Wario Land 4 - Wildflower Fields [S-Hard] score run (32810)
Channel: Michael McKenzie
Date: 24/11/2014

This is the only stage on any difficulty I can see no way of perfecting. There are two currents with a total of six fish enemies in them, and while you can make multiple attempts at the first three, the third of those is in a really uncomfortable position (to the point where getting the coins the way I do is essentially sheer fluke), and the second current you only get one shot at, and you can't force the fish to move around before going up it, so you have to pick them off on your way up at the cost of the 10 coin crystals on the way up. So this stage won't ever be perfect because of this forced trade-off, but for the record I missed 140 coins, so 32950 is the theoretical maximum.

Anyway, this stage is ABSOLUTELY TERRIBLE even besides that. Here's many reasons why:
- That zip at the start of the stage very rarely works, and I don't know why it does when it does. If you don't kill the fourth enemy in the second room, you'll land straight on it if you don't go up to the top.
- Said enemies at the bottom of that room are terrible because they respawn basically whenever you turn around in that room (which is very often because you want to kill off the bees, more on that later) and you can't kill many of them until you've got eight hearts.
- The bees are terrible, at least early on, because you DON'T want them to pollinate any of the flowers until after you've cleared the room of enemies. I think I had one of them pollinated early but I managed to save it somehow. You can't touch the bulb until it goes orange, that's when it gives the most coins.
- Obviously the currents are terrible too, but especially so because there's no way back on the second one. I found a safer way to deal with the last fish in that one though (which would actually have given me 10 more coins!): just go right past it and hover in the still water about two thirds of the way to the right for about 10 seconds. As soon as you hear the sound of it dashing, quickly jump out to the door, then wait for it to do a full cycle around again and you should have enough time to hit it from the left as it comes up.
- As if all that wasn't bad enough, it's the longest stage in the game, clocking in at nearly 20 minutes, and through all that time you can't take a hit. Well, you can, but you have to get progressively further out of the way hearts, and dodge more enemies in the second room. It just gets really messy, and it's more trouble than it's worth.

I still got all six of the 100 coins off the most troublesome fish, so I'm pretty happy with how this went. Beat it if you can!