Video Game / Wario Land 4

"Now, work it! WORK IT!"

"Hello there!"

— The beginning of Palm Tree Paradise

Wario Land 4 (Wario Land Advance: The Treasure of the Golden Diva in Japanese) is the fourth game in the Wario Land series (not counting Virtual Boy Wario Land), originally released in 2001 for the Game Boy Advance.

Much like the other games in the series, the plot is primarily driven by Wario's greed: he finds out that a golden pyramid has been unearthed, and with the sight of gold in his eyes, he storms off to find it. When he does go into it, he jumps into a large hole and finds himself trapped in the pyramid. Now, the only way out is to conquer the paintings found in the four corridors of the area, with a boss lurking behind each one, before finally fighting the one behind all this. And there's a strange black cat that seems to come and go when you least expect it...

After Wario Land II and Wario Land 3 played fairly similar to each other, this entry features another gameplay shake-up for the series — while Wario still has his unique transformations, he now has a life meter, and thus can die much as he could in Wario Land: Super Mario Land 3. There are no lives, though — you're simply kicked out of the level without any of the money or bonuses you found in it.

Wario Land 4 was given a limited rerelease for Ambassadors on the Nintendo 3DS, and later released publicly on the Wii U Virtual Console and available until its shutdown in March 2023.

The game was the first job for many new Nintendo hires who would go on to create the WarioWare series (which would debut in 2003 with WarioWare, Inc.: Mega Microgame$), carrying over the game's unique style as well as some recycled sound effect and background tracks. The Wario Land 4 engine would later be repurposed for Metroid Fusion and Metroid: Zero Mission, and unused areas in both games feature assets from this game. Princess Shokora would later appear as a Spirit in Super Smash Bros. Ultimate while Cractus pops up in Kat and Ana's stage in WarioWare: Move It!

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This game provides examples of

• Absurdly Spacious Sewer: Several of them — two in Crescent Moon Village, one in Arabian Nights, and one in the Golden Passage.
• Acrofatic: Wario is quite a bit more mobile now thanks to the supercharge move. It's quite appropriate, then, that he has this new movement option for the game's timed level exits.
• Advanced Movement Technique:
  • Like in previous Wario Land games, pressing down while dashing has Wario crouch and skid across the floor. This trick allows him to bypass small corridors more quickly.
  • Wario can jump at any time during the running start of a super dash. While in the air, he maintains the momentum he's gathered before liftoff, all without transitioning into a full dash. Consistently jumping the moment he lands back on the ground keeps Wario's controls unrestricted, allowing him to stop on a dime when necessary, while still maintaining a respectable speed.
  • If the player has committed to a full super dash, a sliding animation plays when the attack ends, and the player won't regain control over Wario until he stops. However, the player can cancel the sliding animation by continuing to hold the direction Wario was facing. Instead of sliding forward, Wario immediately goes into his walking animation, thus allowing the player to follow up with whatever they please.
  • With some tricky button inputs, Wario can jump off an object he's lightly tossed up in the air. By doing this, he can reach considerable heights, nearly touching the top of the screen. The trick can be used for some nifty Sequence Breaking.
• A.I. Breaker: Cractus can be stun-locked to death by repeatedly ground-pounding his head as quickly as possible before he ascends offscreen.
• Always Night: Crescent Moon Village, Arabian Night, and Hotel Horror all take place sometime in the night. Interestingly, Crescent Moon Village seems to contain Hotel Horror, as the balcony in the latter reveals a similar town in the background — the moon is even exactly the same.
• Anti-Frustration Features:
  • Because the levels tend to be rather long and have to be beaten in one sitting to get the treasures, the game comes with a save state option on the pause screen, which allows you to save your game at the exact last spot you were at, then return to the title screen and shut off the game safely, so you can pick up where you left off later in a case where you're tired or have to stop playing.
  • Because the boss fights have time limits and you can lose the best ending if you don't get all three treasures by taking too long in them, the game gives an item shop before each fight, which you can use to knock off as many as ten hit points before a fight, in exchange for some minigame medals. This is especially helpful in Hard Mode.
  • Also, beating the Golden Diva without all the treasures will respawn all the bosses (but keep all the levels beaten and the items you got in them) when you go back to your save file, giving a player a second shot at getting all the treasures again.
• "Arabian Nights" Days: Arabian Night, a haunted Arabian town that exhibits noticeable verticality. Thus, magic carpets are necessary to traverse its buildings.
• Art Course: The third Topaz Passage level is Doodle Woods, an area made of childlike drawings and art supplies, some of which serve as obstacles. Its main resident is Hoggus, a ghost of a pig artist who constantly pesters Wario with his living drawings. Some background drawings of ballerina pigs (presumably Hoggus' work) can also come to life in the level's indoor segments.
