YMMV / Wario Land: Shake It!

• Awesome Art: Every environment in the game was hand-drawn, and Wario alone has 2000 individual animation frames^note Then again, the game is supposed to resemble an anime. Indeed, Production I.G was responsible for the character designs, character movements, and the opening and ending movie sequences.. The producers stated that they wanted it to be the "ultimate 2D game," and were pleased with the results.
• Awesome Music: Glittertown and Neon City have a very Las Vegas feel to it indeed.
• Character Rerailment: The team aimed to show off more of Wario's macho and badass sides, which had been made less prominent since WarioWare made him Denser and Wackier.
• Fridge Horror: Oh, boy... with that whole inconvenience of hyperinflation, that Bottomless Coin Sack will screw up the economy. (Or it might not, since one person printing money would have little effect.) Either way, it's not like either Wario nor Captain Syrup will care.
• Magnificent Bastard: Captain Syrup, the sultry leader of the Black Sugar Gang, shows her true cunning here, Syrup seemingly puts aside her feud with Wario to help him gain the Bottomless Coin Sack from the notorious Shake King, even putting in her part to help the Merfles the King has kidnapped. After having used Wario to defeat the Shake King, Syrup doubles around to swipe the Sack for herself, revealing she negotiated it as a "finder's fee" from the Merfles behind Wario's back, driving off victorious with one more kiss blown to Wario and remaining syrupy-sweet every second of screentime.
• Once Original, Now Common: The hand-drawn style of the game these days might not seem that impressive since a lot of indie devs ultimately opted for this style for their games in the years since, but when Shake It was first released, the hand-drawn art style was considered to be incredibly unique and added a lot of charm to the game.
• Presumed Flop: The game is often said to have been a massive failure, as it's currently the last platformer starring Wario, a series which had regular releases throughout the 90's and 2000's. While it did miss its North American launch target by some distance (which Nintendo of America wrote off as being a by-product of the 2008 recession) according to a marketing book, the game had good legs and eventually went on to sell over a million copies worldwide - it actually outsold every WarioWare title released in-between it and 2021's WarioWare: Get It Together!.
• Special Effect Failure: Large Fry is markedly static when he's recovering from a stun. It looks incredibly out-of-place considering the very detailed sprite animations of everything and everyone else.
• Spiritual Successor: Being a sidescrolling 2D platformer with an emphasis on shaking enemies for the sake of progression, this is the closest thing to a sequel for Mischief Makers.
• Suspiciously Similar Song: Various tracks have riffs akin to other pieces of music, most notably from the late '80s and '90s. This helps liken it to a cartoon series from those eras.
  • The Soggybog River theme features the famous first ten notes from "Eye of the Tiger" as its backing. The electric guitar is also akin to the tone of the lyrics of the chorus.
  • The theme of Just Plains starts with the now famous piano riff from the song "Werewolves Of London" by Warren Zevon to kick itself off.
  • Bad Manor's escape theme ("Boogie Mansion" on the OST) has the beat and a few similar notes to scores by Danny Elfman , particularly from Beetlejuice.

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