Wario Land 4: Fools Demise

Would you agree with me in saying that clickbait channels are the worst? Want to know what's even worse than that? Clickbait channels intended for children. The everyday average person would probably ignore these channels but for myself? I can't help but have a fascination for them. Everything they make and present is hot garbage but hey, we all know how the saying goes. There was this one channel I was interested in, called ClippyStippy. Made a whole bunch of videos giving "reviews" for old games on some genuine old consoles but it'd always be a bootleg version of a classic game. Probably was just a way for him to make some easy cash back by not spending too much on vintage copies of games people actually cared about. He had everything from a NES to a Genesis, he even had a couple of handheld consoles like a GBA or a Game Gear. Used to be decently big, had 200K subscribers from what I remember. That was until a couple days ago his channel was deleted and Clippy fell off the face of the earth. The channel was the only social media he had so when it was gone, he effectively disappeared. No one knew what happened to him. After having some time to reflect and mentally prepare myself, today I'll tell you the truth.

It on the day of the channel being deleted. I was browsing YouTube listening to some music while I was ignoring work when I got a notification from Clippy. Clicked on it immediately and downloaded the video as soon as possible, something I did pretty often with these clickbait channels since a few of them had a tendency to get videos deleted because of one reason or another. While the video was downloading, I made a start on watching the video. Only a few seconds into the intro with Clippy clapping his hands to a song he made, the video just froze. After refreshing the page, I got an error screen stating "This Channel Does Not Exist." Not the video, the channel itself. Looked around YouTube and Google to find it but as the error page said, ClippyStippy was deleted. I was both disappointed and immensely interested. What was in that video that made the entire channel deleted? Got to my downloads folder to see that the video was thankfully downloaded in its entirety before the channel was deleted. I got myself a drink and then pressed play, ready to watch the video.

The thumbnail for the video was just Clippy's hands holding a GBA with the screen displaying a black text on a white background that simply said "Wario Land 4: Fools Demise". A bit different from the usual presentation of the bootlegs Clippy got but still something of note enough. When the video started playing, it went through the annoying intro where it was Clippy clapping his hands together and running around his house that had shelves upon shelves of cartridges for games while some stupid song he made played. The video began proper with the camera focused on the table as Clippy's hands were laid flat on the table. He waved hello to the camera and started to talk:

Hello everyone! Welcome back to my channel, the place where you'll find everything you need to know about classic games!

He always had a tendency to talk in a higher pitch than he usually talked. That and enunciate the parts of some words wrong, like emphasising the "nel" in "channel" or "es" in "games". Made him both fascinating to watch and awful to listen to.

Today we have a very interesting, very early Halloween video! Now all of you kids must've heard of Wario Land 4, yes? If you can remember my last video on it, we all gave it a score of 4/10 for both it being the "fourth" game of the series!...as well as some clunky sections. But here's a little fact you may have not have heard...Nintendo made a Halloween edition of Wario Land 4!

It was an obvious lie but for the kids watching, I can see them believing that fact. He'd made similar claims about there being a Christmas edition for Sonic 2 and a Easter edition for Ninja Gaiden.

It took a long while for me to find a copy of this rare edition but after some bargaining, I finally got it! Feast your eyes on this!

He took out a GBA case box that had obviously been drawn over by the person who previously owned it. The new drawing that was over the original cover was a lot more professionally done than other bootlegs though. It was pretty simple too. Just Wario standing in the dark with a spotlight shone on him. His face was covered in a lot of shadow, the only parts of his face that could be seen was his moustache, nose and chin. He looked almost solemn looking down. It honestly unnerved me a bit. But Clippy's high pitched voice soon got back, dragging me back down to his level.

Creepy thing isn't it? How on earth did they get this sold on shelves?! Anyways, let's get this popped in and start playing.

Clippy then took the time to take the cartridge out of the box and then slot it into his GBA. Not a usual thing to happen in his videos since this part was usually cut out. At the time I guessed that Clippy forgot to edit this part of the video before uploading it to YouTube. If this was an unedited video, maybe something was left in that was banworthy? That was the thought process at the time and I guess in a way I was right. I'll be getting to that soon but for now, he had finally booted up the game and held out the GBA in front of the camera. A split second of the "Nintendo Presents" card was shown before it hastily cut to the screen that was on the thumbnail. The intro music from the original Wario Land 4 was still being played as if the intro animation was still on, which made things a bit odd.

