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(REACT!)


  • Accidental Innuendo: From Gold:
    • During the Touch League intro:
    Wario: And if you lose your thingy [stylus]... well, then you're just stuck using your finger.
    • A moment during the ending where Wario tries to escape with his money, but after he trips, Young Cricket runs up and grabs Wario to hold him down while everyone else retrieves the cash. The problem? Cricket grabs Wario by the ass, leading to this unfortunate screenshot.
    • Jimmy saying "What can I say? I love myself a little feline" (he's talking about a cat that climbed into his afro).
  • Alternative Character Interpretation:
    • From Gold:
      • Is 5-Volt really dumb enough to buy into the false claims of Mr. Sparkle's frying pans, or is she too Distracted by the Sexy that she's mesmerized into buying whatever he's selling?
      • The true nature of Wario Deluxe. Is that Wario being possessed by some sort of evil force? Or is Wario just Drunk on the Dark Side, showcasing how truly evil he is after becoming all-powerful? And for that matter, there's the issue of whether the golden pot is just a potty like Lulu says or something more mystical in nature. The in-game cards imply that the pot itself is just a chamber pot and that Wario Deluxe is just a sleep-deprived Wario, which sounds more like a joke answer, but considering that this is WarioWare, it could very well be true. However, that doesn't explain the sudden voice and outfit change after putting on the pot, nor does it explain the lightning powers he got midway through his fight (all of which he loses the moment the pot is taken off), so it could very much be something much more.
      • Was Doris 1 legitimately enraged at Dr. Crygor for abandoning her in the forest or was she possessed by something that caused her to flip out?
    • Does Wario see his employees as actual friends? Or does he only see them as mere lackeys that do his bidding? While Wario has stated that they're his friends in past games and has hung out with them, not only does he frequently screw them over at the end, but he was rather nonchalant towards them leaving him in favor of Diamond Software in D.I.Y. and Gold shows him as not thinking too highly of them (calling them things such as chumps and lackeys instead of friends), as proof for the latter. Wario keeping a picture of all them in his house, accepting them back into Warioware, his card mentioning his door is always open for them, and the fact that, despite his shadiness, they all seem to sincerely like Wario brings credence to him seeing them as friends.
    • Is Ashley a Jerkass and a Wicked Witch who doesn't care about anyone but herself? Or is she a shy, Misunderstood Loner with a Heart of Gold (or at least a Jerk with a Heart of Gold) who isn't nearly as bad as she comes across. While some of the earlier English localizations would lean towards the former interpretation, the Japanese games and later localizations would lean more towards the latter.
  • Audience-Alienating Era: After the release of Smooth Moves, the series started to have trouble staying on its legs. Snapped! proved to be the weakest installment, using a control scheme (that being the DSi's camera) that can be difficult to get working and only having 5 microgames per stage, all of them without boss microgames. D.I.Y., despite its positive reception, was a commercial failure, and even turned off a good portion of the fandom due to its overly complex game editor and a rather lackluster set of pre-built microgames (not helped by the fact that the difficulties feature was removed entirely). Game & Wario is the biggest offender, becoming a standard minigame collection instead, with only a couple of them being engaging enough to be worth replaying. Its poor sales ultimately contributed to the series' long dormancy until the release of Gold, which received a much warmer reception by both fans and critics.
  • Awesome Art: The transition screens between microgames in each stage in Get It Together! are each creative and fun to watch, especially when clearing a microgame.
  • Awesome Ego:
    • Of course, there's Wario himself, who remains as much of an egoistical and fun Large Ham as ever. This is especially the case in Gold, thanks to the added voice acting by Charles Martinet, making him even more of an enjoyable Large Ham than prior, on top of his transformation into Wario Deluxe through the pot, becoming a badass villain again after years of being an Anti-Hero.
    • Ashley is so prideful about herself that she has an Bragging Theme Tune that goes about how great and scary she is. Many fans of the character tend to agree with her that she is the cruelest/coolest girl they've ever met. It helps that later games would establish her as being a Little Miss Badass, showing that she can back up her ego.
  • Best Boss Ever: The bosses of the final stages usually fit:
    • The first game had you play through a hilariously crappy adventure-style game that switched controls on the fly to things you may have played through on an earlier level. Touched also had a similar set-up for Wario-Man's boss stage and plays Final-Exam Boss a bit more straight. Get It Together! also uses a variant for the fake final stage.
    • The first WarioWare also has Orbulon's boss game where you have to defeat a boss Dragon Quest-style by picking the correct spelling of the words, and Dribble & Spitz's boss stage which is reminiscent of the shmup genre.
    • Tiny Wario's stage from Smooth Moves has Wario Dance Company where you had to dance to the beat and strike poses every now and then.
    • Twisted had 9-Volt's boss stage where you played through a level from Super Mario Bros. using the tilt controls. This returns as 18-Volt's boss stage in Gold.
    • Smooth Moves had Dribble & Spitz's boss stage where your Mii goes through an obstacle course before taking down a giant nose, and 9-Volt's boss stage where you played through a level from the SNES Star Fox (Corneria, Sector X and Titania on the respective difficulties) and had to take down R.O.B., who uses a Zapper.
    • Wario Deluxe's stage in Gold gives us the return of Wario Dance Company, which now serves as an improved form of Wario de Mambo from Twisted and challenges the player by employing every previous control scheme as they match the movements of their fellow dancers to the festive sounds of Wario de Mucho. In the story mode proper, this boss microgame is also accompanied by Wario Deluxe having a minor Villainous Breakdown as you progress through his final challenge.
  • Best Level Ever:
    • 9-Volt's stages tend to be much appreciated by fans for their focus on Nintendo games and products. This extends to 18-Volt and 5-Volt's stages in Gold, which share the same theming with different playstyles. As a testament to how popular these stages are among fans, they're usually among the last stages to be unlocked.
    • From the first game, we have Ana & Kat's stage which is very Japanese flavored, having a song instead of interlude + game music, and having interesting microgames based on nature.
    • The first game also has Dribble & Spitz's stage for its sci-fi style and song rather than interlude + game music, similar to Ana & Kat's stage. It also has a great boss stage.
    • Smooth Moves feature Dribble & Spitz for having interesting games as well as the microgames' music once again being switched in favor for a song and having a great boss on top of that.
    • Game & Wario has the "Gamer" stage, which centers around 9-Volt playing video games past his bedtime. The microgames themselves are pretty basic, but the real challenge is hiding from his mother who is constantly checking if he's actually asleep. It's even styled like a B-Grade horror movie, complete with "Psycho" Strings and 5-Volt crawling out of the TV. The mode even made an encore performance in Gold as "Sneaky Gamer", this time playing with Gold's more engaging microgames.
    • Gold combines this with Best Boss Ever through its final stage: Wario Deluxe. Unlike other final stages in the series, it actually features an epic, climactic showdown against a Wario alter-ego, including great music, Charles Martinet at his finest in terms of voice acting, some unexpected Interface Screws to keep the player on their toes and, finally, a fun Final-Exam Boss stage (a remastered "Wario Mambo" from Twisted that employs all present control schemes instead of just the tilt sensor, making it less tedious and repetitive).
    • Kat and Ana's "Split Screen" challenge mode from Gold has only two simple gimmicks: microgames run on both the top and bottom screens so that one can start right after you complete the other, and the speed/difficulty gradually rises instead of increasing at intermissions. It doesn't need anything else, as the lack of any break between games turns it into one of the most frenetic experiences in the whole series, especially in its Ultra version where you have to be prepared for the game throwing every type of microgame at you with no guide beforehand (though Touch games can’t show up on the top screen, of course).
  • Better as a Let's Play: "Gamer" in Game & Wario provides a wonderful chance for Let's Players to pair up and help each other keep tabs on 5-Volt's bedroom stalking, with lots of humor derived from just how insane her attempts to catch her son gaming become. And because most video capture settles on recording the TV and not what's happening on the GamePad, not having any context for what 9-Volt is doing can end up make it funnier, since the difficulty of the game as a whole is obscured.
