Wario Land and three other retro handheld games just hit Switch Online

Nintendo just added four classic handheld titles to its Nintendo Switch Online service, including the original Wario Land. According to announcements on Twitter and Bluesky, three Game Boy games are available on the base subscription tier, while one Game Boy Advance compilation requires the Expansion Pack add-on. All four games are live right now.

The birth of the anti-Mario

The headliner for the standard tier is Wario Land: Super Mario Land 3. Released in 1994, this platformer effectively hijacked the Super Mario Land series and handed the keys to Mario's greedy rival. Instead of rescuing a princess, the goal is to hoard enough treasure to buy a custom castle.

The physics and pacing are entirely different from a traditional Mario game. Wario is heavy. He relies on shoulder bashes and momentum to break through blocks and enemies. It established the core mechanics that defined Wario's 2D outings for the next decade, proving that Nintendo's handheld division could build a flagship franchise out of a villain.

Jaleco mercenaries and Kemco RPGs

The base tier also gets two deeper cuts from the Game Boy catalog. Fortified Zone is a 1991 overhead action game from Jaleco that feels like a cross between The Legend of Zelda and Metal Gear. You swap between two mercenaries, Masato and Mizuki, on the fly. Masato uses heavy weapons but cannot jump, while Mizuki jumps over hazards but relies on a weaker pistol. Character switching was a surprisingly ambitious mechanic for the early Game Boy hardware, and it gives the short campaign some welcome variety.

Joining it is The Sword of Hope II, a 1992 first-person dungeon crawler by Kemco. It plays heavily on text-based menu commands for combat and exploration, similar to the MacVenture games like Shadowgate but with traditional turn-based RPG battles. It is exactly the kind of obscure title that benefits from the Switch's built-in rewind feature.

Two puzzle games in one cartridge

If you subscribe to the Expansion Pack tier, you get access to the Game Boy Advance library, which now includes Dr. Mario & Puzzle League. Released late in the GBA's lifespan in 2005, this compilation cartridge bundles an updated version of Dr. Mario with a portable iteration of Puzzle League.

Puzzle League is the same block-matching franchise originally known as Panel de Pon in Japan and Tetris Attack in the West. Intelligent Systems and TOSE handled the development for this GBA release. They stripped away the various character licenses (like Yoshi or Pokémon) to focus purely on the core competitive puzzle mechanics.

Nintendo's pace with these retro additions has been unpredictable lately, but the Game Boy app is quietly becoming one of the strongest perks of the base subscription. Getting a major first-party milestone like Wario Land alongside weird third-party experiments like Fortified Zone is a good snapshot of what made the original handheld so successful in the 1990s. The games are available to download via their respective system apps on the Switch eShop right now.