• Art Initiates Life: The main setpiece of Doodle Woods is Hoggus, who roams the outdoor areas of the level and draws enemies to attack Wario. Depending on where Hoggus is encountered, his living drawings can be either a hindrance or a component in a puzzle.
• Ascend to a Higher Plane of Existence: In the ending, Princess Shokora is escorted by four angels into the afterlife, having finally been freed of the Golden Diva's curse to rest in peace at last.
• Autobots, Rock Out!: The Toxic Landfill's theme music, which uses some intense guitar samples. It's befitting for the level that contains the most breakable blocks in the game, hidden or otherwise; there's a lot of destruction to be done to get by.
• Bifauxnen: Princess Shokora, if you beat the Final Boss with all 12 treasures.
• Big Boo's Haunt: The main theme of Sapphire Passage (although Fiery Cavern is different from the other levels in the Sapphire Passage ^*Then again, it is based on Hell.).
• Bookends: The game's intro shows a cat (specifically, Princess Shokora's cat form) narrowly avoiding being run over by Wario before a newspaper flies into its face. The final scene of the ending shows the same thing happen to a different cat - the main difference being that the newspaper is advertising all you can eat steak.
• Boss-Arena Idiocy: Most bosses in the game avert this, many of them falling under Tactical Suicide Boss instead, but it's played straight by Cractus, whose room has vines Wario can climb to pounce on the boss's head. Without them, Wario wouldn't be able to hit Cractus.
• Boss Arena Urgency: In the final phase of the last boss fight, the boss starts ground pounding the floor leaving spikes in their place. If you don't beat the boss quickly you'll have no room to stand.
• Boss Corridor: Every boss has a short hallway preceeding the door to the room where the battle is held. The only thing of note is the shop which will let you buy items to start the fight with some extra damage dealt.
• Boss-Only Level: Every boss is isolated from the stages. Once their lairs are unlocked, the only thing keeping Wario from fighting them right away is a hallway containing a weapons shop.
• Branch-and-Bottleneck Plot Structure: After completing the Entry Passage, the rest of the main room opens up, allowing you to tackle the sixteen stages of the next four Passages in any order you want. All that matters is that you defeat the bosses at the end of each one to unlock the final area, the Golden Pyramid.
• Brutish Character, Brutish Weapon: Malicious ghost enemies, the Men'ono charge after Wario in an attempt to slash him with their hatchets. A similar mummy enemy called Onomi, appearing in Arabian Night, behaves the same way.
• The Cameo:
  • Mr. Game and Watch appears as the shopkeeper for the item store (except not, it's actually Princess Shokora in disguise).
  • Dr. Scienstein of For the Frog the Bell Tolls appears again from the previous game. This time, he's an archaeological explorer implied to be responsible for the Golden Pyramid's excavation. He can be found getting lost in the hub and in the levels' bonus rooms, where he serves as a convenient projectile for certain puzzles.
• Camera Abuse: If you run out of time and money when the Frog Switch has been activated, the game throws in a little extra humiliation for Wario by throwing him face-first into the screen, with him slowly falling out of view before the scene transitions back to the map.
• Cap: The coin counter maxes out at 999990. Since all the coins and crystals in the game come in multiples of ten, it's clear that the extra zero is only there to give Wario's adventure more worth.
• Cast from Money: If you run out of time during the escape sequence in a level, it turns monochrome and all of the money Wario collected in the level will start dropping out of him in the form of uncollectable 10-coins, effectively giving you extra time based on how much you grabbed. Run out of that too, and Wario gets kicked out of the level.
• Cheat Code: To unlock Karaoke mode in the Sound Room, which normally requires getting a gold crown in every level, highlight "Exit" and hold Select + Start, + Up + L + R.
• Clipped-Wing Angel: After Wario beats her down to her last hit point, the Golden Diva transforms into one final, far weaker form: a quivering pair of lips that scuttle across the floor. They're completely harmless; should they bump into Wario, the lips will immediately dash off to the opposite end of the room. It takes nothing more than a simple shoulder-bash to defeat the Diva in this form for good.
• Collapsing Lair: After Wario defeats the Golden Diva, he, the black cat, and Dr. Scienstein book it out of the pyramid, with Wario carrying whatever treasures he's managed to save up to this point.
• Collision Damage: As with the prior entries, this is zigzagged and Wario can only be damaged by enemies that are actually harmful or dangerous hazards like spikes or magma.
• Company Cross References: Being transported into other worlds and biomes by jumping into paintings? This wasn't done before in a Nintendo game, was it?
• The Computer Shall Taunt You: Cractus's saliva turns Wario into a zombie if it hits him. Should this happen, Cractus will hang down from the top of the screen laughing at you until you touch the firefly to turn back to normal.
