Have you seen the Super Mario 3D trailer? I assume you have.
Here it is for quick reference: 
Well, I’ve seen it several times now, including on my 3DS, and I have to say it looks like Miyamoto has taken EVERYTHING you said to fix about 3D Mario and is now trying to implement it with Super Mario 3D.
I’ll list everything I spotted:
– Power-ups last until you get hit by an enemy or get a different power-up
– Levels seem to be structured so that your only goal is to reach the flagpole (there’s a flagpole at the end of the trailer)
– There are world and level numbers, so apparently you don’t revisit levels you’ve beaten (unless it’s in the style of Mario 5 or something)
– More focus on platforming and stomping enemies
– Lots of 2D areas (a la Super Mario Galaxy 1 & 2)
– It appears to have the Koopa Kids (the video looked like it had a fight with one of the fat ones)
All of this is just shocking. I think there is simply no way that Miyamoto did all of these things on his own without someone making a list of your complaints and presenting them to him. I mean, you’re the only person I know who complained about Galaxy’s content and said that the whole space theme made no sense (well, I think maybe Yahtzee said the same thing). Certainly, I haven’t seen anyone else list the issues about finding stars and whatnot. Now look at Miyamoto said about that at E3:
“I think you’ll notice the environment is very different from what you saw in Galaxy — it’s a return to a traditional world,” he said. “In the last games Mario journeyed to space, and it gave me a lot of opportunity to reflect on what a Mario game is all about.”
It seems that Miyamoto will only listen to customer complaints when it will apparently help him achieve something he wants to achieve – like making 3D Mario more popular. The sad part is that this game won’t make 3D Mario more popular – despite the way this game looks, it has Galaxy written all over it, but with a different content proposition. It’ll be lucky to reach Super Mario Galaxy’s sales. I wonder how 3D Mario fans will react to this game, because it’s the first title to abandon the Star Finder Mario structure.
Let’s see if Miyamoto has the balls to listen to your complaints about Zelda and content recycling in 2D Mario. Of course, I doubt he will. That wouldn’t suit any of his goals. By the way, there are some other real “gems” in that article I linked.
I highly doubt anything I said influenced Super Mario 3DS. Many of those complaints have been made ever since Super Mario 64 came out.
One thing I know they realized they did wrong in Galaxy was the absence of the Blue Sky. They know that the Blue Sky was a big thing in Super Mario Brothers. Super Mario Brothers was one of the first games to have a background that was not black. The Blue Sky was a shock. This is why the title screen of Super Mario Brothers just shows off the sky.
In Galaxy, the background is black. You can see in Galaxy 2 how they tried to fix this.
Super Mario Galaxy is Miyamoto’s first intentional attempt to bring the 2d Mario crowd over to 3d Mario.
Above: When Galaxy failed to sell in Japan, Nintendo put out this commercial to try to get those backwards 2d Mario people, who bought NSMB DS, into Galaxy. “Kooo- pah” I love how he says that!
Super Mario Galaxy 2 is the second attempt (and included instructional DVDs as seen here.)
Above: If you do not like 3d Mario, you’re apparently a retard and need instructional videos. Note that these DVDs went to Europe and Japan where 3d Mario doesn’t sell too well.
Super Mario 3DS is the third attempt Miyamoto has made in getting the 2d Mario over. He is putting in all the stops from the Tanooki Suit, older staples of the 2d Mario games, even the levels revolving around a flagpole instead of a star. The only thing missing is to make the game 2d.
So why go through all this trouble? Why not just make a 2d Mario instead? What is so freaking important about 3d that this is the third attempt to get 2d Mario into 3d Mario? Wouldn’t it be easier to get 3d Mario fans into 2d Mario?
“How’d you do that, Malstrom?”
Easy. The 3d Mario people are very much attracted to production quality and imagination in the game world. NSMB and Mario 5 were disappointing to them not because they were in 2d but because of how sterile the game world was.
Super Mario 3DS market performance will be very interesting to watch. Will Japan and Europe buy it? Seeing their tepid reaction to the 3DS makes me think no. I think the usual 3d Mario fans will be unhappy with it because this is the first time a 3d Mario game has gone backwards in production quality.
Mario 64 -> Mario Sunshine -> Super Mario Galaxy -> Super Mario Galaxy 2 all went up and up with the production quality. Super Mario 3DS will go downhill from the Galaxy games.