  • Breather Level:
    • "Banana Munch" and "Hard Core" from the first game - in a game where quick timing and thinking is commonplace and you have to stay on your toes, just letting loose and mashing A a lot (even on the later difficulties, as it's just more A presses that are required) is very much welcome. It helps that the two are identical in gameplay.
    • One of the challenges in Get It Together! is "Back to Basics!" which is playing the tutorial mini-games for 18-Volt, Mona, Orbulon, 9-Volt, Pyoro, 5-Volt and Penny.
  • Broken Base:
    • Wario's biker outfit. Some find it to be a cool outfit that fits Wario and a great way to further distinguish Wario from Mario, while others hate it for how tacky it looks and argue that further distinguishing Wario from Mario in the first place is missing the whole point behind Wario's conception since he is supposed to be Mario's Evil Counterpart. The fact that the Mario and Wario Land titles don't acknowledge the existence of the biker outfit most of the time (Super Mario Maker being the only time it's appeared in the Mario games), while Super Smash Bros. would make it his default outfit, while relegating his classic uniform to a secondary alt, has not helped much.
    • Ashley’s age tends to be a touchy topic whenever it gets brought up due to how vague it is. While she isn’t the only character to be vague in terms of age, Ashley is a more contentious case since on top of her child-like design, the West explicitly refers to her as a 15-year-old teenager and gives her a deeper voice to match, while in Japanese, it is implied that she is more akin to a child, while never giving her an age. Some fans accept that she is a teenager since it's the closest to an official stance on her age and argue that Ashley isn't exactly special in this regard since there are other characters who don't match their agesnote . Others though, refuse to accept Ashley as being anything other than a child due to her design, and since Japan seems to imply her as such (even though again, they've never confirmed her age) and regards anything that considers her to be a teenager as nothing but non-canon, localization-related nonsense by Nintendo's Western divisions.
    • The redesigns in Gold and Get it Together! are divisive amongst fans. Some fans are okay with them and even love them, with some of the designs being regarded as an improvement over their original designs (such as Penny and Mona's). Other fans though, despise them, disliking the often drastic changes made to the characters and finding the redesigns to be too "cutesy-looking" for a series like Wario.
    • One Gold redesign that has proven to be especially contentious, however, is Orbulon's, who goes from being a tall and lanky alien in previous games to being far shorter and stubbier. Some like the new Orbulon, finding him to be adorable looking. Others though, lament the loss of the original design and dislike the new design for how "cutesy" it is and for being such a sudden and drastic shift away from his original design.
  • Character Rerailment: On top of acknowledging Wario as a treasure hunter again (a trait that has become less prominent starting in the mid-2000s), after years of being depicted as an Anti-Hero, Gold brings him back to his roots as a villain and depicts him as the Big Bad again for the first time in decades.
  • Common Knowledge:
    • It's commonly assumed that Mona's job (outside of being a dev for WarioWare) is a pizza delivery girl. While this is true, it's only one of many jobs she's undertaken through the series. Her other jobs — such as a gelato server, a cheerleader, a TV archaeologist, and a news photographer — aren't as well known. This may be a result of her image song "Mona Pizza", which is sometimes present in more popular media like Super Smash Bros., skewing popular perception of the character.
    • Ashley is often cited by some to have originally been 8 in Japanese, but changed to 15 in international languages. However, Ashley's exact age has never been specified in Japanese.
      • On the flip side, Ashley is often assumed to be 15 years old due to the Western Touched! website, where her profile states that she is "fifteen going on 500". However, this is likely non-canon, as not only is it exclusive to the West (info from Nintendo's Western divisions is usually deemed non-canon bar some exceptions), but it does not come from any of the games, manuals, or other supplementary material, which do not list her age (that said, it's implied by her behavior in Japanese that she is a young child).
    • This series tends to be blamed for Wario's Flanderization into a Toilet Humor loving Gasshole. Primarily thanks to Super Smash Bros., which has Ware as Wario's primary series. However, this can't be further from the truth. While the games are filled with Toilet Humour, very little of it actually comes from Wario himself, with his story and microgames having very little toilet humor. That isn't to say Wario doesn't have his moments in the series, but it's nowhere near as common in the series as people make it out to be. Furthermore, Wario's love of Toilet Humour is Older Than They Think, with Japanese manuals for the Wario Land series having an emphasis on his love of poop, and even the English Wario Land 4 manual has a section describing a day in Wario's life which is full of gross events.
  • Contested Sequel:
    • Depending on who you ask, Game & Wario is either seen as a fun and underrated gem for the Wii U or an okay but forgettable minigame collection that, while not without its good moments, largely lacks most of what made the series fun and unique to begin with.
    • Touched! has this reception compared to the previous GBA titles. While many fans are very fond of the game and find it to be a great entry, and was the debut of fan favorites Mike and Ashley (the latter of which became the series' Breakout Character), there are many others who find it to be a disappointing entry due to having less content and variety compared to the previous two games. What further complicates things is Twisted! — which is still considered by some fans to be the best game in the entire series — falling victim to No Export for You in several territories, meaning that fans in those territories can credit Touched! for things like casting off the Trial-and-Error Gameplay that the GBA original was sometimes criticized for, which in reality had already been done by Twisted!.
  • Creator Worship: Though not the creator of WarioWare, the series' character designer Ko Takeuchi is very popular with the fanbase. It helps he's one of the very few Nintendo employees to have a notable social media presence.
  • Creepy Awesome:
    • A good deal of 5-Volt's popularity comes from the ridiculous, but terrifying stunts she pulls off just to make sure her son's asleep.
    • Ashley, when she's in a bad mood.
  • Death of the Author: Many fans tend to ignore Ashley's "official" age (15) from the western Touched! website in favor of portraying her as a young child instead. Much of this stems from the fact that she doesn't look like a teenager and is only really depicted as one in the English localization, with the original Japanese games portraying her as being closer to a child instead (that said, Japanese sources have not specified her age).
  • Do Not Do This Cool Thing: Game & Wario's "Gamer" has a warning before the game proper that you shouldn't stay up past your bedtime playing video games in real life.
    This is a game born from 9-Volt's feverish imagination and adapted to the unique features of Wii U.
    Do not attempt any of these activities, such as staying up past your bedtime to play video games, in real life.
  • Draco in Leather Pants: While Wario does have hints of being a Jerk with a Heart of Gold in canon, he is mostly portrayed as being relatively uncaring towards his friends and tends to pretty much use them for his get-rich schemes, never paying them for their hard work in the process. Nevertheless, many fans tend to portray Wario in a better light compared to canon, with some portraying him as a genuinely good friend in spite of his behavior and some even having him act as a surrogate father figure to the younger employees (despite canon showing him as treating them no differently from how he treats his older employees, that is, free exploitable labor).
  • Ensemble Dark Horse:
    • 13-Amp quickly became popular amongst fans after Gold for her design and coolheaded personality. Being voiced by Cristina Valenzuela in the English dub definitely helps.
    • Mike remains very popular despite having lost relevance ever since his debut in Touched, only rarely hosting microgame stages nowadays and acting more like Crygor's sidekick whenever he needs one.
    • Despite having only made a couple of minor background appearances since Twisted!, Sal-Out is a well-loved and decently popular character amongst the fandom, to where some want to see her be upgraded to a main cast member.
    • Orbulon's human female form only appears three times across the franchise and usually has very minor roles (One of the movies in Mega Party Game$, the Meet Orbulon and Dribble & Spitz's character PV and one of the unlockable gallery pics in Get It Together!). However, she has become very popular amongst fans for how cute and attractive she is. Especially her Gold redesign.
  • Even Better Sequel: Twisted! is perhaps the most universally beloved entry in the series — at least in countries where it actually got released — for having an extremely strong set of microgames with very few ones that are disliked, its well-balanced difficulty curve, and its tilt cartridge input taking away the Trial-and-Error Gameplay that the first game suffered from.
  • Epileptic Trees: Due to a couple of background photos of who are likely Mona's parents from her cutscene in Get It Together! baring a slight resemblance to Luigi and Daisy, theories have quickly popped about the two being her parents.
