I recently downloaded Super Mario Bros. 2 (the Western one) for the Wii U Virtual Console, and I was struck by how much I was enjoying the game.
Would a 2D Mario that was more like Super Mario Bros. 2 be worth a shot, do you think, or should Nintendo try something else entirely? Because I think we’ve seen enough of the SMB3/SMW elements by now.
Strange, I don’t think the SMB3/SMW elements have yet to be understood by Nintendo.
Nintendo doesn’t understand Mario. (I know that is an odd thing for people to hear because everyone assumes Nintendo understands Mario and knows how to make Mario sell games. Go with me on this for a moment.) Nintendo assumed people bought Mario games because of Mario as opposed to, say, the Mushroom Kingdom. Mario 64 was a spectacular failure. Miyamoto even publicly admitted the tomagotchi phenomenon was more successful than Mario 64. Then came Mario Sunshine which had much Mario but no Mushroom Kingdom. That game was a total bust. And the Mario Galaxies had a scrambled Mushroom Kingdom.
At the beginning of the Seventh Generation, Nintendo did not differentiate between 2d Mario or 3d Mario. It was just Mario. Reggie Fils-Aime asked game developers how they would market the successor to Super Mario World (Reggie was referring to Super Mario Galaxy). It was the insane success of NSMB DS that punctured Shigeru Miyamoto’s arrogance of how he defined a Mario game (Miyamoto had little to nothing to do with NSMB DS).
The reason why NSMB DS and NSMB Wii were successful is because they were the first 2d Mario games in decades. It was interesting to see them played with modern technology and to see them do new things with modern hardware. However, there were significant problems. “This is the only time Nintendo gets to put these games out,” I warned back then. “2d Mario is defined by its fresh content. NSMB DS and NSMB Wii possess no new content whatsoever. They add nothing to the Mushroom Land mythos.” The 3d Mario games were soaking all the assets like music and art while the 2d Mario games got crap. Super Mario Galaxy games got symphonies while NSMB got ‘wah wah’ as its music. It’s fucking insulting. And yes, Nintendo, the consumers can see this.
Shigeru Miyamoto and other Nintendo developers have no respect for 2d Mario players and consider them an obstacle to 3d Mario being popular. It is why Super Mario Galaxy 2 was shipped with ‘instructional DVDs’ in order to convert 2d Mario fans to 3d Mario. Nintendo saw their own customers as the fucking problem because they chose to buy Nintendo Product A instead of Nintendo Product B. This is partly why Nintendo is in financial hell at the moment. All this has been building up. The market wildly responded to NSMB DS and NSMB Wii and Super Mario Brothers 25th Anniversary because we were saying, “We want Classic Nintendo back, not N64/Gamecube Era Nintendo.”
Nintendo cannot read the market at all when it comes to Mario. When NSMB U was first shown off at E3 2011, it was called NSMB Mii where the biggest ‘feature’ was the ability to play as Miis. ARE THEY FUCKING SERIOUS!? It was so insulting, so degrading. Apparently, Nintendo got the message on that backlash so NSMB Mii was renamed to NSMB U and playing as the Miis was not spotlighted. That’s an improvement, but there is still so much wrong with their approach to 2d Mario.
According to NSMB U Iwata Asks, Nintendo went across NSMB U by focusing on ‘level design’. They even had a Nintendo class on ‘level design’ which, I believe, also was the level design was to infiltrate to other Nintendo games. What I gathered is that Nintendo saw the success of NSMB DS and NSMB Wii was due to ‘level design’. I kid you not.
So the common complaint I hear about NSMB U is that it feels like it is a giant DLC. This is entirely consistent if Nintendo focused on little more than ‘level design’.
For those who lived through the 1980s and early 1990s, you know that the new Mario game was the flagship of the Nintendo console. The Mario game was the cutting edge of console graphics, console sound and music (the original Super Mario Brothers popularized background music), and console technology. Super Mario Brothers was beyond any other game at the time. Super Mario World was the posterchild for the 16-bit generation.