Miyamoto’s approach to Super Mario 3DS is extremely superficial. 2d Mario fans like the fast paced arcade action that only 2d platforming can provide. 3d Mario has a Tanooki suit that doesn’t fly, levels that are floating out in the nether and don’t feel connected to an actual universe, and even has the sterile art style of NSMB in it.
Miyamoto twice said that a 2d Mario game was being made on the 3DS. Yet, where is it? NSMB was shown at E3 2005 so another 2d Mario should be shown at the first E3 since 3DS launched. Perhaps he was referring to Super Mario 3DS. What I think happened is that Super Mario Mii was the 3DS 2d Mario but they are moving it to Wii U because they have problems trying to show off the new device.
Remember a post I made a while back saying that Wii’s successor console should have Super Mario Brothers 6 at launch. All they would have to do is show a trailer of it and have the raccoon tail. People would cry in happiness.
Well, there is a 2d Mario appearing on Wii’s successor but is an abomination. Here’s why.
Robert Reed (the actor who played the father on Brady Bunch) once wrote a letter to the Brady Bunch producers complaining about the inconsistency in tone of how that silly little show was written. He compared it to a scenario where the surgeons from M*A*S*H are in the operating room, when, suddenly, who should burst in but Adam West’s Batman. Now, it’s conceivable that this M*A*S*H Batman is a mental patient, deluded and tragic, but it can’t really be the same Batman from the world of that TV series and still exist in the grimmer, more naturalistic world of M*A*S*H. Conversely, Alan Alda’s Hawkeye and Cesar Romero’s Joker with makeup over his moustache couldn’t meet up on the streets of Gotham City and start plotting Batman’s demise in a giant cream puff, at least not without fundamentally altering who Hawkeye is. These characters exist in different universes; they function by different rules.
In the same way, putting Miis in Super Mario Brothers is like putting Adam West’s “Batman” into M*A*S*H. The show would become an abomination.
The reason why Miis work is because they are not Mario. The Wii Sports audience is not someone who looks at video games as a form of escape. Putting Mario in Wii Sports would not work (as those who suffered through countless Mario sports games will attest). The reason why Miis can work in Mario Kart is that Mario Kart is not used as a form of an escapist adventure despite the fantastical tracks. Mario Kart is very sports-like.
Super Mario Brothers is an action game but is also an adventure. It is not just about jumping on Goombas but is going traveling across a map to a destination. Even in the original Super Mario Brothers and even Doki Doki Panic, the levels were constructed to give the sense of adventure. 1-1 you are on the surface. 1-2 you are underground. 1-3 you are in the sky. 1-4 you are in a castle. These are not levels floating out in an ether with no connection to each other. They were snapshots of lands where, placed together in the mind’s eye, is what we call the Mushroom Kingdom. What happened when you beat 1-1? The game showed you entering a pipe that took you underworld to 1-2. Mario does not ‘magically’ disappear and reappear there. And at the start of every new world, it shows Mario leaving the previous castle behind. Even the original Super Mario Brothers shows a more connected world than the modern Mario games.
The Miis in Super Mario Brothers are not only absurd, it signals that Nintendo has no plans on making Super Mario Brothers Mii an adventure through a coherent universe. This is extremely important because it was the coherent universes of Super Mario Brothers 1, 2, 3 and 4 that created the soil for plants like Super Mario Kart, Paper Mario, Super Mario RPG, all the Mario sports games, and 3d Mario to grow. I remember when Mario 3 and 4 came out of what an impact they had precisely because they fleshed out Mushroom Land more.
Nintendo is very protective of its characters such as Mario so they are not misused. But Mario is not the substance of the Mario Franchise. Mushroom Land is the substance of the Mario Franchise. 3d Mario gets away with doing nonsensical things with Mushroom Land (like turn it into a broken apart universe in the Galaxy games) because no one ever associates 3d Mario as the main Super Mario Brothers games. 3d Mario has always been seen as a spin-off series like Paper Mario or Super Mario Kart.
I have no interest in Super Mario 3DS for the obvious reasons. But I have no interest in Super Mario Mii for the reasons stated above. It is not coming across as a Super Mario Brothers game but as third party shovelware product. If this is what Nintendo wants to do with 2d Mario, then they might as well license it to third parties. The end result would be the same.