  • Evil Is Cool: Wario Deluxe, for having an awesome theme and stage, referencing Wario's long-lost villainous origins and being the only thing the series has ever had to a legit Big Bad.
  • Fan Nickname:
    • WarioWare Gold has gotten the nickname "WarioWare Megamix" due to the notable conceptual similarities between it and Rhythm Heaven Megamix (namely, a "best of" compilation on the 3DS that refines the old content and throws in a handful of new content for good measure).
    • Fans generally tend to dub Young Cricket's partner from Rhythm Heaven Fever and his Gold PV as either "Young Dragonfly" or "Young Butterfly" in order to retain the insect naming scheme that Young Cricket and Master Mantis have. Move It would officially name her Cicada.
    • Orbulon is sometimes called "Orby" by fans, usually as a shortened or Affectionate Nickname for the alien.
    • [*blank*] Gang for any themed teams in Get It Together (like Tech Gang for Crygor, Penny, and Mike, or Volt Gang for 9, 5, and 18 Volt).
    • Due to the game's focus on motion controls like Smooth Moves, fans have dubbed Move It! "Smooth Moves 2". It helps that in Japanese, it is billed as a direct sequel to Smooth Movesnote .
  • Fandom-Enraging Misconception:
    • Suggesting that Ashley is an evil Wicked Witch is an easy way to rile up the fandom, as it's made clear in the games (especially in Gold) that Ashley is not an evil or bad person in spite of her dark interests and aloof attitude.
    • It is not wise to refer to Mona as "Mona Pizza" unless you wanna get on the fandom's bad side, as Mona Pizza refers to the establishment she works at, not the character herself. Similarly, suggesting that Mona only works at Mona Pizza is also an easy way to get side-eyed by the fandom and expose yourself as someone who isn't familiar with the franchise, as Mona has a different job in almost every game.
    • Don't say the series "killed" the Wario Land series unless you want to anger a good portion of the fandom. Although WarioWare did overshadow Land, beyond the fact that they're in entirely different genres, WarioWare and its success has little to do with the lack of Wario platformers today. The underperformance of his last few platformers, and the lack of a dedicated team for the series due to the shutdown of Nintendo R&D1 (the team behind the first five Wario Land titles) are likely more contributing factors to a lack of Wario platformers these days than anything to do with WarioWare.
  • Fandom Rivalry: With the Wario Land series. As WarioWare got popular, Wario Land became less, and consequently, the latter series became dormant and Wario's appearance in Super Smash Bros. largely focused on the former series. This then sparked an ongoing debate on which series meshed better with Wario and thus should be more prominent. While fans who like both sub-series are not unheard of, the most vocal ones are at odds with each other.
  • Fanfic Fuel:
    • The nature and popularity of Ashley has unsurprisingly prompted this, with many fanfics centered around her past and her relationships with the others.
    • How Wario met the others and became friends with them is also a very popular fanfic subject.
    • Mona's Precocious Crush on Wario appears in many fanworks.
    • As you might expect given her huge surge in popularity since Gold, fanfics about various aspects of Penny's character, such as what happened to her parents and how she came into the care of her grandfather, are becoming quite a bit more common.
  • Fanon:
    • While none of the characters have officially listed agesnote  besides Orbulonnote , Fronknote , and Dr. Crygornote , certain estimates based on circumstantial evidence are popular with fans:
      • Wario and Jimmy T. sharing the same age, as they're childhood friends. And considering Mario is supposedly 24-25 (according to Word of God), both Wario and Jimmy are usually put in the same ballpark.
      • 9-Volt and 18-Volt being 9 and 18 years old respectively, despite both being in the same grade. However, recent sources have been making a point that 18-Volt is just oversized for his age. 9-Volt being 9 is actually likely due to the fact that he's a fourth grader.
      • 5-Volt doesn't get the same name to age treatment for obvious reasons. People usually put her somewhere in her 30's as 9-Volt is still relatively young and she doesn't look old herself (plus women having children anywhere in their 20's is very common).
      • Kat & Ana both being 4-6, the average age of kindergartners.
      • Mona being 18, the most an (average) high schooler can have (and to make shipping her with Wario more acceptable).
      • Not many people actually believe Ashley is 15, since she has some mannerisms that indicate a younger age (like carrying around a stuffed animal), on top of the games proper never actually stating her age. 13 is a popular guess due to the connotations associated with the number. 8 is also popular due to the common myth of her being 8 in Japanese and her Crazy Galaxy design implying she's not yet of teen age.
      • Penny, being a middle schooler and around Ashley's height, is usually put at 11-13.
      • Young Cricket tends to be put in the same range as Mona (17-18), based on both of them having similar heights (as shown here). That said, he might be even younger than that, considering he shows up alongside the other children/preteen characters in Ashley's Gold character trailer (though this is likely Jossed by his own Gold character trailer, which features a flashback to where he was a kid/pre-teen with a different design).
      • Lulu is usually given a general age of 7-8, since she's around 9-Volt's size, but acts closer to someone still away from her preteens.
    • While not confirmed in canon, many fans have widely accepted the theory of 9-Volt having inherited a good chunk of his Nintendo collection from 5-Volt. Especially since a lot of his collection is stuff that would have come from her childhood (such as the Nintendo Entertainment System, the Game Boy, etc) and that she, like her son, is also a gamer who is shown to be very fond of Nintendo herself, even stating that the games in her collection in Gold (Which of course are Nintendo related) are all games that she has played in her childhood.
    • While the two don't interact much in canon and their exact relationship is unknown (though the one interaction they did have (which was on the Smooth Moves blog) was friendly, implying they're on good terms), Ashley and Penny are typically portrayed to have an Odd Friendship in fanon. A cutscene in Move It shows them getting along without issue while brewing potions together with Dr. Crygor.
    • Mike and Penny's relationship is largely unknown since the two don't interact much, but Mike is often portrayed as being a father figure to Penny alongside Dr. Crygor in fanworks. Particularly in fanworks that ship Dr. Crygor with Mike.
    • As a bit of a compromise between her original and Gold designs, Penny is sometimes depicted in fanart with heterochromia (which she lacks in canon), with one being brown like her original design and the other being blue like her Gold design.
    • As a way to explain the absence of her parents, Penny is occasionally depicted as being an Artificial Human made by Dr. Crygor, which is never alluded to in canon. Alternatively, If she does have parents, their absence is usually explained in fanon as having died when she was very young. Given her parents are never acknowledged in canon, their status is not clear. Another fan theory is that Penny's parents are alive, but not around much for her, which would give her a Commonality Connection with Mona, Ashley and 18-Volt (for whom this explanation is canon).
    • Because Penny's idol fantasies tend to portray her in Sal Out's clothes, it's generally agreed that she's a massive fan of Sal.
    • Doris-1 is frequently portrayed as being a mother figure to Penny in fanworks. Given that Penny and Doris-1 only have two notable interactions in Get It Together!note , it's not clear as to what their relationship is like.
    • Although it's unclear how Ashley and Red first met, it is commonly speculated that Ashley met Red by having summoned him from the demon realm, much like how she does to the demon in her Gold story.
    • As a way to explain Orbulon's size change from Gold and onwards, fans often theorized that he can change his size willingly — as he can canonically shapeshift — and simply chose to be short (it helps that Orbulon had been portrayed as short at one point in Mega Microgame$). More humorously, some had theorized that he used stilts to make him look taller than he actually is, often in an attempt to look cool and/or intimidating, until he gave them up starting with Gold.
    • Another Orbulon fanon is that he may be non-binary or genderfluid, due to his human disguise having him take the appearance of a woman.
    • Wario being a father figure to the younger employees (especially to Ashley or Lulu) is incredibly commonplace in fan works, even if he treats them as free, exploitable labor like he does to the rest of his employees in canon. Less sympathetic interpretations of Wario tend to put this parental duty on the far more reasonable 5-Volt instead, with the former being more of an Anti-Role Model who frequently corrupts the child employees with his usual nonsense.
    • Lulu is often interpreted as a close friend of Kat & Ana thanks to their similar ages and personalities.
