YMMV / Wario Land II

• Awesome Music:
  • The music for the water cave stages is considered a standout song in the game. The cries of the gulls in said stages add to the goodness.
  • The music that plays in the underwater ruins levels is also very catchy and awesome, as you make your way down in the ruins to hunt the giant spear man.
• Anticlimax Boss: After completing every level and finding every goal and treasure, Wario makes his way to "The Really Final Chapter", here he fights... The giant spear man. Again.
• Best Level Ever: Story 2 in Ruins at the Bottom of the sea. A trippy completely-vertical wrap around level where you constantly fall and fall down breaking through blocks and taking split pathways. It's extremely fast-paced and all of the secrets are easy and quite fun to explore. It also helps that the music is very awesome and is not heard anywhere else in the game.
• Best Boss Ever: By being an interesting and unique "basketball boss" and putting himself on equal ground with you, Dunk the B-ball Bunny makes a big impression compared to the previous bosses, and is arguably the best one in the game. Ironically, Shoot the Soccer Bunny in the third game has the opposite reputation.
• Even Better Sequel: While the original Wario Land was a very good game in its own right, and Virtual Boy Wario Land is a Cult Classic, this game was a significant improvement in giving the Wario series a gameplay identity all on its own.
• Goddamned Bats:
  • The snowman-like Yukimaru enemies will spit difficult-to-avoid icy breath upon spotting Wario. If hit, Wario will transform into Frozen Wario and be sent skidding backwards uncontrollably until he collides with a solid object. Naturally, they are often placed at the end of long flat narrow corridors.
  • Ghosts and Zombies. If Wario comes into contact with one of these foes, he'll be transformed into Zombie Wario. In this state, Wario loses his ability to jump and is slowed to a crawl, and if he was airborne, he'll fall through non-solid floors. While this transformation is required for some puzzles, in nearly all other cases the enemies that cause it serve solely as a hindrance.
• Good Bad Bugs: Charging up a slope and crouching at the top will cause you to roll in the uphill direction.
• Growing the Beard: Mostly because it's where the series dropped the Super Mario Bros. elements and went its own direction.
• Heartwarming Moments: In the first story of Chapter 2, Wario prioritizes bringing home his pet chicken, Hen, over getting his treasure back. Hen's description in the manual is just as adorable, urging the player to be nice to her!
• Most Wonderful Sound:
  • The chime that sounds when you beat a mini-game.
  • The ringing sound that plays when a glowing 100-Coin drops after bashing an enemy, followed by the jingle that plays when you collect it.
• Scrappy Mechanic:
  • The owl. It's slow, can't move diagonally, and makes flying sections incredibly slow. It's often required for them, too.
  • You get pieces of a map by playing a game after each level. It's a 9 tile puzzle that forms a number, and you have to guess what the number is to win. You can uncover more panels on how many coins you've earned, but if you don't have enough money, and especially if the number is hard to figure out (like 8 or 3), it's a Luck-Based Mission until you replay the level.
  • Zombie Wario can't jump at all unlike later games. This needlessly complicates any puzzle requiring that transformation's ability to fall through non-solid floors, by requiring that the player be airborne above the floor they want to fall through when they first become a zombie.
• That One Boss: Syrup when fought in her own castle is one of the hardest bosses in the game, as she has multiple forms, touching anything she throws at you will send you back to the start, and she takes quite a few hits before going down.
• That One Level:
  • Chapter 1, Story 4, "Go down to the cellar". The crushers in the hallway that make you crouch-jump to avoid them, otherwise you get turned into Flat Wario, thus forcing you to backtrack to water or a D-Bat enemy to turn back to normal and try again... only for the process to repeat itself over and over again. It's horrible.
  • Chapter 3, Story 3, "Through the thorny maze!!" is another frustrating and annoying level if you don't know how to handle the owl's controls. Spikes everywhere and invincible annoying flying enemies abound and getting knocked off the owl will force you to repeat sections, which gets tedious very quickly if you mess up a lot.
  • "Into the factory!" is a real pain at the end when you have to be pixel-perfect to jump and float into one-block-high crevices.

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