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So you had a success on the home consoles in the 8-bit era. What’s the next logical
step? DO IT AGAIN. Change one or two things, then do whatever you just did again. Call
it Mega Man 2. Call it DuckTales 2. Call it Super Mario Bros. 2 (in Japan, anyway). And
don’t look back. When I extracted Wagyan Land 2 from Felicity in Worcestershire’s
box of import goodness, I immediately had a preconception. And, after plugging in the
rather large cart and playing the game, I can say with conviction, “IT IS WHAT I THOUGHT
IT WAS.” It’s more Wagyan Land, with the same platforming, the same weird edutainment
boss fights, and the same mechanical dinos... wait. You say it’s the first Wagyan’s
son? How the hell can you tell? It’s the same sprite!
But, this IS Wagyan Land 2, and that number isn’t just hanging about there because it’s
Wednesday and it has nowhere better to be. There are a number of improvements, starting
with a greater diversity of power-ups. Some of these just boost your score (thus moving
you closer to extra lives), but some can imbue Wagyan II with invincibility or a propeller
function for his tail, allowing for glide jumps so long as you continue to mash the
jump button. These make the platforming sections a little more forgiving; said sidescrolling
areas can now be taller than one screen high and seem to be a bit shorter than in the predecessor.
That said, it’s still a fairly bog-standard platformer. The occasional weird weapon like
the Egg Helmet helps to spice things up, but aside from emulations of Bonk’s Adventure,
it’s really not that much more useful than the basic shout-at-things-to-stun them armament
that comes pre-installed on all Wagyan models. And then, there’s a boss fight which has
nothing to do whatsoever with weapons or anything.
In addition to the word-chains and concentration puzzles from the last game, Wagyan Land 2
introduces a kind of number-race challenge, where you and the boss go head-to-head finding
and selecting numbers in order from a five-by-eight grid of shuffled cards. Manage to claim enough
numbers to fill or exceed your quota, and the boss sulks off and does whatever defeated
bosses do. But even these feel significantly easier than last time; the bosses take their
sweet time finding numbers, and during the shiritori throw-downs, there’s not as much
deviation in the tiles available. Two such fights played out almost identically, with
both bosses being stymied at the lack of a word starting with “do.” Did kinda take
the fun out of it. Wagyan Land 2 is a decent enough game, but the diminished challenge
and largely retrodden territory prevent it from being in the upper echelon of sequels.
But now you’re better at finding numbers really fast! So there’s that.