• Console Cameo:
  • In the background of Spoiled Rotten's arena, two GameCubes can be seen stacked atop a television, with one turned over to display its top.
  • In one of the credits images, Wario is carrying a box full of Game Boy Advances, with another box near him. The treasure that spawns the image is also a golden GBA.
• Cool Car: The first appearance of Wario's trademark purple car. He also drives this during the end credits on Normal, or a pickup truck on Hard, and even a hovercar on Super-Hard.
• Credits Medley: After the initial credits theme, the player is treated to a medley of remixed level tracks, which varies depending on how much treasure you collected. Notably, for the absolute worst ending, the viewer is initially treated to the Hall of Hieroglphys theme — with lyrics.
• Credits Montage: The ending shows Wario's reminiscing about his various misadventures throughout the Pyramid. Between the flashbacks are some imagine spots of his, regarding what he'll do with his newfound fortune.
• Dash Attack: Wario's signature shoulder-bash returns, but this game introduces a super-charged headbutt variant. After a running start, Wario's dash attack gets a speed and damage boost, allowing him to break strong blue blocks and plow through weak blocks and enemies without canceling the attack. A similar effect is applied to Wario's Ground Pound, provided there's enough vertical distance when the move is initiated.
• Deliberately Monochrome:
  • Collectibles aren't truly earned until you complete a level after grabbing them. They'll appear monochrome on the pause menu until you finish the level with them, only gaining their proper color once you do so.
  • Running out of time during an escape causes the level to turn grayscale as Wario loses coins.
• Dem Bones: The skeleton ghosts, which can turn Wario into a zombie via strange saliva. Counterintuitively, they're only vulnerable once Wario becomes a zombie, during which they become tangible. Touching them as Zombie Wario causes their bodies to shatter, leaving only their now useless wings and apprehensive heads knocked down on the floor. You can touch the discarded head as Zombie Wario to defeat it, or pick it up if you can return to normal form in time.
• Denser and Wackier: The Wario Land games beforehand were offbeat, but 4 kicks the weirdness up a few notches. Unlike the more grounded settings of its predecessors, the game takes place within an ancient pyramid that houses anachronic and surreal worlds to explore within its paintings. The art style is as varied as the locales are, utilizing everything from pre-rendered sprites of real objects or 3D models, to cartoonish aesthetics wherever appropriate. The game's sound design also warps and distorts in response to Wario's actions, to contribute to the atmosphere; his transformations, in particular, cause the background music to shift pitch, change tempo, and warble. Wario's voice is treated similarly, consisting of several smaller voice clips that are combined and played in ways that often sound nonsensical and blatantly artificial.
• Deranged Animation: All of the bosses have weird animations that get more deranged as they lose health, and the Sound Room records have weird pics to go along with them.
• Developer's Foresight: The bombs inside the frog switches will explode if the switch is onscreen when time runs out. In order to see this, you'd have to activate the switch and then just let Wario stand there until it happens.
• Easy Levels, Hard Bosses: Most of the levels are fairly straight forward, but the bosses are no pushovers.
• Easy Level Trick: If Cractus proves to be overwhelming for players going for a straight fight, there is an easy way to beat him. The boss writhes in pain for quite a few seconds once hit. Thus, Wario can stunlock Cractus by camping on the ladders and repeatedly butt-smashing each time Cractus' invincibility frames wear off.
• Eternal Engine: Every level in the Ruby Passage is unified by a broad mechanical theme. The Curious Factory focuses on robot construction, The Toxic Landfill is a massive garbage dump, 40 Below Fridge is an abandoned cold storage facility, and Pinball Zone is a giant pinball machine.
• Exactly What It Says on the Tin: Catbat, a cat ghost with a bat embedded in its head.
• Fat Bastard: Wario, as per usual, to the point where he is able to knock enemies around using his chest fat.
• Flunky Boss: Most of the bosses have at least one type of enemy around to assist them in the fight. Fortunately, some of those enemies are the key to defeating those bosses, such as Cuckoo Condor's eggs, Aerodent's tack soldiers, or everything the Golden Diva summons from her jewelry.
• Forced Transformation: Princess Shokora was transformed into the Black Cat by the Golden Diva after she lost in a magic duel.
• Ghastly Ghost: Quite a few. The Ghost Pirate of Crescent Moon Village, who annoys Wario by swiping loose coins as well as stealing the Keyzer during the escape sequence. There are also the Skeleton birds, who are capable of zombifying Wario by spitting at him. Finally, there is Men'ono, pink axe-wielding Ghosts who charge after Wario on sight and try to hack at him with their hatchets.