But each new Mario game introduced a new chapter of Mushroom Land which snowballed and created the Mario mythos. In an interview in the 1980s, Shigeru Miyamoto said that Super Mario Brothers 3 was designed to ‘further explore each Mushroom World’. Yamauchi is to have said of the original Super Mario Brothers that he knew it would be a hit because it had swimming, jumping in the clouds, being in castles, it was all over the place. Super Mario World had Dinosaur Land complete with Yoshi. Super Mario Brothers 2 had Sub-Con and its fruity universe of Shy Guys and Birdos.
Proper Mario games are a universe. They were not just about ‘level design’. They were a universe in themselves. A Mario game is not just calculating jumps and how to get to the flagpole. A Mario game is immersion into another world like Alice falling down the rabbit hole. When was the last time Nintendo came up with a new world for a Mario game? Nintendo is content to recycle content from the first four Mario games but consumers are not interested in that. Unlike hardcore Nintendo fans, 2d Mario fans have standards.
Many analysis has been made to the poor sales of Wii U despite it having a 2d Mario game. Never once has any analysis considered whether or not this is a quality 2d Mario that 2d Mario fans wish to buy. I can tell you this is not the direction where 2d Mario fans want to go. They can sense the half-assed nature of the NSMB series, and they are on boycott. The fact that you have to pay over $400 to get to the 2d Mario is also ridiculous. Nintendo could bundle NSMB U with the hardware which would make it $350 to get to the Mario game. For some explicable reason, Nintendo refuses to do this. It will bundle in Nintendo Land. It will even bundle in Zombie U. But bundle in NSMB U? No way. In the same way, Nintendo is willing to give away Mario 3d Land for free with a purchase of a 3DS but refuse NSMB 2 that same option (and note how dumb the idea of NSMB 2 is to just ‘collect coins’. Imagine the outrage if a 3d Mario game was designed just on ‘collecting coins’). I suspect the Nintendo developers are actively rooting for 2d Mario to fail because they see the game as ‘beneath them’. Miyamoto has made it clear this is the case with his public statements.
Nintendo fans are not this homogenous block of people who ‘like Nintendo’. There is far more variety if you scratch beneath the surface. People don’t seem to be aware of the boycott phenomenon that occurs with Nintendo products (and has been going off and on for generations). The best example to illustrate the boycott phenomenon is Metroid: Other M. Metroid fans boycotted the game because that is not where they want Metroid to go. Metroid Other M not selling doesn’t mean Metroid doesn’t sell, it means crappy Metroid doesn’t sell. There is a massive war going on between Nintendo developers like Shigeru Miyamoto and traditional Mario fans (2d Mario fans). They both hold nothing but hatred toward one another. You don’t think the 2d Mario fans know that everything they want, such as Giant World or Tanooki Suits, intentionally gets thrown in with 3d Mario (Galaxy 2, 3d Land) while they are left with literally generic crap?
2d Mario fans made Nintendo. Therefore, they have the power to destroy Nintendo. They’re boycotting that they have to pay over $400 to buy a 2d Mario that plays like a DLC download and brings less to the table than Super Mario World back twenty years ago.
Nintendo is in such big trouble with its fanbase. They have destroyed the Metroid franchise. I don’t see the Zelda franchise as recoverable. And I think the Mario franchise may be unable to recover from these ‘third string team’ NSMB games Nintendo keeps putting out.
Should the next 2d Mario not be like SMB 3/World elements? The games haven’t even gotten close to any of the original 2d Mario elements. Even the Super Mario Land games were more interesting than the NSMB factory-made mentality that is being shoved out there. At least the Super Mario Land games offered new worlds and environments to explore. We don’t need ambitious technology, we need ambitious creativity.
Even Super Mario Land offered a more interesting universe to explore than the NSMB factory made junk. Nintendo doesn’t need level design experts. It needs people who know how to create content instead of recycling old content.