Wario Land: Shake It!

That video broke YouTube. In multiple ways.

One of the coolest video game ad campaigns I’ve ever seen was for Wario Land: Shake It!, a Wii title developed by GoodFeel and released in America on September 22nd, 2008. It started out as a basic YouTube video (in all its 2008 YouTube glory) with nothing to indicate what would come next. It plays, showing footage from the game, in which Wario gets increasingly reckless. Then, chaos! Titles outside of the video start falling. Coins being shaken out of an enemy pop out of the video player! Wario crashes into things, causing more damage to the entire YouTube page! It ends with even the video falling onto a pile of the page’s remains, titles and thumbnails and everything else, at the bottom. Some way to leave an impression!

And what a way to announce Wario’s latest platformer outing at the time, the sixth title in the Wario Land series, and the only one to be released on home consoles (unless you count the one made for the Virtual Boy). Also his last, so far. With its hand-drawn 2D animation, anime-styled cutscenes, and a gameplay that makes use of the Nintendo Wii’s capabilities, there was definitely something very interesting here. Plus, it’s good to see Wario away from his microgame company once in a while.

I’m so disappointed that the ad no longer exists, nor was it curated in its original form, instead existing as videos of screen rips. But, with that said, time to look at the game proper.

Adventure Time: The Secret of the Nameless Kingdom

♪♫ We'll go to very distant lands... ♪♫

The smash Cartoon Network hit Adventure Time was probably one of the most notable cartoons of the 2010s. Truly a cornerstone of the decade in pop culture. It started with somewhat disconnected plots that eventually all tied together into a cohesive story, which is a format I’ve come to love (see: My post about Code Lyoko only a few weeks ago). Finn the human and Jake the dog are very endearing characters, and they’re surrounded by an entire cast of lovable folks, several of which turn out to be a lot more complex than they first appear. Plus I got some cool hats out of it. As I’m writing this, four hour-long specials are being released on HBO Max to offer a form of closure to some elements of the series.

So, video games were made. The only one I’ve played is today’s game: Adventure Time: The Secret of the Nameless Kingdom (which I'll shorten to SotNK in the review), developed by WayForward Technologies, published by Little Orbit. I can imagine the Adventure Time games all try to follow the general tone of the series; very comical, slightly self-aware, with the occasional dramatic edge or pinch of serious. One of the advantages of the universe depicted in Adventure Time is that it’s very wide, and has even extended its scope to alternate realities, so anything’s possible. The games in the series also tend to homage classic adventure games.

I can’t actually pretend that I know the show that well – I saw a lot of episodes, but not all of them, and I haven’t kept such a tight grip on continuity to know how everything clicked together in the end. I lost track about midway into Season 5. Let’s see, the game was released for the Nintendo 3DS in November 18th, 2014 in North America, which means it was released while Season 6 was airing on CN. However, I’d assume this story would fit best around the end of Season 5, as Finn hasn’t lost his arm yet and still wields the Grass Sword. From there, let’s see where this story takes us.