• Ghost Pirate: Crescent Moon Village's main gimmick is a large pirate ghost with a Hook Hand. It'll swoop down and nab any stray coins that Wario doesn't pick up, which initially just paints it as a nuisance for those trying for a gold ranking. However, it becomes more threatening during the level's exit sequence: it steals the Keyzer! And as long as he has it, Wario cannot progress; the village doorways lock up as the ghost taunts Wario with the Keyzer.
• Glass Smack and Slide: If you take too long to get out of a level during the escape sequence, you'll start to lose the coins you collected throughout the level. If you lose all the coins you collected, the game will force you out of the level this way, and you must start over.
• Gonk:
  • Princess Shokora looks remarkably like a gender-swapped Wario if you have only a few treasures left after the Final Boss fight.
  • The Golden Diva is pretty hideous, with grotesquely exaggerated features and a disproportionately large, cylindrical head. She doesn't do the best job of hiding her face, as the mask she wears is grossly undersized.
• Green Hill Zone: The entire theme of Emerald Passage is this, mixed with Jungle Japes (except Wildflower Fields, which is just a normal grassland). As it features the easiest set of levels in the game, they are all nature-themed.
• Grimy Water: The Toxic Landfill features a gross-looking but non-lethal variant of this; it's functionally no different from the other bodies of water found throughout the game.
• Gross-Up Close-Up:
  • When you fight and damage the bosses long enough, except Spoiled Rotten, who's gross for half of the battle.
  • The Wario Princess kissing Wario himself in the game's "second" worst ending.
• Ground Pound: One of Wario's moves. If you jump from a high-enough place, Wario's Ground Pound turns into a Super Ground Pound, able to smash through even ultra-hard blue boulders.
• Guide Dang It!: The Golden Diva has multiple attacks, each of which has a different method that Wario has to use to hurt her. One attack involves a hammer being thrown at you. You have to throw it upwards and then move so that it lands on Wario, turning him into Spring Wario, which allows him to smash into the Diva's mask. The game gives little indication that you're supposed to do this - it assumes the player will remember that hammers are used by the enemies that can turn you into Spring Wario - and the player may even assume you're supposed to throw it at the Diva (which won't remotely harm her).
• Hailfire Peaks:
  • A three-fold example: Fiery Cavern starts out as a Lethal Lava Land/Underground Level, but turns into a Slippy-Slidey Ice World when you hit the Frog Switch.
  • There's also 40 Below Fridge, which mixes Slippy-Slidey Ice World with Eternal Engine.
• Harder Than Hard: Super Hard mode, which starts off Wario with one hit point, adds large amounts of enemies, hides most of the needed treasures, and gives a lot less time for the level escapes and bosses. To let you know how hard it is, you are given fifteen seconds to beat the first boss. Said boss is the easiest boss in the game, yes, but on Super Hard it easily becomes much more difficult. You have literally NO margin for error of any kind; as soon as you are able, you Attack! Attack! Attack! and don't let up for any reason.
• Hearts Are Health: Wario's health is denoted in the HUD with a series of eight hearts. They can either be filled up with more hearts strewn about the levels, or the small red orbs dropped by enemies. These orbs fill up a secondary bar on the UI; collecting enough of them will fill one heart in Wario's health bar. However, if the health bar is completely filled, the orb bar will remain untouched until Wario takes damage again, upon which it effectively serves as a ninth hit point when it immediately replaces the eighth heart lost. As a bonus for keeping both bars maxed out, enemies will stop dropping orbs and instead produce more coins than usual upon defeat.
• Heavy Sleeper: Keyser is out cold when you spot him. No matter what chaos happens around him he snoozes away. He only wakes up if Wario touches him. Lampshaded in the instruction manual where Wario threatens to slap him one if he doesn't wake up!
• Hell: Fiery Cavern is based on Hell, due to its placement in the Sapphire Passage, a set of horror-themed levels. This becomes more evident when the whole place freezes after Wario hits the Frog Switch.
• Hell Hotel: Hotel Horror is quite a large level that requires a bit of exploration to complete, with maps posted on each floor. Thankfully, you'd be hard-pressed to get lost inside, since each floor is denoted by their distinctly colored walls. Also, judging by the balcony area, it seems to be located in the Crescent Moon Village, explaining why there are ghosts running amok in the place.
• Helpful Mook:
  • Dr. Scienstein shows up in almost all the bonus rooms whenever a projectile is needed. He cannot be defeated, only knocked over, yelping in pain each time he's attacked in some way.
  • In the fight against Cractus, if you get turned into a zombie, a firefly will appear so you can jump into its light and go back to normal.
• Hub Level: The Golden Pyramid serves as the game's hub. Wario must complete five passages — the Entry Passage first, then the four succeeding passages in any order the player likes (though the game's preferred order has Wario travel counterclockwise, from Emerald to Sapphire Passage).