    • In Japan, Nintendo would publish a one-shot webcomic starring Ashley, Red, and a group of peculiar monster-based characters not featured anywhere in the games (and Tibby). While it is unknown who these monsters are, as the comic features no dialogue, fans (and even the Super Mario Wiki) theorize they are the so-called "Ashley's Spooky Crew" mentioned in the character credits in Touched!.
    • Cicada, the female martial artist who is often seen with Young Cricket and fully appears in Move It, is frequently depicted as a childhood friend or relative of his.
  • Fanon Discontinuity:
    • In the minds of some Wario Land and Super Mario fans, Wario never founded a video game studio, he never lived in a house in a city, he never had a group of "friends" to do his bidding, and he most certainly never wore a biker outfit. It doesn't help that outside of some minor continuity nods, the WarioWare series is unusually very isolated from the rest of the Mario universe, with crossovers being few and far between,note  making it surprisingly easy to ignore Ware altogether or dismiss it as a non-canon alternate continuity as some have done.
    • Most fans would rather ignore Snapped!, since it is more of a glorified tech demo for the DSi's camera than a proper entry in the series. It helps that the game is never acknowledged by the series again, not even by Gold, which otherwise features references from all across the franchise's history. The later shutdown of the 3DS eShop in 2023 (thus putting Snapped! into Keep Circulating the Tapes status) has only increased this sentiment.
  • Foe Yay Shipping: It's a very rare ship, but there is fan art shipping Mona with Vanessa from Touched!, despite the latter's hatred and envy towards the former in that game (although, it's implied that they made up by the end, as the two are later shown to be performing together at the hawt house after Mona's story).
    • Leo, an antagonist for Kat and Ana, has been occasionally shipped with the younger twin since his debut in Get It Together!. Surprisingly, Move It! would show the kid ninjas having a snack together in the cast roll, suggesting they can be on okay terms despite him stealing their map during the plot and the confrontation in the previous game.
  • Friendly Fandoms: With the Rhythm Heaven fandom due to them being created by the same team, having similar styles, and the frequent crossovers between the two franchises.
  • Game-Breaker: Some of the characters in Get It Together can snap a lot of microgames in two.
    • As this video shows, 5-Volt's teleportation ability utterly trivializes anything involving traversal.
    • Penny has the largest difficulty curve in Get It Together, but once mastered, she makes a lot of microgames much easier. Not only is her water cannon the best projectile in the game by far, it also retains the property of the water used in microgames, meaning she aces anything involving watering.
    • Orbulon's tractor beam makes any microgame involving keeping something up, attacking a specific object, or collecting items a breeze, and even the microgames that don’t fall into said categories are made significantly easier. It should be noted that he has a whopping 72 microgames he's considered a good fit for, outclassing every other character in the roster by a wide margin (for the record, the next highest up is Penny with 42).
    • Ashley renders nearly every other character with free movement virtually obsolete. Not only does she move at the same speed as those characters, but she can also fire in any direction, whereas most others are limited to attacking in only one or two directions (or, in Crygor's case, not at all). The only caveat is that she has to move in the direction she wants to shoot (as opposed to, for instance, Mike, who can shoot upward while moving in any direction), but it's a minor inconvenience at most, and it's easily outclassed by her sheer versatility. She also has the honor of being one of two characters who does not have any microgames where she is considered a bad fit (the other being Dribble and Spitz).
  • Goddamned Bats:
    • The Fronk microgames in Twisted and Gold. They have two distinct traits: their timers are a lot shorter than the average microgame, and they show up in the middle of unrelated stages instead of having a dedicated level (they appear in various stages of Twisted, while in Gold, they only show up in the first two Ultra League stages and the Challenge modes). None of them are complex, but once the speed starts picking up, getting a Fronk microgame can lead to a lost life before you get a chance to react.
    • There are a few in Get it Together's extra game Friendless Battle:
      • Enemy Monas have the tendency to immediately aim their boomerang towards the player upon spawning, constantly battering your character before you even get the chance to hit her. Since the boomerang also has a slight knockback effect, it's also possible to get trapped in a corner this way.
      • Kat and Ana's constant jumping makes them somewhat difficult to hit, and headbutts from them from below hit hard. The fact that they jump constantly also means that attacking them from above will almost always result in you getting hit if you're not careful, making them more dangerous if you're playing as Orbulon or Red, who only attack from above.
  • Growing the Beard: As well-regarded as the first game is, it does suffer a little bit from Trial-and-Error Gameplay at times, as the controls are almost never explained prior to any of the microgames, meaning that if you make an incorrect guess as to how a microgame's controls work, the result is almost invariably an instant fail. Twisted (or Touched, for people in countries where that game suffered No Export for You) is where the series really came into its own, and began using control styles that were less frustrating, in addition to opening up more gameplay opportunities.
  • Harsher in Hindsight: At the end of their story in Smooth Moves, 9-Volt states to 18-Volt that he’ll always be his player two. 18-Volt's next appearance in D.I.Y Showcase would reveal that the two temporarily became enemies due to 9-Volt having joined Diamond Software, with 9-Volt rejecting 18-Volt's pleads to be friends again. Though it seems 9-volt reconsidered his position since then, seeing as how later entries show them being friends again without so much as a mention of what happened.
  • He Really Can Act: While he has done full voice acting outside of the Mario series before (such as portraying Orvus in Ratchet & Clank Future: A Crack in Time), as Wario, Charles Martinet is usually limited to grunts and other short voice lines. But in Gold and its sequel, Get it Together!, he gets to do full voice acting for Wario, and many players consider his Laughably Evil, Large Ham performance to be one of the best parts of the game, with one of his most memorable performances in his 25 years of voicing him.
  • Hilarious in Hindsight:
    • The game which basically inspired Wario to found his company is Pyoro, a game for handhelds that's highly successful and features a red bird as its mascot. Sound familiar?
      • As of 2014, the extremely simple yet (briefly) intensely popular Flappy Bird, which also features a red bird, makes for an even better point of comparison.
    • The description for the Kid Icarus record in Twisted is "This is as close as you'll ever get to a sequel." Nope.
    • Not to mention that there is also a record called NES Remix.
    • Mona's Steel Chef microgame in 2004's Touched bears a very uncanny resemblance to 2010's Fruit Ninja.
    • Gamer is a game where the player can't move from their preplaced spot, and must multitask multiple screens and use a hiding mechanic to avoid getting attacked by a mysterious, horrifying threat that comes from multiple angles. Sound familiar?
    • The "Classic Clash" microgame that's been a part of the series for a long time is vindicated when Bid Toys did a line of Ultraman and Godzilla-themed Mario and Bowser figures (called Ma-Nultra and Koopala) in 2020. The version seen in Mega Microgame$! even has Bowser grey and metallic like Koopala is.
    • In Mega Microgame$!, Wario runs a Shoddy Knockoff Product version of Dr. Mario as an ambitious Back-Alley Doctor in-game. Come Dr. Mario World, his ambition becomes a reality after 16 years!
    • Touched features Mona wearing a cap with eyes, with it emoting and everything. In short, she basically had her own version of Cappy a full decade before Cappy was properly introduced.
    • During Crygor's character trailer, we see him in his classic design before turning into his Gold redesign via his morning routine. In the very next game, Get It Together!, he's shown reverting to said classic design.
    • To promote Touched!, a tie-in-manga was published on the March 2005 issue of Comic Bon Bon, the second half of which features Wario operating a theme park, several years before Snapped had that exact idea as its premise.
    • The "Smile and Nod" microgame from Smooth Moves may occasionally ask if your name is Doof.
    • Wario briefly says "It's pizza time" after session of video games in the intro to Gold. Five years later, that same phrase is commonly used in another video game, a Spiritual Successor to Wario's other series no less.
    • Super Smash Bros. Brawl features a Warioware themed stage where the fighters interact with the microgames. Over ten years later Get it Together! uses that concept of controlling characters in microgames as the main focus.
  • Ho Yay:
    • The fight between 9-Volt and 18-Volt in Smooth Moves is very similar to a lovers' spat.
    • Dr. Crygor chatises Mike for running off during his stage in Gold, tenderly saying to him "You know how I miss you...". Mike gags in response.
