Gameplay

Progressing through stages involves more than just fighting your way from the beginning to the end; you must solve small puzzles and collect back your treasures. This means that you'll have to hit colored switches and then find the corresponding treasure chest that it activates.

Free Ware$

If you have Game Boy Advance with a link cable to your GameCube, then there is a tangible motivation for collecting as many treasure pieces as possible. After finding all the eight pieces of treasure for each stage, a micro-game from Wario Ware Inc. is unlocked and can then be uploaded to your GBA for play. There are a total of eight games to be unlocked, which is a nice bonus for the player who seeks out all the treasure. On the other hand, if you already own Wario Ware Inc. or do not have a GBA with a link cable, then there's really nothing driving you to hunt down all the treasure chests unless you want to make Wario happy.

He looks like he's full of chocolate

This doesn't look to scale

Fire-breathing stone Bowser head?

Another 'optional' part the adventure is to free Spritelings, who are trapped in boxes that you encounter along the way. Setting them free with a punch will earn you some rather basic tips and advice. Freeing all 40 Spritelings in the game will reward you to the best ending, though you can still play through the entire game by ignoring those little Jakubs.

Collecting gold statues is also not essential. Gathering all the gold statues on a stage will increase your life meter, but that's not really an issues because the game never becomes much of a challenge. (More on that later.)

What is essential to making it through to the next level is collecting an adequate number of red diamonds to open up the door to the stage boss. Red diamonds are always found through trapdoors littered through the level. A simple butt-stomp on a trapdoor will send you down into a puzzle room where you must solve simple problems in order to "earn" the red diamond. Most of the puzzles are quite simple and are solvable on the first try. Some take a bit of thought, but none of them are so hard that you'll have to consult a walkthrough. Beyond steel trapdoors are jumping puzzle levels similar to what you may have seen in Mario Sunshine. Again, most of these are easily completed on the first try, but there are some that may require more attention and several attempts. None of the puzzles caused any notable amounts of frustrations for us.