• Hypocritical Humor: Wario looks incredibly uncomfortable when Princess Shokora kisses him in the game's second-worst ending — because she looks just like him.
• Idle Animation: Wario has quite a few idle animations that play in different contexts:
  • When left standing still in a level, Wario pulls out a pair of dumbbells from somewhere and performs bicep curls. Sometimes, he instead jumps rope, and he does so very quickly, much like a boxer during a training regimen. If you break Wario out of these animations, he'll apologize for wasting time.
    Wario: S-s-s-sorry!
  • If he's left floating on a water body's surface, he begins flailing his arms in a desperate attempt to keep afloat (he won't actually sink, however, not that it matters).
  • If he's idle after the Frog Switch is activated, he starts panicking by nervously running in place. This one begins much sooner than the other land-based idle animations to emphasize urgency.
• Invincible Minor Minion: Dr. Scienstein is completely indestructible, and unlike most enemies not even water will do him in - he simply puts on a snorkel. This is because he's normally there to be used as a projectile to solve puzzles for loot.
• Jerk with a Heart of Gold: Wario, surprisingly. In the ending, while Wario was as rough as usual, he helped Dr. Scienstein and Princess Shokora out when the pyramid was collapsing, the latter of which he didn't know the identity of at the time. This goes against everything gamers have seen from Wario as a character so far, but that doesn't seem to be a problem here.
  • Might also be a case of Character Development, with Wario saving the inhabitants of the music box accidentally in the previous game, and now doing it intentionally. Showing that while he may be a greedy jerkass, he's not ALL bad.
• Joke Item: The Smile, the only free item in the shop. "Buying" it will simply cause the shopkeeper to smile at you.
  Shop owner: Hmph!
• Last Lousy Point: The hardest level to get a gold crown on is the tutorial level, the Hall of Hieroglyphs, as there are only just enough points to earn it. You can give yourself a tiny bit of breathing room when getting it by using one trick: Ground Pound next to the harmless purple Goomba-like enemies to pop them into the air and "upgrade" them to red. They're still harmless, but now they drop bronze coins that are worth 50 points, instead of two tiny 10-point coins.
• Laughing Mad:
  • Befitting his manic portrayal in this game, Wario has a random chance to giggle in response to pain.
    "HEE! HEE-HEE-HEE-hee-hee!"
  • All of the Golden Diva's voice lines consist of warped, snobbish laughter, tying into her greedy personality and her strange tactics. However, it grows increasingly demonic, distorted, and distressed as her battle progresses, especially when her mask is destroyed.
• Lethal Lava Land: Fiery Cavern is a prehistoric volcano brimming with lava geysers and tough-as-nails cavemen... until you hit the frog switch, inducing a near-instant flash freeze across the entire environment.
• Load-Bearing Boss: When the Golden Diva perishes, the pyramid collapses.
• Logical Weakness: The first five passage bosses are each weak to one boss item in particular:
  • The Bugle is most effective against Spoiled Rotten, a child who would be easily spooked by loud noises.
  • The fire-breathing Black Dragon is most effective against Cractus, a giant man-eating plant.
  • The Big Fist is most effective against Cuckoo Condor, who is initially encased in a cuckoo-clock mech suit. A machine built by hand can be just as easily disassembled by hand.
  • The Large Lips are most effective against Aerodent. Kissing rats, or holding them close to one's face in general, distresses them greatly.
  • The Black Dog is most effective against Catbat, tying into the classic rivalry between cats and dogs.
• Long Song, Short Scene: In normal gameplay, most of the Golden Passage uses the "HURRY UP" theme for its background music, as Wario lands on top of the Frog Switch very soon after the level begins. For the brief moment in which he's airborne above the Switch, the first few notes of a fully composed song can be heard. It's a darker, faster remix of the hub-world theme, "Inside the Pyramid," and the rest of it can only be listened to by extracting the music file from the game.
• Losing Your Head: One enemy exclusive to The Curious Factory is a robot that throws its spiky head on the floor, causing it to roll forward.
• Made of Iron:
  • Wario, although not quite to the extent that was previously seen in Wario Land II and Wario Land 3. For one thing, he actually is able to die outside of the game's final boss fight this time. Outside of that, however, Wario can still take icicles, rocks, axes, spikes, and lava with little more than a bit of lost health.
  • Dr. Scienstein. Wario keeps tossing and thrashing him around to solve puzzles, yet he seems to be no worse for wear. Most stage enemies would be dead several times over, but this guy, while he does feel pain, isn't injured in the slightest.
