Super Mario 3D World is Nintendo’s latest game in the Super Mario franchise.  It came out in 2013 for the Wii U to great reviews across the board.  Is this the perfect fusion of 2D style and 3D gameplay?  Or has the Mario formula gotten stale after so many entries?  Let’s find out in my Mighty Review of… Super Mario 3D World! 

    Let’s get one thing straight: this is the best looking Mario game released thus far and HOLY SHIT.  Iz fuckin gorjus!. The textures, the colors, it’s just got a wonderful style and atmosphere to the world that really gets you into what’s going on.  Seriously, LOOK AT PLESSIE! You can’t GET that kind of adorable without world-class graphics! This game might just be the best looking game I’ve ever played, showing that a good art style combined with great graphical prowess never ages.  I particularly love the water effects both while swimming and with rain going against the camera on certain levels.

The story is almost the same as always.  Since Peach is coming along for the ride this time, Bowser decides to kidnap fairies in jars and Mario and the gang try to save them.  Simple stuff.  It’s Mario.  It doesn’t need a story to get in the way of the gameplay.

Now, the music.  Ugh, I love this soundtrack.  It might be my favorite Mario soundtrack to date.  The jazzy feel to light levels, the remixes of classic tunes, the epic music of boss levels.  It’s all here in full force.  Thank you Koji Kondo.

While there isn’t much to complain about in this game presentation-wise, the locales are another story.  Seriously, you can all probably say it with me at this point.  Grass world, desert world, water world, ice world, poison world, sky world, lava world.  Bowser’s circus is pretty cool, but there was no originality put into the overworld.  If you’re going to take away overworlds full of secrets like Peach’s castle and Isle Delfino, you better have something big to replace it with and this game doesn’t.  

    It’s a Mario game.  You run, jump, beat the clock, get to the flagpole, and get your score.  Simple as that.  The four playable characters each play a little differently, but overall the character you choose won’t change the approach you take to playing all that much.  The powerups are pretty cool too.  Of course you have your mushroom, tanuki, and fire flower suits, but there are also some new additions to the lineup.  The boomerang suit lets you throw a boomerang.  It comes back.  It’s really only fun to use in the bullet hell inspired levels. The cat suit is overpowered but fun, allowing you to climb up walls and dive through the air.  

My favorite is the cherry.  this adds up to 4 more characters you control on screen and can actually make playing the stage harder.  While it does technically make survival easier, most stages in which you get this powerup require you to get as many clones to a certain part of the stage as you can. This makes you take a completely different approach to the stage and it’s really tense.

    The levels have a lot of variety, with a new trick or gimmick being thrown in all the time.  Enemies have a lot of cool new tricks too.  The sheer amount of stuff to do in this game is great.   In addition to getting to the top of the flagpole, most stages also have a stamp and three green stars to collect which unlock more stages.  These are really well hidden, sometimes unfairly so, but normally they just take a thorough look through the level to find.

    There are a few problems with this game though.  I found the difficulty to be really low this time out.  I understand that this helps when playing with four players and everyone shares a life pool, but I really only felt a challenge when playing the post-game levels, and even then the challenge was simply collecting the green stars.  The bosses were really lame this time too.  Not only were they simple, but they were often reused with only minor changes multiple times.

    The multiplayer, while fun at times, can be really frustrating.  And the fact that everyone’s lives are pooled together makes for arguments really quick.  When you’re playing with someone who’s new to video games, you constantly have to wait for them to catch up, while playing with someone who knows what they’re doing results in a fight for who the camera points to.  I would have liked this better if there had been an option to play split screen so that both me and my friend could go where we wanted without the other having to tag along or try to keep up.  And the lack of online multiplayer is pretty disappointing.  Still, if you’ve got a little brother or a kid who can’t really play yet, but wants to, this is a good way to get them in.

    I’m also not a fan of the general concept of this game.  I get that the idea was to turn Super Mario World into a 3D game, but it left the whole experience feeling uninspired.  When I play a 3D Mario game, I like to explore the worlds, spend time getting to know them, get a feel for what’s going on and the uniqueness of everything.  When I play this game I just want to get to the flagpole.  I blame this on two things- first, the time limit is arbitrary in all but a few levels and doesn’t add much to the experience.  Had I been left to play and explore the levels I think it would’ve been a lot more fun.  Second, the levels are a lot more linear.  It really does feel like Super Mario World has been given a z-axis.  My biggest complaint about Super Mario Galaxy was the linearity and it’s been amplified tenfold here.  I wish Nintendo would bring back the open levels from Super Mario 64 in which you get dropped in and in most cases you can get any star in the level right off the bat.  It takes creative and intelligent level design that can either be incredibly fun if done right or incredibly frustrating if done wrong and at this point I’m wondering if Nintendo abandoned the concept out of laziness or fear of not having the talent to pull it off anymore.

In the end, if someone on the street were to ask me what a Mario game is, this is it.  It blends both the 2D and 3D styles of play into a very fun experience.  It’s got everything Mario written all over it.  While it is probably my least favorite 3D Mario to date, it’s still a fantastic game.  I hope Nintendo’s next swing at the 3D Mario franchise has a bit more oomf, but until then my mighty review score for Super Mario 3D World is… 8.5 Plessies out of 10.