If you plan on picking up WarioWare: D.I.Y. next week—with or without a shiny new Nintendo DSi XL to go along with it—get ready to do some heavy reading, thanks to the game's bulky instruction booklet.
A copy of WarioWare: D.I.Y. just showed up here at Kotaku Towers West (sans gigantic sandwich) and it may have a valid claim to the biggest Nintendo DS instruction manual ever. At 65 pages, it's a little beast, doing a most voluminous job of explaining the programming and game design features of WarioWare: D.I.Y. Pretty hefty for a game series famous for its seconds-long twitch-based games.
Keep in mind, this is a single language manual, not one of those English, French and Spanish numbers, the kind that ballooned the New Super Mario Bros. Wii manual to a whopping 66 pages.
While I haven't actually had a spare minute to play my copy of WarioWare: D.I.Y., I have done something just as important—oops, I mean trivial—I've tried to see if any of the other DS games in my collection compare to the latest WarioWare. Here's a small first-party sampling.
- Fire Emblem: Shadow Dragon - 37 pages
- Advance Wars: Dual Strike - 39 pages
- Brain Age - 49 pages
- Picross DS - 29 pages
- New Super Mario Bros. - 45 pages
- Mario & Luigi: Partners In Time - 37 pages
- Rhythm Heaven - 16 pages
- Super Mario 64 DS - 35 pages
- Elite Beat Agents - 27 pages
- Animal Crossing: Wild World - 43 pages
- Mario vs. Donkey Kong 2: March of the Minis - 33 pages
- Advance Wars: Days of Ruin - 43 pages
- Mario Kart DS - 40 pages
WarioWare D.I.Y. more than doubles the instruction manual page count of WarioWare Smooth Moves for the Wii, a 32 page tri-language manual, and easily bests the 37 page-long LittleBigPlanet manual. That design-your-own-level game for the PlayStation 3 also packs in 12 pages of developer credits.
What can we conclude from this? Nintendo is making sure that no facet of making your own WarioWare games—micro-sized they may be—goes unexplained.