Hi, Malstrom. I recently read your response to the “Miyamoto’s Other Mario Problem” e-mail and I almost completely agree with everything both you and the e-mailer said. I grew up with Mario World and it used to be my favourite 2D Mario game, but the sheer easiness of the game’s levels has made it almost unreplayable in my older age. I also agree that players should not have easy access to the levels they’ve already beaten, not only because it allows players to grind for lives and power-ups but because it removes all sense of tension and danger from the game’s world.
Mario 3’s level progression makes the game feel like a dangerous quest for several reasons:
-When you beat a level in Mario 3, you can’t return to it. The implication is that you’ve conquered the level so there shouldn’t be any enemies to fight there anymore.
-When you die in a level in Mario 3, Mario is taken back to the last level he beat on the map screen. The implication is that Mario is forced to retreat from the monsters back to the last safehouse.
-When you get a Game Over in Mario 3, Mario is returned to the very beginning of the world. The implication is that Mario has been hurt so badly that he must leave the world altogether. At least if a Fortress has been conquered, Mario can take a shortcut back to the later levels once he’s rested.
The point is that Mario 3’s level progression makes sense in context. It doesn’t make sense in Mario World:
-Why can I pass through levels that are supposed to have dangerous enemies in them?
-Why am I only allowed to save after beating a Ghost House? Ghost Houses are supposed to be some of the most dangerous places in Dinosaur Land and it’s already been established that the dangerous enemies don’t leave after you’ve beaten them.
To be honest, I never felt that Nintendo really cared about the quest. In Mario 3, you had to rescue the kings of the Mushroom World. In Mario World, you have to rescue… Yoshi eggs? That’s pretty lame. Yoshis are supposed to have dragon properties, so why not rescue Dragon Kings or something? That would be so much more awesome. Also, Mario World’s instruction manual plays up the mystery of the Sunken Ship but the secret exits in World 2 actually reveal Bowser’s underground fortress to the player. Way to spoil the surprise, Nintendo!
That all said, there is one big thing that I think Nintendo did right and I think is the reason why a lot of people do prefer Mario World over Mario 3. In Mario World, you cannot see new levels on the map until you actually reach them. The reason why this works is because it excites the player’s imagination, making them wonder where the game will take them next. Mario 3 had similar events like this. Remember discovering Sky World for the first time? Remember taking pipes in World 8, wondering where the game was going to go? Mario World had this kind of effect but on a more constant basis. You might be able to see the castles and ghost houses but the rest of the map was a mystery. And when the instruction manual shows you the existence of Star World, immediately your mind races as to where Star World is and how to reach it. For a long time, I thought there would be a path that takes you behind the mountains and to Star World. The hidden paths in Mario World were something that should have been continued in New Super Mario Bros. on DS and Wii, but Nintendo spoiled it by making the maps more predictable, going as far as to place Warp Cannons on the map screen! Nintendo completely dropped the ball on that one.
I know my post is starting to ramble a bit but I’ve got one more thing to say before I finish. While I agree that the secret exits were used to pad content in Super Mario World, I don’t believe that secret exits are always a bad thing. Mario 3 had two levels with secret exits, both of which led to Warp Whistles. The secret exits were cool because they were rare and the rewards were relatively greater. So likewise, the secret exits in Mario World would have been awesome if they were restricted to discovering Star World, the sort-of-equivalent of the Warp Zone. The multiple paths in Mario World could just have been revealed by beating stages normally, like in Mario 3.
To summarise my thoughts on Mario World, the game feels like it is all about “surprise”. You find a secret exit and get the “surprise” of seeing a new path open up. But then the novelty wears off and there’s nothing to go back to. This is why it feels like Mario World is for children and why it’s so difficult to replay. Mario World could have been much greater if it stayed true to Mario 3. Dinosaur Land was an awesome place to explore after the Mushroom Kingdom.
You’ve summed it up very well.
Mario and Zelda were developed at the same time by the same developers. Both games influenced another. Mario’s arcadey elements made Zelda arcadey. But Zelda’s Adventure-ish elements actually entered Mario.
In Super Mario Brothers 3, you could obtain items, hold them, and use them when you want. You could go to Toad Houses and be given a power-up. There were mini-games like the card flip which rewarded power-ups. They were so much fun, and they are something that would appear in an adventure game. Those elements appeared in Zelda and no one notices them. But when they were put in Mario, it had a huge effect.
The coolest thing introduced in Super Mario Brothers 3 was the maps. Maps were already in Zelda along with an overworld. But no one placed maps in a platformer before. Once Mario 3 did it, every platformer game began to do it.
Maps are such a powerful tool used in fantasy books. They made you feel like you were on a journey because of the map. You weren’t just doing stage after stage. The map gave a visual representation of your progress. (I wonder what the maps of Sub-Con would look like? What a fun world THAT would be to explore!).
Anyway, about Super Mario Brothers 4, the way how Star World led straight to the secret exist to Bowser’s Castle was very lame. You’re right about that.
Not sure if I mentioned this in the prior post, but Bowser and his henchmen seemed more like adversaries in Mario 3. In Mario World, they seem like clowns. Even Bowser rides around in a clown car. Who came up with that garbage?
In Mario 3, each world represented a kingdom. A Koopa Kid transformed the king of the land into a creature and took over the world (the monsters inhabiting the stages). The Koopa Kid would ride around in a Doom Ship. Remember what happened if you died during a Doom Ship level? I forgot about this because I never die. I was reminded by it by watching someone else play. What happens is that the Doom Ship flies away. It doesn’t just sit there like in Super Mario Brothers 5. The reason why it does that your penalty is not just doing the Doom Ship again, you have to beat the levels the Doom Ship hides behind. If you continued and used the fortress keys to get to the Doom Ship, now you have to beat the levels. It was ingenius.
The Koopa Kids were very dangerous. They had these Doom Ships, were transforming the Kings of the Mushroom Kingdom into something else, and their wands and hopping around could easily kill an experienced player. But in Mario World, the Koopa Kids sat in these fortresses and their fights were just gimmicks. A couple of battles was a ‘whack the mole’ with the Koopa Kid popping in and out of the pipes. Really Nintendo? Talk about lame. And when you destroyed them, you saw ridiculous things like Mario picking up the fortress and kicking it. I know this is Mario which is absurd. But it isn’t stupid.
World 8 I found most interesting in Super Mario Brothers 3. I always imagined I was fighting Bowser’s armada. He literally had tanks, gunboats, and an armada of airships! Wow! It is the first, and only time, that Bowser actually had a military force. I felt like I was fighting his army, his navy, his air force, his palace guards, as well as having to deal with the native levels of the land (which had a colored out apocalyptic look). Bowser’s castle was just awesome. He had statues that shot laser beams. His castle was no joke.
In Super Mario Brothers 4 and 5, the final castle was a joke. In Four, they made it like a ‘choose your own adventure’ with numbers you could choose from. The secret exit, though, really spoiled anything of the final Bowser castle. The final battle of Mario 3, as well as its music, were equally epic. Mario 4 was extremely poor in comparison.
I always imagined Super Mario Brothers 4 to be Bowser’s forces retreating from the Mushroom Kingdom, after the defeat Mario gave them, and hiding out in Dinosaur Land. In other words, Mario 4 is about cleaning up the retreating forces of Mario 3. It is how I could reconcile how lame and easy Mario 4 was. Bowser’s forces were already licked. You were just hunting him down as he fled to another fantasy world.