And here we are, Wario Land 4: Fools Demise! Such a spooky title, I sure hope Wario is going to get out of this game in one piece!

Clippy pressed a button and the intro where Wario runs to the golden pyramid started, with some noticeable changes. The whole pyramid was textured black with a night sky instead of day. Wario got to the entry point of the pyramid and a new animation played where he looked behind him nervously before shaking his hand and giving a haughty laugh and entering the place, psyching himself up as it were. The music from the intro kept playing as it normally did as it slowed down yet instead of transitioning to the next track it just kept getting slower and slower. Wario got to the hole in the floor, with the black cat nowhere to be seen. He took a deep breath and jumped down inside. He kept falling until he reached a resprited entry passage. Instead of purple it was a dark shade of red, with a couple of unlit torches on the walls.

Goodness, do you recognise that symbol? I guess the people in Japan didn't think much of this when it was released.

He pressed the button to continue and he was brought to a single large room. It was so spacious and massive that it extended past the screen. The light from outside of the room only made a single door visible with the rest of the room cast in shadow. He continued onwards and entered the door which was just black aside from the frog portal item. Wario jumped on it and then into the portal. The loading screen popped up and then ended, immediately throwing him into a strange custom level. Clippy barely had any time to look around since he immediately landed on another frog timer than began a timer for 6 minutes and 56 seconds. I actually took the time to pause the video to look closely at what the people behind this bootleg did. It had the background of one of the outside jungle levels but it was heavily edited to look like a forest fire. Splintered burning wood and fallen down trees were littered all over the place. Red rain droplets were pouring down from the sky, which drew my attention to the stage itself which had been textured to look like raw and bloodied mincemeat. There wasn't much of a challenge platforming wise as it was just a straight mad dash from one end of the level to another. I unpaused the video and watched as Clippy ran as fast as he could, not deciding to explore or comment on his surroundings. Eventually he ran to the next section of the level where things began to take a turn for the worst.

The room was just a simple boss room with grey stones as the floor, almost everything cast in heavy shadow with 3 unlit torches on the upper parts of the two sides of the room. Then the first boss of the original game, Spoiled Rotten, suddenly appeared already in his second phase where he had an ugly "gonko" face as he cried from getting hit. The "Hurry Up!" music had changed into a slight remix when the boss showed up, having it be pitched down a bit with the bassline removed from the song. Clippy immediately started shoulder bashing the thing to death, when it got to a new third phase. Its gums shed away to reveal a lot of teeth and its eyes came close to popping out of its skull as a torrent of tears came out of him.

Oh...Oh! That's really strange, quite surprised they put that into the game...

Once he kept shoulder bashing him until he exploded into little eggplants, the first torch on the wall lit up. With that, it brightened the room a bit to show that the walls in the background was textured a dark shade of red like in the entry passage. After a moment, the second boss of the original game turned up. It was sprited as normal, a strange plant monster coming out of a floating crown. Thankfully for Clippy the ladders from that boss fight turned up here so that he could get a move onto slamming down onto the thing and draining its health bar. Once the plant was dead, it disappeared in a puff of black smoke and the second torch lit up. The background was then revealed to have a hole in the ceiling, showing nothing but pitch black up there.

Isn't this...interesting, kids? The wonders of game making huh?

The cuckoo clock boss then showed up, this time already in its second phase as a bird in a bag with bat wings just like the first one in this bootleg. Unlike the original game where the bird was flying however, it limply crawled on the floor with its expression changed from smug to fearful. Clippy needed to do a ground pound to drain his health bar, it led me to taking note of the fact that the boss wasn't fighting back at all. It was seemingly just there to drain time, which had now been reduced to about 3 and a half minutes. Once it lost all of its health it sank into the ground as a pile of bones and the third torch was lit. Now the stage below Wario was shown to have screaming faces embedded within the stone, streaks of blood coming from their eyes and mouths. Clippy started to speak but he was stopped with a bad coughing fit.

Sorry...that was rude. What I was going to say...was that this is a lot more graphic than I expected out of a Nintendo game...