    • In Move It, upon seeing a picture of a mermaid in a brochure, Mona drops everything to go scuba diving in the hopes of meeting one. It’s not exactly difficult to interpret her obsession with mermaids as an attraction to them.
  • I Knew It!:
    • Given the series' close relationship with Rhythm Heaven and the Nintendo 3DS is capable of doing most of the series' previous control gimmicks, many fans have predicted that the 3DS WarioWare game would be a compilation game in the same vein as Rhythm Heaven Megamix before Gold was revealed to be just that.
    • Two weeks prior to E3 2021, Nintendo emailed My Nintendo members a poll asking how much money they'd be willing to spend on a new WarioWare game. Due to the timeframe the poll was sent out and the oddly blunt and specific question, everyone who heard about it came to the conclusion that WarioWare would be getting a new title for the Nintendo Switch revealed at the event. They were right, as WarioWare: Get It Together! was announced during Nintendo's E3 Direct.
    • Before Get It Together! was revealed, fans predicted that Switch title would make use of the Joycon's motions controls, akin to Smooth Moves. While Get It Together! itself would not use motion controls, fans would ultimately be proven correct a couple of years later, as the second entry for the Switch, Move It!, is confirmed to be focused around the motion controls, with the game even being billed as a sequel to Smooth Moves in Japanese.
  • It's Short, So It Sucks!: Generally averted for the series; you can reach the credits of every game in about an hour, but there's tons of extras to unlock and each set is meant to be replayed for high score runs (and to unlock all of the microgames, since each set has more than the number you play the first time through). However, Snapped has 20 microgames in a series that usually has around 200 per game, and none of the sets are endless high score challenges, so it runs dry extremely quickly even as a 500-point downloadable title.
  • It's the Same, Now It Sucks!: Although Gold was largely well received and is regarded as a solid return to form for the franchise, some fans and critics have criticized the larger amount of returning microgames over brand new ones, feeling it makes the game more derivative and predictable compared to other entries.
  • Jerkass Woobie: While Ashley is certainly a jerk, it's hard not to feel sorry for her. As she is a lonely and introverted outcast who is not only mediocre at magic, but was implied to have been abandoned by her parents at a young age, and has no friends or anyone to comfort her (aside from Red). Jeez.
  • Just Here for Godzilla:
    • There are quite a fair number of fans who are open to admit that much of their interest in the franchise is largely due to Ashley and not much else. So much so that Nintendo briefly capitalized on her popularity during The New '10s.
    • Many Nintendo fans tend to be drawn to the series due to the Volts, whose microgames are themed around Nintendo and tend to feature references and shoutouts to much of the company's history, including their pre-gaming days.
  • Launcher of a Thousand Ships:
    • Ever since Ashley was introduced in the series, and kind of inevitable due to her popularity, she has been shipped with nearly all the characters in one way or another.
    • Mike has quite a few ships to his name as well, being shipped with Dr. Crygor, Doris 1, Fronk, Penny, and Orbulon, among others.
  • Low-Tier Letdown: 9-Volt and Kat (and by extension, Ana) are near-unanimously considered to be the two most difficult characters to play as in Get It Together! They both have the same issue of automatically moving in ways that the player can't control, with 9-Volt constantly moving left and right on his skateboard, while Kat and Ana constantly bounce up and down, and this nonstop movement makes it cumbersome to control them with any kind of precision. While they have decent projectile attacks, they're difficult to aim since they can't stop moving, and other characters have projectiles that are just as effective, while not having to deal with their limitations. In the Play-O-Pedia, 9-Volt and Kat/Ana have over twenty microgames each where they are considered a Worst Fit, when the majority of the rest of the cast don't even reach double digits.
  • Memetic Mutation:
    • Jimmy T's "Body Rock" song from D.I.Y. has become memetic in the SiIvaGunner community.
    • Intro from Gold:
      • "It's pizza time"Explanation
      • Wario calling peopleExplanation
    • "I have granted kids to hell"Explanation
    • Gold's Studio mode gets use in creating ridiculous gag dubs, with Orbulon's intro (where he goes through a fast food drive-thru) and 5-Volt's intro (where she watches an informercial) seeing the most parodies.
    • "Twitter stinks! I'm leaving!"Explanation
    • "MUST RAGE-NAP!"
    • WarioWare: Shove It Up Your Own Ass GameExplanation
  • Moe:
    • Kat and Ana qualify, being preschooler ninjas.
    • Ashley, especially after her redesign in Game and Wario. Both her initial and newer designs also qualify as Creepy Cute.
    • Penny as well, since she embodies the Adorkable aesthestic.
    • Orbulon became a case of this thanks to his Gold redesign, as he went from a weird bowling pin-like alien to something far more huggable. It helps that he now always rides a cute, miniature version of his ship.
    • 9-Volt, who also counts as Adorkable.
  • Most Wonderful Sound:
    • Smooth Moves has two pretty good ones: the 1-UP jingle and the Victory theme. Even its Game Over variant has a rather triumphant vibe to it.
    • Orbulon's laugh in Gold sounds quite adorable.
    • Ana's voice in Gold isn't without its fans, who think she just sounds outright adorable.
    • Some of the character voice clips in Get It Together!, like Mona going "beep-beep!" or Mike scatting.
  • My Real Daddy: Nintendo employee Koichi Kawamoto created the "Sound Bomber" mode in Mario Artist Polygon Studio that was the basis for the series and thus is sometimes refered to as "the creator of WarioWare" in official interviews, although he's not actually been involved in the series proper beside "Concept" and "Prototype" credits for his work on Polygon Studio. While Hirofumi Matsuoka directed the original game, fans usually see Goro Abe as the true creative lead of the series as he was heavily involved in the development of the original game and directed most of the sequels.
  • Older Than They Think:
    • WarioWare had its first incarnation (sans Wario) as part of a mini game in Mario Artist: Polygon Studio for the ill-fated 64DD. Watch a clip of it here.
    • Wario's Denser and Wackier portrayal has existed in Japanese long before WarioWare's creation.
    • This isn't the first time Wario is shown to have a group of lackies who work with him, as both Super Mario Land 2: 6 Golden Coins and Wario's Woods both have groups of characters that work with him in order to fight off Mario and Toad respectively. Coincidentally enough, the SNES version of the latter game featured a young witch as one of the opponents working for Wario named Sarissa, who is shown to have a personality remarkably similar to Ashley's.
    • This is not the first time Wario has ridden a motorcycle as his main method of transportation, as he also rode a motorcycle in the ending of the Bomberman spin-off Wario Blast.
  • One-Scene Wonder:
    • The angel and devil girls from the Sort It Out microgame have become unexpectedly popular amongst the fandom, due to their adorable designs.
    • Orbulon's dad, Papa Orb, who is one of the few things known about Orbulon's own alien background, yet he only appears very briefly during his son's memory recollection sequence in Move It!.
    • The pink-haired girl from the Move It! microgame De-Stocking has garnered quite a bit of attention, in part because of her Animesque appearance, but mainly because of the absurd juxtaposition with the disclaimer "Do not actually put stockings on your head."
  • Popular with Furries: Dribble and Spitz are somewhat popular with the furry fandom, being the most prominent Funny Animal characters in the game.
  • Portmanteau Couple Name: The series has a couple, such as Warmona (Wario/Mona), Ashenny (Ashley/Penny), and Mikulon (Orbulon/Mike).
  • Quirky Work: The plots and microgames are often varying degrees of strange. It has steadily decreased over time, as much like its parent series, the strangeness has become completely commonplace and people are used to it by this point.
  • Scrappy Mechanic:
    • The objective of Listen to the Doctor from Mega Party Game$. You're instructed to physically do something stupid OUTSIDE of the game, and there's nothing stopping the other players from refusing to applaud you and thus denying you any points. There's a reason that very few multiplayer video games are reliant on the honor system.
    • Blowing into the mic in Touched is somewhat clumsily implemented, especially since background noise can very easily screw you over if you're playing on an original DS, DS Lite, or DSi. Playing on the 3DS has the opposite issue: its microphone's not nearly as good at picking up sound, forcing you to blow to the point of lightheadedness in some cases. Fortunately, it works fairly well in Gold and there are not many microgames that use it heavily anyway.
