GameCola: Inside the Guide (6-11)

-- By Michael Gray

Hey everyone, and welcome to another edition of Inside the Guide. In this column, I discuss games that I've written GameFAQs guides for. This month, there's a slightly educational bent, as I talk about Wagyan Land for the NES.

Wagyan Land was released only in Japan, and, because of this, you kind of need a guide just to figure out what the hell is going on. As this video shows, Japan is strange. Anyway, in this game, you take the role of a weird-looking green thing, which I guess is a Wagyan. Wagyan Land is full of monsters, and the only way to kill them is to collect four Wagyan-shaped stuffed animals, which makes you invincible for a while. You can also temporary stun enemies by shouting the words WA, G/A, and GA at them.

Does that make any sense to you readers out there? 'Cause it sure confuses me. Anyway, the game's plot is that you have to cross Wagyan Land to get to Wagyan village. Once there, you meet an old Wagyan who tells you that everyone was kidnapped and gives you a "Super Wagyanator." The old guy also sends you off to find your brother's ghost, so that you can be turned into a helicopter and fight the nefarious Dr. Devil.

Here you can see Wagyan, the stuffed animal that he must collect, and the G/A that he uses to stun enemies. See, I wasn't making it up after all.

Wagyan is clearly unimpressed by the construction worker's tomato card.

Writing a guide for this game was super easy. Here's how I did it: I played for five seconds, then wrote a sentence covering what I did (such as "Go right, and jump over the snail"). Then I repeated the process, which worked fine. That's pretty much the way I write guides for all the simple NES platformers. Of course, later on, when the game gets harder, I write more detailed instructions, but that's pretty much the technique.

Now, the strange thing about Wagyan Land is that you never have actual boss fights per se, seeing as Wagyan can't kill any enemies. Instead, you compete against the boss in an educational minigame. The minigame is either a matching game (where you turn cards over and try to make a pair), or the word chain game.

This slide is the most fun level of the game.

Here are all the kidnapped Wagyans. Awww...how sad!

Word chain goes like this: I pick a word, and the other person gets five or so seconds to say a word that starts with the letter my word ends with. A sample chain will look like this:

Hypothermia - A
A - Aeschylus - S
S - Singer - R
R - Rat - T
T - Trombone

If you're interested, you can see the word chain game in action at 2:02 in this video. The word chain game is halfway fun to play, except that there's a major problem: Like I said at the start of this article, this game is Japanese. So, unless you know Japanese, you're going to have a hard time. You can find a translation of the game, but it's still hard to win. In fact, even I couldn't beat the final boss in that game, and I know words like "antidisestablishmentarianism." Which, for the record, is not one of the words you can pick in word chain in this game.

OK, so that's all I have to say about Wagyan Land. Now that you know how to play word chain game, I'm sure you readers will be the life of the next party you go to! Take it from me, nothing says "Super Fun Party Animal" like someone who can play word chain!

-- Michael Gray {11-2007}

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