Waluigi’s Mario Strikers Animations Are Dripping With Swagger

Nintendo released a demo today for its upcoming soccer game, Mario Strikers: Battle League. How does it play? Is it a worthy follow-up to the older games? Is it fun? These are questions for which I don’t have answers. What I can tell you is that in this latest game Waluigi retains his crown as the king of swagger, with his penchant for weird poses with roses looking fully intact.

Mario Strikers: Battle League is being developed by Next Level Games and is out June 23 for the Switch. It’s the third game in the Strikers series, and stars various Mario characters taking their conflict to the pitch to play some soccer together, complete with special moves and wild animations. But let’s get to the real reason many of you are here: Waluigi’s amazing victory animations.

First off, here’s Waluigi’s amazing swagger walk after scoring a goal:

I first spotted these wonderful animations thanks to Twitter user @ElliotDuby, who clipped them from new demo gameplay footage shared by NintendoLife.

There’s more swagger where that came from. This is what happens when Nintendo’s resident weird, tall dude wins a match:

Dude just walks off like he owns the world and yeah, at that moment, in that field, surrounded by god-knows-what-shows-up-for-these-things, I guess he does the own the world. He’s the king and he’s back, baby.

Oh, and don’t worry. For all you sickos out there who love some sexy Waluigi x rose action, Nintendo surprisingly has you covered with this alternate scoring animation:

It appears he is recreating the infamous (and erotic) “rose pose” render that popped up last year seemingly for no reason at all. It felt like someone deep inside Nintendo made it, hid it, and then on their last day of work uploaded it to the web for all to see. To that person, that I’ve completely made up in this blog, I say thank you. Because now we have Waluigi recreating that brilliant flex in a brand-new Nintendo game.

Y’know, all this amazing Waluigi action just reminds me that it should be a literal crime that the purple prince of eyeball graffiti continues to be left out of the ongoing Smash Bros. franchise. Look at these animations, that amazing strut, the intense rose action, and tell me he shouldn’t be front and center in Super Smash Bros. 

And don’t give me some crap about “rules” and how he appeared in trophy form or whatever. If a nerd like Minecraft’s Steve can be in Super Smash Bros. Ultimate, then so too can Waluigi, aka the human-ish-personification-of-that-noise-you-make-when-you-pop-a-zit. He’s playing soccer again, for which I am grateful. But he should also feature in Nintendo’s big brawler. He’s earned it. It’s only fair.