    • Snapped was a Tech-Demo Game for the DSi's frontal camera, and while it does work, it requires significant setup and good lighting for the camera to recognize the player. The recognition process has to be repeated for each microgame in a set, too.
    • While Smooth Moves' motion controls work quite well overall, especially for an early Wii game, they still have aged in a few ways, namely the reliance on keeping the Wii Remote level with the Sensor Bar (which is difficult for people who are tall and/or can't place it above the TV), and the tendency to bug out with some movements.
    • In Move It!, any of the forms that require the use of the straps. They are among the least responsive in the game, and if you don't have the straps, you're shit out of luck. These also require you to break Grip Hold that almost all microgames use and can be tricky to quickly get back in position before the next microgame starts. The "Pounce" form in particular also requires a perfectly flat surface to work, so that's already two additional requirements besides the Joy-cons that can be completely out of the player's abilities.
  • Self-Fanservice:
    • The main female characters often find themselves on the Rule 34 chopping block, with Mona being a fan-favorite among R34 artists, and 5-Volt surpassing her R34 popularity following her redesign in Gold. Even Penny Crygor and Ashley have some fans who make them older and more attractive than they are in canon.
    • On the male side of things, Dribble is a target of this due to filling a niche in Bara Genre artwork. His Stout Strength design often gets exaggerated with the addition of thicker muscle definition in his arms and chest. This oftentimes gets pushed into Big Beautiful Man territory with the addition of a thicker belly. Wario oftentimes gets the same treatment with Bara artists often playing it up even harder with him due to him already being established as being fat and muscular in equal measure.
  • Sequel Difficulty Drop: The first game isn't that hard to begin with, but Touched! is nevertheless considerably easier, since the touch controls mean that most microgames can be won by simply swiping back and forth across the screen.
  • Sequelitis: Snapped isn't remembered fondly by most fans, due to lacking the replay value of past titles (only four sets of five microgames each, and since high scores aren't kept there's no penalty for failing them), completely lacking any rewards or unlockables of any sort, and the DSi camera gimmicks being fairly finicky.
  • Ships That Pass in the Night:
    • Ashley/Penny has become a popular pairing for the two, with many fans liking the contrast between them in regards to personality and skillset (Ashley being a reserved witch, Penny being a cheerful scientist). This is in spite of the two having only having interacted once in the entire franchise (which was a rather minor one on the Japanese-exclusive Smooth Moves Character Blog), with their relationship being unknown outside of being co-workers. Later, Move It! would portray the two creating potions together alongside Dr. Crygor.
    • Ashley and Young Cricket don't even interact at all in any official media, only being shown on screen together at the very most. That doesn't stop it from being a popular pair anyway, especially on the Japanese side of the fandom. It helps that the two do wear contrasting colored outfits (Ashley wears Red, Cricket wears Blue) and that although different, are similar in some aspects (both are apprentices, both are big eaters, etc), both of which makes it an appealing pair for shippers.
    • Orbulon/Mike became a surprisingly popular pairing after Gold. Despite their lack of interactions, on top of one being an alien and the other being a robot.
    • Kat/9-Volt is one of the most widespread and popular ships in the fandom, in spite of the two having little to no proper interactions in the games. They do interact briefly in the diary entries on Mega Microgame$' Japanese website and it's heavily implied in the aforementioned diary entries and in Mega Party Game$ that 9-Volt is friends with both her and Ana, but there's nothing between the two that suggest that they're closer than just friends who hang out on occasion.
  • Shocking Moments:
    • Wario's Deluxe transformation is one, as it is the first time where Wario's villainy is outright acknowledged and spotlighted in a series where he is traditionally just a big jerk at worst. It's also the first time the series dabbles with having an actual Big Bad figure instead of the usual No Antagonist Random Events Plot routine.
    • Given how the Wario Land series has been dormant for years, with WarioWare deviating from its roots tied to that series, few could've expected that Move It! would finally tap into the series again by bringing back, of all characters, Cractus from Wario Land 4 as part of Kat and Ana's story.
    • While WarioWare featuring microgames based on other Nintendo games has become a standout element of the franchise, the series has always stuck to pulling from games developed by Nintendo and Intelligent Systems, the developers of the WarioWare series, or subsidiaries of Nintendo like Retro Studios. So when Move It! broke this streak by featuring a microgame based on, of all games, Mario Pinball Land, it was surprising in the sense that it deviated from tradition (with Pinball Land being credited to Fuse Games) and because it was for an otherwise forgotten GBA spinoff with middling reception. (A few other microgames in the series have been based on games with significant development contributions from other companies, like Fire Emblem: Three Houses, Metroid Dread, and Wii Play: Motion, but either Nintendo or Intelligent Systems are always credited for at least some of the development in those cases, while Fuse Games is listed as the sole developer of Mario Pinball Land.)
    • Cicada's reveal is rather surprising since this is a character whose existence seemingly only ever amounted to a minor detail in Young Cricket's backstory, and mostly to tie him further with Rhythm Heaven Fever.
  • Sidetracked by the Gold Saucer: Despite being a game already composed of microgames, some of the side things you can unlock can easily sway you away from the arguably main task of completing all the microgame gauntlets:
    • The first game has "Dr. Wario". Given that it's a fully playable bootleg version of Dr. Mario, its addictive properties should come as no surprise.
    • It's no surprise that Pyoro was such a huge hit In-Universe, given that it's a pretty distracting minigame.
    • Touched has the Orbit Ball minigame. It's essentially an Endless version of Kat and Ana's boss microgame, where you draw trampolines to keep a ball in the air.
    • The first game has a simple jump rope minigame called "Jump Forever", where the goal is to jump successfully as many times as you can without tripping on the rope.
    • The unlockable minigame "Pumpkin Panic" in Gold received plenty of attention and is pretty addictive. The fact that it stars Ashley helps a lot, too.
    • People who enjoy gag dubbing can easily spend a few hours in Gold's Studio.
  • Signature Scene: The Gold Digger microgame. It’s a perfect example of WarioWare’s small yet quick action, different brand of humor compared to other Nintendo games, and appears in most games, even the odd game out Game & Wario.
  • So Okay, It's Average: This sums up the reception to Game & Wario. While it's not considered to be a bad game and is widely agreed to have its fair share of fun moments throughout, most of the minigames that make up the game are generally regarded as being forgettable and generic compared to past games. Many are also disappointed about the series' iconic microgames being relegated to only appearing in one mode (Gamer).
  • Spiritual Successor:
    • Super Mario Maker to WarioWare D.I.Y.. Both involve making your own short games for others to play. D.I.Y., interestingly enough, is itself seen as a Spiritual Successor to Mario Paint as well.
    • WarioWare itself is the spiritual successor to Sound Bomber from Mario Artist: Polygon Maker, as the basic concept of microgames and even some of the games were taken directly from it.
    • The franchise could act as one to the Game & Watch franchise. Like the Game & Watch games, most of the WarioWare titles are simple and easy to pick up and play games that have you do a simple task over and over again at increasingly faster speeds and difficulty in order to get the highest score, only ending after you lose your lives. The only major difference is that WarioWare throws hundreds of tasks at you to do one after another in seconds, whereas Game & Watch has you do one throughout. Many of the optional minigames in the franchise also tend to directly evoke the Game & Watch titles (Gold even has one of them as one of its minigames). Game & Wario (as the title suggests) even takes direct inspiration from them.
  • Squick: The reveal in Gold's final stage that Wario's crown is actually a chamberpot.
  • Starboarding: Though many fans do ship Mona and Wario, there are plenty of others who simply find Mona's Precocious Crush on him cute without having it be reciprocated, especially given the vaguely-defined age gap between them.note 
  • Surprisingly Improved Sequel: While Game & Wario was considered a decent game in its own right, it has proven to be divisive among fans for breaking away from what made WarioWare what it is to be what fans consider just another generic minigame collection. Its poor sales also nearly put the series in a coffin, as there wasn't another game from the series until WarioWare Gold in 2018, which was warmly received as a return to form, with new full voice acting and lots of bonus gameplay content.
