuff, the player often needing to change the firing angle of such cannons or try to snuff out the fireballs in midair with some good click timing. The character wandering around will continuously move regardless of what you do, and while you can turn them around by clicking on them, you can’t make them stop moving in any way and your ability to influence the level is dependent on where the character is. Before a stage and whenever you pause you can view the totality of a stage, but when the characters are walking, Wanda can’t leave the edges of the screen to set things up. This makes a good degree of sense at least, some levels would be far too easy if you could fly off and set up all the blocks or beat enemies before they even threaten you, and while sometimes this does add fiddly management to level traversal because you need to keep babysitting a character while keeping the work you need to do onscreen, it can also add some complexity when you need to take specific detours that endanger the character but are the only way you can set up important elements in advance.
Over time, new little complications are added to make your work as a guide more difficult. Blocks that disappear in set intervals ask you to keep things moving with the right timing, some blocks only appear when you disable the opposing block type and vice versa, but most dangerous of all have to be the limited time blocks. Despite your success in a stage depending a lot on that character ambling around with a bucket on their head, a lot of moments require spot on timing to avoid an immediate death. You might need to send your character through during the small gap in timing between moving spike balls, you might need to alternate blocks right before your character teeters off, but the limited time blocks are the roughest. Sometimes very small and placed in long bridges, limited time blocks, once activated, will quickly decay. Sometimes this is used as a clever way to change a spike ball’s movement cycle by briefly trapping it, but at times there will be many little blocks of this type linked together and you need to click them rapidly to avoid a deadly fall. Unfortunately, the size of the blocks and the fact your character is walking on top of them make it very easy to accidentally click the character and send them walking the opposite direction to their doom. Unfortunately, Mario & Wario is not really against punishing a small flub with an immediate death, and some levels take quite a while to walk through and set up so repeating them isn’t exactly entertaining. You might have figured out the puzzle elements already and just get stymied by the precision timing moments, but thankfully most of these are placed either near the end of the adventure or in the bonus EXTRA levels so that by then you’ve likely accrued a good stockpile of lives.
While levels only ask you reach Luigi at the goal, they do offer a little extra to pursue. You can have Wanda click on coin blocks repeatedly when you find them, 100 coins getting you an extra life, and each level outside of the first world features 4 stars that add some more legwork to the level should you wish to collect them all. The rewards for grabbing all the stars is just one extra life and sometimes the detours needed to grab them can add a great deal of time to your work clearing the level, something the timer isn’t always keen to support, but stages do feel like they have greater depth if you try to pursue the stars since quite a few might be too easy otherwise. In other levels, it is very fortunate the stars aren’t more important because of how tightly all actions must be taken to avoid death, but in calmer levels it adds some helpful substance and makes it easier to build up the reserves you’ll need for the tougher endgame. Mario & Wario can still feel like it doesn’t muster up the most advanced level layouts though, most often relying on ideas like springs that send you between different tiers of the level to make stages more maze-like. You will need to plot your path through such things and there can be nice eureka moments once your plans come together, although sometimes it might be sabotaged by not getting the timing on a living fireball’s movement right which doesn’t feel like the kind of way the game should have been shutting you down so often.
When you’ve finished a world though, you at least get a moment to let off a little steam. Wario comes flying by in his plane, but this time Wanda’s well armed. Bearing a mallet, Wanda is now able to bonk Wario on the head about as fast as you can click him, the player earning coins for doing so to add another way to build up towards extra lives. Wario isn’t exactly a clever pilot either, making it very easy to hit him plenty of times. It’s a simple little closer to each world and doesn’t pull you away from puzzle-solving for long, this little bonus a nice simple addition despite the shift in concept.
THE VERDICT: Mario & Wario is at its best when you’re figuring out the ways to guide a character through its little maze-like levels. Wanda can’t stray too far from the bumbling hero so you need to plan not just the best path to the goal but when you’ll trigger certain changes, and the four stars in each level give you an extra goal to shoot for in the many plainer stages. However, as Mario & Wario moves into newer ideas, it also starts relying on ones that can cause some annoying losses. Tiny disappearing blocks you need to click where it’s a bit too easy to slip up or tight squeezes between enemies that force a full level restart should you fail are the kind of complication that moves things away from the focus on thoughtful navigation puzzles, but there are still enough arrangements with some entertaining ideas to make up for those rough reaction tests.
And so, I give Mario & Wario for the Super Nintendo Entertainment System…
An OKAY rating. Mario & Wario is definitely a puzzle game where reactivity is important, hence why Wanda can never stray too far from whichever character is currently covered with a bucket. At times, this just means you’re setting up the path forward on the fly, at others, it means you must get a good overlook of the level and make sure you activate or stop the right things as you come across them. However, it’s when the game starts adding difficulty by way of perfect timing that the puzzle design becomes unsteady. Admittedly, before then it can perhaps be too easy, the stars being optional letting you decide if you want to get more out of level layouts but they could have been the spice the earlier levels needed if they had been required. At the same time, later levels letting you skip them is a godsend since having to get an automatically moving character to slip through multiple spot-on timing tests could grate. The different characters do add some room for adjustment, Yoshi harder in most ways but also able to clear those timing tests better than the Princess who would let you buy more time for setting things up. Mario & Wario feels a bit trapped between the two major components of its design. You need to look ahead and know what needs to be done in the more advanced and engaging levels, but difficulty can just as often come from doing things at the right time. The first one means you can figure out a level and just be left dealing with the execution though, which causes the second aspect to sometimes prevent it poorly. Usually, Mario & Wario is better when setting up the cycle of enemy movement is as much a puzzle as the block manipulation duties, but there are times where it’s just about stalling in place until the right window emerges or clicking a line of blocks and hoping you don’t accidentally tap the character in the process.
This curious game concept from Game Freak isn’t exactly the exciting pay off to years of wanting to play it, but Mario & Wario isn’t the kind of massive failure where you realize immediately why it never got a wider release. It’s a humble and simple mouse game, and it actually provides some ancestry for a later Mario series. Mario vs. Donkey Kong 2: March of the Minis and its follow-ups seem to look to this game for inspiration and walk away with some important lessons. They still have their shortcomings with the automatically moving characters, but a greater range of control and more interesting gimmicks that aren’t just about squeezing through tight timing windows make it a nicer experience, but the fact they brought back this style also shows there are points where Mario & Wario worked well enough. Level designs can be simple fairly often here, but there are enough stages that tickle your brain a bit or ask for smart movement rather than perfection that can give you a generally pleasant experience. My curiosity is finally sated, and now it’s much easier for everyone to see this strange little mouse game that for so long felt like a buried part of the Mario series.