WarioWare Gold is the tenth game in a series built on a simple joke: give the player three seconds and one instruction, then take the seconds away. Nintendo shipped it for the Nintendo 3DS in July 2018 in PAL regions and the following month in North America and Japan. Intelligent Systems developed it, Nintendo published it, and it holds up as the sharpest version of the idea the series has produced.
Trailer, via Nintendo UK.
Three Seconds and a Shrinking Clock
The pitch is unchanged. Microgames arrive back to back, each with a short prompt and a shrinking clock. Clear one, take a point, move on. Fail one — lose the game or run out of time — and you lose one of four lives. Run out and the stage ends on your high score. Finish a section and a boss microgame waits.
Gold carries more than 300 microgames, the most in the series. Most are pulled from earlier entries: the Game Boy Advance original, Twisted!, Touched!, Smooth Moves, D.I.Y. and Game & Wario. Creative director Goro Abe had 1,100 microgames across the series to pick from, and the planning behind that cut is where the game earns its keep.
Controls stay varied. You press buttons, tilt the system, touch the screen, and blow into the microphone. The 3DS hardware is doing the work, and Gold uses all of it.
Wario Runs a Tournament He Plans to Rob
The plot is a Wario scheme, which means the premise is theft with extra steps. Broke after a treasure hunt in the village of Luxeville, Wario organizes a tournament in Diamond City and talks his friends into designing new Mash League, Twist League, Touch League and Ultra League games around Sports, That’s Life, Fantasy and Nintendo Classics themes. He promises to pay them.
He charges an entry fee and offers a prize, then secretly plots to take the pot for himself.
Then Lulu shows up. A girl from Luxeville, she tracks Wario down, calls him out, and starts training to challenge him — she wants back the town’s golden pot, which Wario stole.
Jimmy T, Mona, and a Rap Battle at Emerald Street
Around that spine, the game runs short vignettes for the rest of the cast. Jimmy T tries to impress two girls at Sapphire Street. Mona hunts a dress at Joe’s Clothes. Dribble and Spitz fight UFOs from their taxi. 5-Volt works out. Ashley and Red face a demon called Dark Lord Hum Gree.
Dr. Crygor and Mike meet the old invention Doris-1 in Agate Forest. 18-Volt takes on newcomer 13-Amp in a rap battle at Emerald Street. Penny tries to cure Dr. Crygor after her elixir gives him a stomachache. Kat and Ana mistake the gourmet master Mrs. Munchly for their ninja trainer at Diamond City Castle. Fronk teaches 9-Volt that math is fun, and Young Cricket and Master Mantis train.
Voice Acting Arrives, and So Does the Dub
Gold adds full voice acting in the story mode, a first for the series, in multiple languages. It also lets you redub the cutscenes in your own voice. That unlockable is the best joke in the package — the series has always been about performance under pressure, and now the player gets to be bad at it on purpose.
Missions award coins. Coins buy rewards, including extra minigames. Clear the story and the challenge mode opens, which reintroduces microgames alongside distractions. Intelligent Systems spent less effort on collectibles, deciding they mattered less than the core programming. That call shows.
The Collectibles Are the Weak Spot
The collectibles are the weak spot, and reception of them split. That tracks. A WarioWare game lives or dies on the two seconds between prompt and response, and anything that pulls attention away from that loop is dead weight.
Gold’s best additions — voice acting, the challenge mode, the redub — all feed the loop or extend it. Its worst sit beside it.
The microgame selection is the real achievement. Whittling 1,100 down to 300 is curation, not porting, and Gold plays like a greatest-hits record where someone actually sequenced the tracks. The 3DS is a dead platform now, which is the only reason this isn’t the default recommendation for the series. As a farewell to the hardware’s gimmicks — the tilt, the touchscreen, the mic — it’s close to ideal.
Release Windows
| Window | Region |
|---|---|
| July 2018 | PAL regions |
| August 2018 | North America |
| August 2018 | Japan |
The Numbers
- Score: 7.7/10
- Developer: Intelligent Systems
- Publisher: Nintendo
- Platform: Nintendo 3DS
- Microgames: over 300, chosen from 1,100 across the series
- Lives per stage: 4
- Series installment: tenth
WarioWare Gold is the best argument the series has made for its own premise, and it makes that argument with a clock. The voice acting gives the cast a presence they never had, the challenge mode gives the microgames a second life, and the 300-game cut is sharp enough that the seams rarely show. The collectibles are noise. The core is not. 7.7 of 10.
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