  • Suspiciously Similar Song:
    • "The Frog Flap", Kat and Ana's boss stage in the first game as well as one of Dribble & Spitz's games in Gold, has music similar to "Music, Music, Music" by Teresa Brewer.
    • "Electric Groove Fish", a microgame from Mega Microgame$!, features music resembling the theme from The Addams Family.
    • Mike's Song from WarioWare: Touched! has almost the exact beat from the chorus to "Greased Lightning" from Grease. It's also been compared to "Bunny Hop" from Rhythm Heaven.
    • The music for "Sloppy Salon" in WarioWare Gold bears a strong resemblance to the title screen/file select tracks from Paper Mario 64. Not too surprising, as Intelligent Systems is one of the main developers of both series.
  • That One Achievement:
    • Both of the missions for Cruise Controls:
      • The Cruise Controller achievement requires you to beat the game in just 65 seconds. That may not sound so bad, but to pull it off, you would need to be at top speed for almost the entire run, without making more than a single mistake.
      • "Punctual Person": You have to complete the game in two minutes on the nose. Doing so requires a near-perfect balance of speed; going too fast or two slow for even a second or two can completely throw off your timing and cause you to miss the mark. It's not uncommon to beat the game a single second over or under the two minute mark.
    • The mission for the Sneaky Snatcher game, "Neighborhood Watch", has you identify the culprit in the first 5 seconds of gameplay. What this mostly amounts to is to make a blind guess and hope for the best.
    • All of the missions related to Wario Kard:
      • "Serious Card Collector": Getting all 147 cards is one hell of a Luck-Based Mission. Have fun grinding coins for literal days trying to get that single A-rank card you still don't have!
      • "Card vs. Kard", "The Ringer", and "Card Sharp", which require you to defeat 50, 100, and 200 enemies respectively in Wario Kard. The first dozen or so aren't too difficult once you've got a handle on how the game works, but later enemies throw such ridiculous restrictions on you (have fun trying to defeat a 3800 HP enemy both down a card in your hand and without using A-rank cards!) that the only conceivable way to beat them is to keep shoving coins into the Shufflers and hoping you can boost the cards you need. But that's not all! There are only 81 unique enemies in the game. Once you've defeated them all, you cycle through the same enemies again... with 150% HP. Beat them, and you the foes you'll have to go up against have double HP!
  • That One Attack:
    • From Jimmy's "Punch Out" boss microgame from Mega Microgame$!. Your opponent performs a special punch on Levels 2 and 3 that KO's your fighter if you don't dodge it, handing you an instant loss. On 2, your opponent only does this when he's down to his last hit point. On 3, your opponent does this at any time, and always when he has one hit point left.
    • Admit it. You hit the Psycho Electric Eel the first time you faced the Octoblocker (the first boss) in Move It!. It's not often that WarioWare employs such a cheap trick, let alone in the goddamned tutorial boss.
  • That One Boss:
    • Dribble and Spitz's boss microgame from Twisted, named "Basic Training". You must violently shake the system in order to outrun a boulder, while jumping over obstacles and holes. If you can see anything on the screen, you're not shaking it fast enough to outrun the boulder. Nearly unplayable on level 2 or higher. It returns in Gold, but is substantially easier because the graphics are better, there are no holes, and you race other railcars instead of having to outpace a boulder.
    • Wario-Man's boss microgame from Twisted, "Wario Mambo", can be summed up in one sentence: "Wait, the timing is THAT strict?!". You simply have to copy the moves shown to you, but if you mistime your movements even slightly, you lose a life immediately. You pretty much have to start moving from the moment the game finishes counting you in. Good luck keeping track of all the different commands flying your way on higher difficulties with this in mind.
    • Jimmy's boss microgame in Touched!, "Rainbow Juice", which involves filling up an anthropomorphic bucket with rainbow droplets. While the first level can be done relatively fast, the second level gives the bucket a lid, which will periodically close for a few seconds, stopping any droplets from actually going in the bucket. But the third level really takes the cake, as not only does the lid close a lot more frequently, but the droplets fall very slowly. And that's not taking into account the bucket's unpredictable pattern of movement. Even worse, the bucket moves faster and faster as it fills, and if any droplets miss the bucket, they will start forming dunes below it. Miss too much and the dunes will grow tall enough to trip the bucket and cost you the game.
    • Ashley's boss microgame in Touched!, named "Global Warning", in which you have to navigate a Bullet Hell of a level with tiny bullets flying at you near-constantly, and that's ignoring the giant meteors coming down. One hit, you're dead. No exceptions.
    • The Gold incarnation of "Crossing Guard" is a lot worse than it was in Twisted; even on the first difficulty level, the game is a lot slower paced than it originally was, and the speedier ostriches are present from the start. The second level brings in even faster horseback riders and has you managing two separate bridges. The third level sticks with two bridges, but adds walking bombs that need to be dropped in the water before they reach the other side. On every level, even one mistake ends the game. This is Ashley's boss microgame, meaning that it's the first non-tutorial Twist boss you have to contend with; none of the later ones ("Basic Training", "Super Mario Bros.", and "Toilet Training") are as hard as it.
    • Penny's remake of Toilet Training in Gold is very different than it is in Smooth Moves making it considerably more difficult. For one, you're in a movie theatre, so everyone is seated, they then leap up from their seats with very little warning. Secondly, the people are in different rows in the seats, making it very possible for two people to come at you at almost the same time, giving you very little room for error. Finally, unlike in Smooth Moves where people would start at the same point then leap offscreen or fall down, the people in the theatre only pause with very little warning for when they're going to do it, making you have to rely on reflexes to ensure you don't accidentally send a person over to the wrong side.
    • Kat and Ana's boss in Gold, "Top Notch", is this in spades. The premise is that you have to assemble ingredients on a plate and then squirt ketchup on it at the very end in order to match the example dish given as closely as possible, with the margin of error tightening with each level. Passing this game even at level 1 is difficult enough due to how picky the game is about your placement: having even one of the ingredients even a few pixels off is likely to set you back several points, and the mistakes stack up. But things get even worse in the two levels that follow, which not only have more numerous and complex ingredients to place and a higher accuracy requirement, but also throw in dummy ingredients that aren't included in the example dish. Slip up and put even one in your dish, and it's pretty much an instant failure. It also has That One Mission, which requires you to get 85% accuracy when even breaking 80% is a nigh-impossible feat. And, to top everything off, it has the same problem as "Crossing Guard", in that it's the first non-tutorial boss in the Touch League, with the following two bosses ("Clawing for More", "Pro Bowling") being nowhere near as difficult. Those who don't have an impeccable eye for detail are fat out of luck. Given the duo's dialogue before the microgame starts, it's safe to say that it's perfect for the kind of microgame it is.
      Kat and Ana (in unison): Good luck out there!
    • On the other side of the coin, Orbulon's boss microgame, "Sneaky Snatcher" has you identify which of the many characters on screen stole a certain item, with three or four clue photographs to help out. Now for the issues: you only get 40 seconds to identify the criminal, not all of the clues are revealed until a couple of your precious seconds have already passed, there can be many characters with the same clothes, hairstyle and face, and if you run out of time or accuse the wrong character you automatically lose.
    • Mona's boss microgame in Move It!, "Candle Bear", is surprisingly complex for that point in the game (her stage is the second one). It involves keeping a pair of candles lit as a bunch of ants attempt to put them out with various water attacks (if both candles die out, it's game over) and you must successfully light up a cannon that has a frozen fuse in order to win. This is actually a pretty long, tiresome endeavor, and it's not immediately obvious that you can relight a non-lit candle by connecting it with the still lit one. The ants are also incredibly aggressive even in the lowest difficulty, and their patterns are not as simple to dodge as you would expect from such an early boss.
    • Ashley's boss microgame from Move It! (Flight of Icarus) has been very often criticized for its straining length and gratuitous employment of Fake Difficulty. The "Scales" pose is not the most adequate to hold for long periods of time and out-of-shape players can have a lot of trouble maintaining it for what's essentially a minute-long narrow course filled with random speed-ups, annoying obstacles and janky controls.
