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  • Breather Boss: After that first boss on Rice Beach, the Minotaur of Mt. Teapot sure looks formidable, with intimidating surroundings, but he's incredibly easy to defeat.
  • Breather Level: Course No.6 is completely devoid of harmful enemies and contains Maizos, harmless crabs that Wario can easily bash for coins.
  • Even Better Sequel: Artifact Title aside, Wario Land is even deeper and more expansive than Super Mario Land 2: 6 Golden Coins which was an impressive game in its own right, and is widely considered one of the best games for the Game Boy.
  • First Installment Wins: From a commercial standpoint. Though its sequels — particularly the first two — were and are generally more popular with players, the first game outperformed its successors hugely in the number of copies sold. To give an idea of the gulf, the first Wario Land sold over 5 million copies worldwide while the next highest-selling Wario game, WarioWare: Touched!, sold 2.47 million units.
  • Game-Breaker:
    • The Jet Pot allows Wario to fly a very long distance by pressing B in mid-air, and also boosts his movement speed, letting him fly through levels with ridiculous ease. Wario keeps flying for a fixed distance (after which point he'll slowly descend) or until the player presses B again. But, double-tapping the B button causes Wario to stop his current flight and start a new one while still airborne, allowing him to fly as far as you please and making the powerup even more broken.
    • The ability to spawn a 10 Gold Coin item from your wallet by pressing Up+B is pretty overpowered. Besides throwing it around, any enemy touching it while you hold it gets knocked out. This is the same that would happen if you're holding another enemy, only that the coin doesn't get knocked out of your hand afterwards, so you have an impenetrable shield over your head.
    • Super jumps (Up+A), with their massive height, speed, and distance, trivialize most of the game's platforming and allow just about any obstacle to be bypassed. And unlike the jet burst, any form of Wario can super jump at any time, right from the beginning of the game.
  • Goddamned Bats: The Watches wait hovering in certain spots and dive at Wario in a sweeping motion when he approaches. They're also the only enemy in the game that can do legitimate Collision Damage on Wario. Watches also have very awkward hitboxes and will damage you if you aren't 100% perfect when jumping on them. It's one of the rare situations where the normally-useless Dragon Pot is truly helpful, because you can just shoot fire and roast them when they dive at you.
  • Good Bad Bugs: With some tricky D-pad input, some levels from Wario Land 1 can be skipped on the overworld map, as many SpeedRuns can demonstrate.
  • Hilarious in Hindsight: The final boss battle against Syrup and the Genie involves Wario throwing the Genie's lamp until it stands upright to create a cloud platform he can reach the Genie with. Sounds a lot like the bottle flip challenge several years later!
  • Scrappy Weapon: The Dragon Cap's fire has an awkwardly long delay when firing up and dying off, short range, and simply lacks the utility of the Bull Cap's ground pound and the Jet Cap's increased speed, jump height, and flight. Additionally, flaming enemies destroys them without awarding coins... in a game where coins are used in bonus games, you need coins to finish levels, and your total coin count at the end determines your ending. It becomes evident in the game that even the developers must have realized this, as the Dragon Cap becomes increasingly rare as the game goes on and often only appears where it's required to solve a puzzle or bypass an obstacle immune to your other attacks, and you always find a powerup to get rid of it not long after. The Dragon Pot is helpful in dealing with annoying Watches, though.
  • That One Boss: For a game that's mostly not too tough, the boss of Stove Canyon, Devil's Head, is brutal. Not only is it hard to catch the projectiles used to take him down, but he also starts breaking the platform you're on, turning him into a Time-Limit Boss as well.
  • That One Level:
    • World 1 has a scrolling stage where you must avoid bats trying to knock you off a tiny platform while a huge spike-covered enemy chases you. It's very, very nerve-wracking.
    • Stove Canyon's first level is really difficult, because there is an Advancing Wall of Doom and you have to go through a labyrinthine path with ladders and pits to the very end. If you mess up, it's fiery death for Wario.
  • Unfortunate Character Design: The Dragon Pot that turns Wario into Dragon Wario. It seems to have been intended to look like a dragon's head viewed from the top, but unfortunately, the bulging sides of the pot and long snout on top make it look like something else.

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