Item - Warioland 4

Like most of the rest of the series, this is a waste of good paper. Although it tries to stand out by adopting a first-person narrative, Wario's greed and arrogance do little to disguise the fact that this is a blandly-written and incomplete summary of somebody's experiences playing a video game. There's only so much you can read about jumping on monsters and picking up treasures before you lose interest, and this book does nothing to keep the reader's attention. There's no game system, so the fighting and collecting have no meaning to the reader, and there's only one ending, so all of the choices are meaningless. Every choice is of the form "move forward, or else take a moment to do something and then move forward as if you hadn't done anything." Even where the game has puzzles, the reader doesn't get to solve them but instead reads about how they were solved! Perhaps this thing serves as a hint book in disguise (though it's far too vague to be very useful even in that role), but as a gamebook or as a novel, it is a total failure.

More reviews by Demian