For individual games:
- Wario Land: Super Mario Land 3
- Virtual Boy Wario Land
- Wario Land II
- Wario Land 3
- Wario Land 4
- Wario Land: Shake It!
For Wario's other big series, WarioWare, go here.
For the Wario franchise as a whole, go here.
The franchise in general:
- Accidental Aesop: If you've been set on fire, running around is the worst thing you can do. The flames will spread and eventually smother you.
- Broken Base:
- The base is split down the middle on whether making Wario invincible in II and 3 was a good move or not. Either it makes the game more creative or too easy. Naturally, this popped up again when 4 undid that change.
- Should Wario World and Wario: Master of Disguise be considered as part of the Wario Land franchise or just individual games? Many fans tend to put the two under the Wario Land series given they're both platformers that share many elements with the rest of the Wario Land series and Nintendo has officially placed them under the Wario Land series. However many fans just prefer to see them as individual games instead due to neither sharing the Wario Land name and their very different approaches in gameplay and mechanics from the Wario Land series such as Wario World being more of a 3D Beat 'em Up with platforming elements than a puzzle platformer, and the bigger focus on touch controls and minigames in Master of Disguise.
- Common Knowledge: Many discussions of the Wario Land series, especially in regards to Pizza Tower being a Not-So-Cheap Imitation of it, talk about the entire series as high-octane action games with an emphasis on keeping up your momentum, a description that doesn't even apply to half of the main Wario Land games. In fact, 4 is the closest to fitting the description of what makes a Wario Land game, and it doesn't even have every element, such as Wario's immortality.
- Contested Sequel: Every game since Wario Land 4 is contested. Which one is the 'true' sequel to the previous games? Well, you’ll get a lot of different answers to that question, as each has different gameplay mechanics and game design. Do you prefer the 3D beat-em-up/platformer hybrid approach of Wario World, the stylus-oriented gameplay of Wario: Master of Disguise, or the more return-to-form 2D platforming of Wario Land: Shake It!? As for whether any of them are even good games... that’s pretty debated as well. Wario Land: Shake It! gets flak for being too much like Wario Land 4 except with less new ideas in it, Wario World has a very mixed critical reception in general, and Wario: Master of Disguise is seen by quite a few fans and critics as just plain bad. You can see this by the Metacritic scores of each game:
- Wario Land 4: 88
- Wario World: 71
- Wario: Master of Disguise: 60
- Wario Land: Shake It!: 78
- Crazy Is Cool: Wario. If he needs to get through a wood barrier, the obvious solution is for him to light himself on fire and tackle it.
- Fandom Rivalry: With the WarioWare 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.
- Fanon: The games have never given Captain Syrup's first name, but everyone assumes it's Maple. It does somewhat have Word of Dante on its side, though, having been used in a Famitsu article.
- Magnificent Bitch: Captain Syrup, the sultry leader of the Black Sugar Gang, is Wario's chief rival and just as proficient as Wario himself. Showing her true cunning in Shake It!, 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.
- More Popular Spin-Off: The series completely replaced Super Mario Land and became a hugely popular series in its own right.
- Obscure Popularity: The series is one of Nintendo's consistently successful franchises to date, with every game in the series receiving widespread acclaim as being amongst Nintendo's best platformers and having sold at least a million copies, often outperforming many of Nintendo's other franchises like Metroid, Star Fox and even Kirby. Despite this, you'll rarely find anyone talking about the games and they lack the large fan followings that other less popular Nintendo franchises enjoy.
