That’s been bugging me for a while, and I think something you’d agree with. Is that it seems Nintendo aren’t quite putting in full effort in the recent 2D Mario games. New Super Mario Bros and New Super Mario Bros Wii are excellent, but it seems Nintendo seems to be avoiding putting in their ‘A’ grade ideas for world themes and levels. Really, it just seems they (extremely strangely, despite the 2D games selling far better and being more popular) see them as second tier Mario games and their 3D games as the ‘true continuation’ of the Mario series.
Still, why doesn’t Nintendo just vary up the world themes and settings, or the enemies a bit? Do we really need each new Mario game to be ‘Super Mario Bros 3 tribute edition’? Why the constant use of these eight world themes?
Grass
Desert
Ocean
Forest
Ice/Snow
Mountain
Sky
Dark Land/Bowser’s Castle
Do Nintendo not realise the original 2D Mario games were so popular and beloved because they weren’t just mission pack sequels to the original? Okay, one was… it was called the Lost Levels/SMB 2 in Japan, and did pretty poorly as a result. Super Mario Bros 2 was totally unlike the original in most respects bar gameplay, and it did great. Super Mario Bros 3 was unlike Super Mario Bros 2 and fairly unlike the original, expanding upon the ideas and bringing in lots of new ones. It did fantastic. As were Super Mario World and the Super Mario Land games.
What Nintendo needs for a real 2D Mario sequel isn’t an attempt to just match Super Mario Bros 3, but to outright try and surpass it, to make a different type of 2D Mario game (at least in setting) with some new ideas and such. Like you mentioned ages ago in an article, why not a new 2D Mario game with the giant land type setting or something? Truth be told, Nintendo needs a new Super Mario Bros 2/Super Mario Land type game, one where they’ll put their A teams to work and make a proper sequel,
Why not a Mario game without Bowser Jr and with some new villains or something, like Wart? Or one with a proper haunted house theme for a whole world or something.
I’m not sure what to say, it seems Nintendo is just letting Mario basically ride the success of Super Mario Bros 3 for way too long rather than moving on.
To be fair, it is a miracle we even got Mario 5 in the first place. We (consumers) have been demanding more 2d Mario ever since Super Mario World (18 years ago!). At this point, I was like a man starving of thirst on the desert. Any 2d Mario, in any form, is a godsend. I’m not going to complain how the water tastes but only rejoice that there is water there.
I don’t understand your complaint about Mario 5 emulating Super Mario Brothers 3. If anything, we need more games emulating that. Judging from previous history, we can expect another game like Mario 5 to be released in 2028.
But I understand your point. For those who experience Super Mario Brothers and the sequels when they first came out, what we experienced was an expanding magical universe. People were crazy when each sequel to Super Mario Brothers came out because each game carved out more of that magical world. In an interview with Nintendo Power, Miyamoto described Super Mario Brothers 3 as ‘further exploring’ the worlds of the Mushroom Kingdom.
After some exploration of Peach’s castle in Mario 64, there has been no more exploration of the Mushroom Kingdom. There has been no expansion whatsoever. There was Sunshine which wasn’t in the Mushroom Kingdom (and neither was Super Mario World or Yoshi’s Island now that I think about it). The Galaxy games were a mess of different things thrown together with no congruent world or universe. And Mario 5 was, as you said, a collection of things we have seen before. We have seen ‘Ice World’ and ‘Grass Land’. The Mushroom Kingdom as a universe is not expanding with that. At best, Mario 5 introduced a jungle world which I’d prefer to revisit Giant World (instead, Nintendo saved that for Galaxy 2 because only big budgets and things people want to see get saved for the Mario games people do not buy but Nintendo wants to make).
Above: You won’t see any universe as interesting as this come from Nintendo again. I should know. I’ve been waiting decades…
Nintendo does not see its franchises as ‘worlds‘. They see them only as ‘characters‘. It doesn’t matter if the Mario universe is scrambled in the Galaxy games or non-existent in Sunshine. All that matters is Mario the ‘character’. Every Zelda fan has the same complaint about recent Zelda games: the world sucks and seems flat and dull. This is because Nintendo does not see Zelda as a ‘world’ but only as a set of characters. This is why Nintendo can put out a Zelda game that completely and bizarrely reconfigures the game world to suddenly use trains because Zelda is having tons of dialogue now that reveals her character (“she is scared of mice, LOL!”).
Nintendo sees their franchise progression as ‘character progression’, not ‘world expansion’ which we, in the audience’ want. Sakamoto is a great example of this. In Sakamoto’s world, the Metroid universe is constantly a dull space station that has holograms of various environments. The only thing important in Metroid’s universe is Samus Aran’s feelings. If you ask a Metroid gamer what Metroid is, they will describe the rich world that is Metroid and its atmosphere and its labyrinth.
Why Nintendo only sees “characters” (which they shouldn’t see at all for these ‘characters’ serve only as the player’s avatar in the game) and not ‘worlds’ I cannot say. I am as flabbergasted at this as you are. The only explanation I have is that elder game developers have been making games so long that they have gotten out of touch with common sense and audience expectations. The fact that Nintendo developers defy Miyamoto to secretly inject story into a Mario game, for crying out loud, gives me no hope. If Miyamoto cannot stop them, you know they won’t give a damn what any of us lowly consumers say.
The future of Nintendo software will likely resemble more of the Gamecube type stuff. Nintendo thinks the audience moved away because they didn’t “understand” the material because it was too difficult. But the audience moved away because of the content, because of the substance Nintendo was presenting. Using Sakamoto as an example again, I think he is literally shocked that people are reacting negatively to his game’s content. Nintendo is not used to people reacting to their games in this way.
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