Nerd Mentality

End Boss Month: Day 3 (Super Mario Bros. 2, Wart)

Posted March 6th 2005 by Stephanie DeSiena.

Mario's next adventure teams him up with some of his good friends, his brother Luigi, his fungus sidekick Toad, and the same princess we had to save in his last quest, the lovely Princess Toadstool. Now this dream team of Mushroom Kingdomians must save another world from certain disaster, a world known as Sub-Con. If I weren't one at the time this game was released I probably would have put two and two together and realized that Sub-Con blatantly meant subconscious and that this entire game was just a horrible nightmare, but then again when you're a year old you don't realize much besides that there's warm stuff in your pants and you may or may not be hungry. The first full-fledged adventure starring Mario had taken place 3 years prior to this, and someone at Nintendo must have thought up the brilliant idea to not reuse Bowser for their second outing. That really turned out well, didn't it?

Where Bowser is iconic in the Mario series, Wart is just a giant green frog that has some sort of wicked bizarro ulcer. He polluted this fictional world with frightening baddies such as small men wearing masks, terrifying ladybugs and bees with spears. His cohorts include a mouse that wears sunglasses (possibly at night, although I don't think there was any time differentiation in Sub-Con, but he certainly wore them underground), a three-headed snake and a bird that vomits eggs at you.

When you finally reach Wart at the end of Super Mario Brothers 2 you're confronted by him in a small arena with backgrounds that you hadn't seen previously in the game. It's a nice change of pace in the repetitive nature of NES games at the time. Our villain has one of the most unfortunate weaknesses in the history of video gaming – he gets an upset stomach from vegetables. It was his brilliant plan to take over a world that's absolutely polluted with various types of veggies when he himself couldn't stomach them. To make matters worse, there are tubes in his own evil lair that launch vegetables out so the hero can easily grab them and throw them into his gaping mouth. Talk about poor planning.

Unfortunately we never saw Wart outside of Super Mario Brothers 2 again, possibly because the designers realized what a ridiculous character they had created that is harmed by things that are there to make you healthy. On second though, I suppose it's not that unfortunate since all he is is a lizard that spits fire at you. Now where have we seen that before?

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