• Magic Carpet: Flying carpets are ubiquitous in Arabian Night, being used to elevate Wario to higher parts of the town. Thanks to some invisible barriers, Wario cannot willingly walk off these carpets; he must jump off of them. However, those barriers also allow him to prepare his supercharge as if there is nothing in front of him. Thus, Wario can achieve top speed before the carpet lands on the ground, and without crossing nearly as much distance as he typically would. This technique is used for a puzzle in this stage.
• Man-Eating Plant: Cractus is a large, toothy, undead plant with arms. However, rather than attempt to eat Wario, it just drenches him in zombifying saliva and laughs heartily when it does so.
• Meaningful Name: Spoiled Rotten, the Warm-Up Boss of the game, has a youthful appearance and throws nasty tantrums.
• Mole Monster: There are Drill Mole enemies in Wildflower Fields that are often found moving around beneath the ground, where they throw spiked balls up at Wario while remaining safe from retaliation unless he uses a ground pound to force them to the surface.
• Monster Suit: Aerodent's icon in the Topaz Passage level select prominently features a teddy bear. But as the boss' name hints, that's not the boss itself—that's a giant balloon protecting the true Aerodent, a tiny, sturdy rat ghost. The balloon provides it with all of its offenses and defenses; when that balloon flips upside down, Aerodent is completely helpless until it rights its ride and reinflates it.
• Monstrosity Equals Weakness: Once you break the Golden Diva's mask and expose her Gonk-ish face, she resorts to smashing open the floor of her arena to expose spikes. Compared to how she was before, her movements are slow and much more predictable. She's also corporeal now, meaning three simple shoulder bashes will reduce her to a harmless pair of lips.
• Mook Maker: Hoggus in Doodle Woods floats in the air following Wario and draws enemies.
• More Teeth than the Osmond Family: Cractus and the final form of Spoiled Rotten.
• Multiple Endings: How many of the treasures you earned for quickly beating the bosses at the end determines what form Princess Shokora takes (the more treasures you collect, the prettier she looks), and what bonus images are received at the end of the credits, with the additional ceavat of two only showing up if you beat the game on Hard or S-Hard. Finally, what vehicle Wario is driving during the credits is determined by the difficulty level of the file.
• Numbered Sequels: The game immediately lets players know that it's the fourth of a series... except in Japanese, where the game is instead titled Wario Land Advance: The Treasure of the Golden Diva.
• Our Monsters Are Weird: The game's many creatures, especially the bosses, certainly take the cake for some of the strangest enemies Wario has ever faced. They range from the decently unusual, such as a giant baby eggplant who is reduced to a sobbing, toothy wreck as her battle progresses, to the absolutely bizarre, such as a rat ghost who pilots a giant, inflatable teddy bear, one that can jettison fireballs and soldiers with spiked butts wearing spring shoes.
• Palmtree Panic: Palm Tree Paradise, almost word-for-word. It is the first traditional level of the game after the Entry Passage serves its purpose. The level is a breezy, straightforward walk through a tropical isle, one that introduces the last few major recurring elements the game will throw at the player.
• Pinball Zone: This game holds the Trope Namer, a strange mechanical funhouse containing various pinball-tossing challenges. The 500-point coins are most common here. Usually relegated to treasure chests, the coins always spawn from the mechanical locks in front of crucial exits once all of a room's pinball challenges are completed.
• Polluted Wasteland: True to its name, the Toxic Landfill is a titanic dumping ground containing a ton of hidden passageways. Even without factoring in those secrets, the level contains the most visible breakable blocks of any stage, and the music is suitably aggressive to encourage players to bust past them all.
• Redundant Researcher: Dr. Scienstein plays this role. While he does seem to be making some headway in his explorations, he's still just a much-abused tool to solve the game's many puzzle rooms at the end of the day.
• Save the Princess: Unintentionally. Wario saves the cat in the endgame, which turns out to be Princess Shokora.
• Sequence Breaking:
  • There's a Pause Abuse glitch you can exploit in Arabian Night that allows you to bypass most of the stage and get to a later part of it sooner.
  • Its possible to reach the upper areas of Doodle Woods well before the countdown sequence, by bouncing off the flying pigs Hoggus summons. It requires the player to manipulate Hoggus's position on the screen to be in just the right position when he summons the enemy. This can be done by turning Wario around; Hoggus will lazily hover to the upper corner Wario is facing. If Wario turns around several times in one place, Hoggus can be halted right where the player wants.
• Shifting Sand Land: Downplayed with Arabian Night. While the Arabian town certainly takes place in a hot desert environment, the level design puts significantly more focus on the town's interior.
• Slasher Smile: Cractus and Spoiled Rotten (once she Turns Red).
• Slippy-Slidey Ice World:
  • 40 Below Fridge combines this with Eternal Engine. It is a cold-storage unit of some kind, containing various ice-related challenges that involve slopes and avoiding falling icicles.