When the floating teddy bear boss appeared the song changed again, the volume on the drums were turned up which started to drown out the melody. The boss itself was mostly unchanged but when the final hit was given, it fell onto the ground and exploded in a shower of black blood. The fourth torch was lit to reveal that there was a black pentagram on the background wall. Clippy was just silent at this point, aside from the occasional cough. The catbat boss then appeared, who had been reduced to just crawling on the ground as it coughed up blood and bile from its mouth. Some more ground pounds came and it just laid there as a heap on the floor. The fifth torch lit up to reveal spikes coming out of the background, punctured limbs and screaming corpses on them. The timer was at a minute and a half as the final boss from the original game Golden Diva appeared. Her sprites had been changed to have her look as if she was burning, her skin sloughing off of her face and arms revealing scorched muscle tendons and bits of bone. Her boss fight was more or less the same as it went in the original game, with Wario needing to throw a variety of objects at her to drain her health. Every time her face changed however, more skin and muscle came falling off until it was just her skull with her eyes drooping down onto her cheeks. Once the final blow was given, she puffed away in an explosion of black smoke. The music immediately cut away to a ticking clock sound as the sixth torch was lit.

Clippy was starting to cough immensely hard at this point, one of his hands went off screen to bump his chest. It didn't help as a cutscene played where, now that the room was fully lit, a final boss appeared from the background with only 40 seconds left on the clock. The new boss was large enough for it to only depict its head. It was of a blackened goat's skull, the horns twisting around into its cheeks. The eyes were of a pure dark red, its teeth jutting out of its mouth in odd angles. It laughed as it looked down upon Wario in a deep and harsh tone. The sound of it drowned out any other sound that could've been heard, even Clippy's coughs. The fight began with the boss bringing out some skeletal fists to slam down onto Wario, with Clippy barely being able to dodge. The only way he could damage the boss was to shoulder bash the fists as they went down but as the clock went down to zero, they ended up being too fast for him to hit. When the clock eventually struck zero, I felt my heart sank as I witnessed what happened.

Instead of coins being drained away from Wario, it was his blood. All of his health was being drained away at a slow pace as the boss withdrew his fists and just laughed at him. Wario became more sickly and bloated as the blood drained, his skin turning a yellowish green as he got slower and slower. When his health got low enough, maggots and roaches flew out of him as Wario stood still. His flesh dripped off of him as he fell down and his health was reduced to nothing. The game then immediately cutted to the game over screen that was made for this thing. It was the cover art for the game but Wario's face was now fully visible. His mouth had greenish grey mush inside, with maggots squirming inside of it. His face looked as if it had insects crawling underneath his skin. And his eyes had been replaced with bloodied, gold coins. Clippy could only cough in response, splatters of blood hitting the table.

...I...have...

I ha..ve...to pla..y...aga...in...

He turned off the console and then turned it back on, trying his best to get the game running again. The game got to the "Nintendo Presents" card before it immediately cut to the game over screen again as the boss's laugh came back on. Text had been overlaid on the screen on top of Wario's face saying:

YOUR GREED IS WHAT CONSUMED YOU YOU'LL NEVER BE ANYTHING MORE THAN A HUSK NOW

Clippy dropped the GBA onto the table as his coughs grew harder. Cockroaches and maggots started to spill out from behind the console as his coughs began to sound like he had something in his throat. Clippy then stood up from his seat and tried to run away, holding onto the camera stand as support. All that he was able to do was fall onto the ground, the camera hitting his chest as it showed off his face. Clippy retched and heaved until he puked, a torrent of mush that had maggots swarming inside coming out of him. Cockroaches crawled out of his nose and ears as he moaned in agony, shaking and jittering in place. His eyes then swelled up as they suddenly popped out of his skull, revealing rotten and mushy flesh behind them. I couldn't bear to watch anymore of it and I clicked off of the video and slammed down my laptop.

For the past couple of days I've been thinking about that video. And I'm heavily certain that video will be in my memory for the rest of my life. I don't know on whether or not that video is fake and quite frankly, it's too disturbing for me to even consider. If that video was faked, then thank fucking god that channel was deleted because that would be an immensely sick joke on his part. And if the video was real? I don't want to think on that possibility anymore than I've already done. I won't be sharing the video, I'm sure no one else needs to see something that awful in their lives. But I feel as if it's important to write down my experience with the video and to share it on the internet here. Because if that video was fake? Then have it be a warning for anyone wanting a Clippy comeback because he does not deserve a platform after making that video.

And if the video is real?

Then it's a warning to never play Fools Demise.