    • Jimmy T.'s boss microgame from Move It!, "Griddlebot", has the problematic combination of being long and using the Pounce pose. If you don't like crouching down for long periods and don't happen to have easy access to a flat surface at standing level, this microgame will be absolute hell. And you will have to suffer, as the motion controls on this microgame can be spotty, so deviating in any way from what the game expects you to do for the sake of comfort will render this microgame nigh unplayable.
  • That One Level: See here.
  • They Changed It, Now It Sucks!:
    • The art style that was used in Game and Wario was not well-received by some fans, due to Ko Takeuchi abandoning the Mario-esque but distinctive style from past games in favor of using Rhythm Heaven's artstyle, which some have accused of being derivative and felt didn't fit the series' cast compared to the previous artstyle.
    • While the art style change for Gold was much better received than Game & Wario's (as it looks more distinct from Rhythm Heaven's style), some fans didn't take kindly to the drastic shift in style due to certain changes made to the characters from previous games (such as Orbulon being far shorter and stubbier or the character's eye colors getting changed around).
    • While the voice acting in Gold was largely well recieved by most, several fans are disappointed that Nintendo replaced the cast from previous games (bar Wario, who like always, is played by Charles Martinet) in favor of professional voice actors. Some fans also despise the full voice acting period, preferring the Voice Grunting from previous games. Other fans are indifferent to it altogether, other than Wario's performance in Gold thanks to his Awesome Ego portrayed by Charles Martinet at his finest.
    • 9-Volt's boss microgame from "Move It!" is based on Super Mario 64 DS, but has Mario's voice clips redubbed by Kevin Afghani. This made a number of Charles Martinet's fans unhappy, out of a belief that audio from the original game could have been recycled.
  • They Wasted a Perfectly Good Character:
    • Some fans felt disappointed that Captain Syrup from Wario Land didn't show up or even get referenced in Wario's final stage in Game & Wario, despite the stage having a pirate aesthetic to it.
    • Vanessa from Touched! is presented as being The Rival to Mona, which has a lot of potential for fun stories, especially since Vanessa herself is shown to have some Large Ham tendencies (such as blowing up in anger when she finds outs she’s number two), however she is never acknowledged at all again after Touched!.
    • Jimmy's family could have made for endearing and fun characters and they're very well liked by fans, unfortunately, unlike later relatives such as Penny Crygor and 5-Volt, they would disappear from the franchise after Touched!, only getting a cameo in Jimmy T's character trailer for Gold.
  • They Wasted a Perfectly Good Plot:
    • One would think the series would delve a bit into how Wario became friends with his employees to begin with. However, outside of Jimmy T. being a rumored childhood friend of Wario's and Orbulon having met Wario by crashing into his house, most of their backstories are never delved into and it's never explained as to how Wario came across most of them or how they became his friends.
    • The premise for Snapped! revolves around Wario opening a theme park, with the crew members hosting attractions, which is a great idea and one that is perfect for a series like WarioWare, given the many opportunities the idea brings. Just too bad the premise is wasted on the most barebones game in the franchise, which doesn’t even use the idea to its full potential, only using it as an Excuse Plot in its introduction.
    • Crazy Galaxy as a whole is regarded as this. The idea behind the concept was that it would be an spin-off of WarioWare starring an older Ashley, which would've had her, plus four other girls, sent to space by accident, with the objective being to get back home, while either fighting or befriending numerous aliens along the way. The idea is generally meant to be nothing but an April Fools' Day hoax by the Nintendo Badge Arcade, however many fans quickly became attached to the fake game, with many finding the concept to be cool and expressing disappointment that it was wasted on a hoax. This has led to many fans wanting the game to be real or at the very least, wanting to see its ideas and characters be integrated into the WarioWare franchise proper.
      • In general over the years, there has been plenty of demand for a game focused on Ashley more then any other character, rather it be the aforementioned Crazy Galaxy or something in lieu of a Metroidvania for any new Nintendo system. While Ashley still appears in her home series to this day, many wonder about why she has never gotten a game to herself despite her Breakout Character status and fan following.
  • This Is Your Premise on Drugs: It's a minigame collection, on crack.
  • Trans Audience Interpretation:
    • Due to Orbulon being a male alien whose human form tends to be a woman, some fans have interpreted him as being gender-fluid or non-binary.
    • Penny is often interpreted as being a trans girl in many fan headcanons, particularly due to having a tomboyish voice from Gold and beyond and making the tonally transformative elixir in Gold.
  • Unexpected Character:
    • Given that 5-Volt was originally just a minor character who acted as The Ghost early on, before disappearing outright, her sudden comeback and prominence in Game & Wario definitely took some by surprise. Her becoming promoted to a main character starting with Gold was also not expected by fans.
    • The cameo of Jimmy's family and Jimmy P. in Jimmy T.'s Character PV trailer for Gold surprised several fans since his family and Jimmy P. have been largely ignored and Put on a Bus after Touched and Smooth Moves respectively.
    • Given that the form hasn't been acknowledged since Mega Party Game$, the return of Orbulon's human female form in the "Meet Orbulon and Dribble & Spitz" character PV came as a bit of a surprise for fans.
    • Many were not expecting to see Kung Fu Girl from Rhythm Heaven Fever (later named Cicada in Move It!) in Young Cricket's character trailer, confirming the fan theory that the boy in the Kung Fu Ball minigame is actually a younger Cricket.
    • Considering how the games tend to avoid direct references to Wario Land beyond easily missable cameos, no one expected Cractus, one of the bosses in Wario Land 4, to appear as a secondary character in Move It!.
  • Unintentional Period Piece: The first game features a lot of early 2000s tech such as the flip-phone and old school computers.
  • Values Dissonance: Twisted! has a souvenir called "Fortune Cookie", which is exactly what it is. While most of the fortunes are traditional symbols of good and bad luck (such as "Four-Leaf Clover" and "Broken Mirror", respectively), one of them, "Black Cat", is actually considered "Good Luck" by the souvenir, albeit at the lowest level of the "Good Luck" charms. This may confuse most players (or at least be brushed off as a comedic mismatch), as black cats are widely associated with misfortune in most countries, but it makes more sense to a Japanese player, as black cats are viewed the opposite way in Japan.
  • Win Back the Crowd: Although Game & Wario was marketed as a Gaiden Game, it managed to sour many on the WarioWare series and caused many to believe that the series was over due to a lack of ideas. Fortunately, Gold managed to win back these fans by being a massive compilation of both old and new microgames using a mix of buttons, motion control, and the touchscreen, all coupled with some great voice acting for the cast (an incredible rarity for an extended Mario universe title) and a massive slew of bonus content.
  • Woolseyism:
    • The techniques in Smooth Moves have completely different names (and meanings) in Japanese and English, and they all make sense in the English translation. ('Tengu' becomes 'Elephant', 'Mawaryanse' note  to 'Chauffeur', etc.) A full list can be found here.
    • In the European Spanish version of Gold, "18 x 13" is written using a bunch of Spanish slang expressions. It fits very well for an impromptu rap battle between two teenagers.
    • The Japanese version of "Mike's Song" is just the same few words repeated over and over again, sung by Sal Out. The English version actually has a full song's worth of lyrics and is sung by Mike himself.
    • The English version of "Ashley's Song" changes the lyrics to be more about how wicked and scary she is, with a little Black Comedy added in ("I turned my teacher into a spoon"), as opposed to being simply about how amazing she is like it was in the Japanese version. While the Japanese version is not bad, many feel the English lyrics are a lot catchier, goes better with the spooky Pinky and the Brain-esque tone of the song and fits better with Ashley's overall character than the Japanese lyrics do.
    • The English localization pretty much did its own thing with "Megagame Muscles" in Move It!, and both versions are equally as funny. Where the Japanese version features a singer scatting increasingly frantic variants of niku-niku-niku-macho (literally "muscle-muscle-muscle-macho"), the English version has Mr. Sparkles coach you like a personal trainer, including a particularly hilarious moment where he bellows "EVERY DAY IS LEG DAAAAAAY!"

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