  • Additionally, the Fiery Cavern freezes over after the frog switch is hit, and it exhibits similar puzzles as the 40 Below Fridge. Interestingly, it turns out the cavemen in this stage are related to the sneezing yetis that are common in the Fridge; one, in particular, undergoes a visible transformation sequence before Wario to demonstrate the relation.
• Smashing Hallway Traps of Doom: Certain areas feature crushers that smash Wario.
• Smooch of Victory: Wario gets one from Princess Shokora at the end of the game, with varying degrees of satisfaction depending on how much treasure he gained.
• The Song Remains the Same: Oddly, the title screen stays in English in both versions and the Palm Tree Paradise one stays in Japanese in both versions. And the odd aversion is the ending song, which is an American-style song with English lyrics in the North American and European versions and an anime-type song with Japanese lyrics in the Japanese version.
• Speed Echoes: Wario leaves behind trails when running very fast.
• Squashed Flat: Flat Wario, the result of Wario being smashed by a crusher. As in the previous games, he can float like a feather in this form, and enter areas he normally can't.
• The Spiny: One enemy looks almost exactly like the Mario Spiny - though on closer examination, it looks more like a yellow Kirby with a spiked helmet.
• Stalked by the Bell: Hitting the Frog Switch prompts a time limit - if it runs out, your accumulated money is quickly drained. If that runs out, you're booted out of the level and forced to recollect everything you lost — including the most important collectibles.
• Stealth Pun: The way that Wario escapes Fiery Cavern ties into how the entire level is based on Hell: Once he hits the Frog Switch, the entire place freezes, and the exit portal opens up. In other words, Wario literally escapes when Hell freezes over.
• Stone Wall: Aerodent has very little offensive presence; the only way the boss will hurt Wario is by summoning the parachuting tack mooks, which are very easy to avoid. Otherwise, Aerodent's skillset is skewed toward wasting Wario's time: the boss has the second-most health of any boss in the game, he can light Wario ablaze and use the resulting transformation to eat up precious seconds on the clock, and reaching his weak point takes some considerable setting-up that can be easily undone if one isn't careful.
• Stout Strength: Thanks to the new additions to his moveset, such as the supercharge effects for his dash and ground-pound attacks, Wario is at his strongest in this game. Even considering that he's no longer functionally invincible like the preceding titles, he still has a health maximum health-bar of eight hitpoints (or nine, due to a technicality involving the game's health system).
• Symbolic Blood: When the frog switch's timer runs out, red coins start pouring out of Wario's body, giving the impression that he (or at least his wallet) is bleeding out.
• Super Title 64 Advance: The Japanese title, Wario Land Advance.
• Tactical Suicide Boss:
  • Catbat creates tidal waves to push Wario away throughout the entire fight, which Wario must use as a platform to reach and hit the boss's head. If Catbat stopped making any waves, Wario would be screwed.
  • An odd example with Cractus, who hangs down from the top of the screen laughing at you when you get turned into a zombie. If he were to hang down like that while you're in regular condition, you'd be unable to hit him.
• Temple of Doom: The Golden Pyramid, although only the Entry and Golden Passages are actual levels set there.
• That Poor Cat: In the intro, a black cat is nearly run over by Wario's car as he drives up to the Golden Pyramid. Later on, in the ending, he nearly runs over a white cat when driving up to get $10.00 all-you-can-eat steaks.
• This Is Gonna Suck: Wario's "Oh boy!" and "No! No!" voice bits when he undergoes a transformation, as well as occasionally muttering "No no no..." when he presses a Frog Switch.
• Timed Mission: Every level turns into this when you hit the Frog Switch. The entirety of the Golden Passage is this, considering the frog switch is placed under the starting vortex. This is also the case with Palm Tree Paradise on Super Hard mode - Hall of Heiroglyphs isn't much better, forcing you to press the switch quite early on.
• Time-Limit Boss: Every boss is fought on a time limit, with treasures starting to disappear if you take too long. Some bosses actively exploit this by using moves that don't deal damage, but will waste valuable seconds if they hit you; Catbat's projectiles in the first half of the fight puff you up (in the second half they just damage you), Cractus's saliva turns you into a zombie (leaving you unable to Attack Its Weak Point until you transform back) and Aerodent throws fireballs that trigger the notoriously lengthy Flaming Wario transformation.
• Toggling Setpiece Puzzle: In many levels, there are blue blocks (marked with a frog face) that Wario can step on as long as they're solid, but some of them are physically inactive (only their outlines can be seen) and cannot be used. When Wario presses the level's Switch (marked with the figure of a blue frog), all associated blocks will swap their states, so he has to reach the exit within the time limit while working around a new path (as the state switcheroo will make some previously-accessible parts off-limits and vice versa); for extra challenge, a few collectible items will only be available by then. On other levels, the Switch can toggle other types of setpieces (such as freezing the whole area of Fiery Cavern to turn all fiery elements into ice ones, or opening frog-marked doors in Hotel Horror).
