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.