• Toy Time: The Topaz Passage is themed around toys of all sorts. The Toy Block Tower is a castle made out of a child's playing blocks, the Big Board is a giant, loosely defined boardgame, Doodle Woods is a forest constructed of drawing tools inhabited by an artist whose images constantly come to life, and Domino Row is a massive playhouse that facilitates races against giant domino lines.
• Turns Red: Every boss becomes more aggressive when their health gets low. Sometimes, this aggression necessitates a change in strategy.
  • Spoiled Rotten serves as the page image for this trope. Out of nowhere, she throws an intense tantrum, baring her teeth to discourage attacks from the front.
  • Cractus continuously throws his punches farther as the battle progresses. During his last few passes, he also elevates his head far above the floor, meaning Wario must use the vines in the background to reach the boss' weak spot. Cractus eventually slows down to a crawl on the very last few passes, far out of reach from the vines, to catch players off guard with his punches.
  • With Cuckoo Condor's clock suit destroyed, Wario is left facing the bird within. Condor lays eggs, doing so progressively quicker as it sustains damage. The eggs hatch into explosive chicks if Wario doesn't catch them out of the air in time to throw at the weak point.
  • Aerodent begins throwing fireballs to transform Wario and waste his time. When on its last few hit points, the rat begins throwing fireballs the moment its balloon is flipped around.
  • When Catbat's bat head disappears, its cyclopean mooks literally turn red. Instead of transforming Wario, they directly hurt him. Catbat also starts creating speedier tidal waves that always undulate. On top of that Catbat can now only be harmed with ground pounds, which make taking it out while collecting all the treasures in Super-Hard mode impossible without an item to lower Catbat's health.
  • Without her masks, the frustrated Golden Diva can only body slam the floor to expose spikes, creating a secondary time limit.
• Underground Level: Fiery Cavern, a hellish, lava-filled cave containing some of the most dangerous hazards and enemies in the game. After the Frog Switch is activated, it becomes somewhat less perilous thanks to everything getting coated with ice.
• Under the Sea: Mystic Lake is where underwater segments are most ubiquitous. It contains some unique challenges in its waters, too, such as giant fish that lunge out of their nestings when Wario draws near, and octopi that swing maces around to make navigation more difficult.
• Uniformity Exception: Spoiled Rotten is the only boss in the game that does not guard any chests, and the only one who cannot be rematched after finishing the game.
• Unlockable Difficulty Levels: The game starts out with two difficulties available to select when starting a file, "Normal" and "Hard". Beating a file set to the "Hard" difficulty for the first time unlocks a third difficulty option, "S-Hard".
• Unsportsmanlike Gloating: Upon zombifying Wario, Cractus will hover out of reach and laugh at his expense until the transformation is undone.
• Variable Mix: Besides the "Hurry Up!" theme, the game's music changes to match Wario's actions, slowing down when he crawls, speeding up while rolling, and distorting during transformations.
• Video Game Cruelty Potential: Whenever Dr. Scienstein is encountered in one of the game's levels, he is quite-literally invincible, so feel free to throw/ram him (causing him to scream in pain) as many times as you want to.
• Violation of Common Sense: The second phase of the Golden Diva's fight revolves around turning four different attacks against her in some way. Three of them are simply thrown back at her, but the fourth—a spiked hammer—does not yield the same result when tossed that way. It turns out that Wario must wait for the hammer to retract its spikes, then toss it onto his own head to turn himself into Spring Wario to damage the Diva. While this strategy goes against how Wario handles the other three attacks, the use of a hammer this way has precedence thanks to the Menhanmā enemies seen throughout the game.
• Wake-Up Call Boss: The normally easy Spoiled Rotten becomes this in Super Hard mode - you have a scant 15 seconds to defeat it.
• Warm-Up Boss: Spoiled Rotten does very little beyond wandering about the room until Wario provokes her enough. All she really does in response to his attacks until then is turn around to face her attacker, which only becomes problematic when she starts baring her teeth. It's safe to say her accompanying Totsumen pose a greater threat. However, Spoiled Rotten becomes much more threatening on Super Hard mode; with only fifteen seconds granted to defeat her, there is absolutely no room for error.
• Weird Moon: Crescent Moon Village, anyone? Stuck in a state of perpetual crescent phase, and way larger than it should be in the sky.
• You Don't Look Like You: Dr. Scienstein is shorter and lacks the weird helmet he had in Wario Land 3. Ironically, this makes him look closer to his original appearance in For the Frog the Bell Tolls.

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Oh boy... HURRY UP!

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