Metroid: Zero Mission (Game Boy Advance Review)

July 28, 2025 by 4 Comments

Metroid: Zero Mission
Platform: Game Boy Advance
Released February 9, 2004
Directed by Yoshio Sakamoto
Developed by Nintendo
Available with Switch Online Expansion Pack Subscription
Listing at Metroid Wiki

ARE YOU SH*TING ME? How the heck did I miss 33% of the items? I knew I should have used a guide. Oh, and ignore my completion time, because I did rewind and use save states a lot to undo backtracking. At one point, I spent close to an hour trying to figure out how to get one super missile pick-up (this one) when I knew I had the stuff to get it, but I also wanted the best ending. I really thought I’d be further along in my Nintendo marathon, but trying to 100% every game is getting to be a pain, especially since I missed an energy tank in the first Metroid anyway (I didn’t get the one in Kraid’s chamber). For Zero Mission, I really did think I got most everything. I’m genuinely stunned I missed so much. I thought, at worst, I’d have like 90%.

It’s really not accurate to call Metroid: Zero Mission a remake of the original game that I just reviewed. There are winks to the original game, but calling this a “remake” is like saying the 2025 Superman movie is a direct remake of the old 1950s Kirk Alyn serial Atom Man vs. Superman. I mean, they’re both about Superman fighting Lex Luthor, who uses an artificially-created Kryptonite to neutralize Superman while unleashing a doomsday device on Metropolis. They’re practically identical! Except, no, they’re not really that similar at all. Zero Mission is barely even inspired by the original, and instead shares a small handful of similar rooms and a couple gags from the first game. Like, remember this GOTCHA?

I could have also done the Captain America “I understood that reference!” meme here.

But otherwise, this is basically more of a direct prequel to Super Metroid, like Nintendo said, “what if in 2004 we released what the 1986 game would have been like if we had made it in 1994 instead?” It’s Nintendo’s version of wish fulfillment. Which isn’t to say you should expect a game with as grand a scale as Super Metroid, either. I was actually surprised by how small the world of Metroid: Zero Mission is, even if you count all the Zero Suit stuff. I remembered the game being much bigger, but there really are only two “benchmark” boss fights before you tackle Mother Brain. Nintendo’s own version of Bulk & Skull, the dynamic duo of Kraid and Ridley. There’s other boss fights but not a single one of them shakes the “mini-boss” vibe, and hell, I beat Ridley in about twenty seconds. I even called my nephew and his friends over to watch the fight since they’re big Smash Bros. fans. “Hey kids, want to see me beat Ridley?” and the fight was over before the kids even finished talking about how cool a design it is.

Maybe I’m just good at fighting Ridley. I died against both Kraid and Mother Brain, but later on, I beat Robo Ridley only getting hit twice.

I guess I just expected to like Metroid: Zero Mission a lot more than I did. I was certain I’d be saying it’s one of the all-time great Game Boy Advance titles, but I’m not going there. Much like with Super Mario Bros. 3, eh, it’s fine. It just brings very little new to the table. The disappointing thing is, when it does manage to bring fresh ideas, they usually are fantastic. It’s such a small thing, but at one point you’re attacked by these annoying-as-hell space parasites. You can’t shoot them, and once they’re on you, you have to bomb them off. I kind of figured they only existed to be a tutorial for the bombs. Later in the game though, you have to deliberately infect yourself with the parasites, then lead them to these otherwise indestructible heart-shaped barriers. Apparently the parasites like them more than the taste of Samus’ armor.

Chow down, gang! Whoever eats the most will become the new Khaleesi of the Great Grass Sea! (My sister read that and said “that’s not why she eats the heart. It’s to prove she’s carrying the Stallion who Mounts the World you idiot.” I feel so loved.)

It’s such wonderful world building that helps make Zebes feel like a genuinely organic, thriving ecosystem, but those moments are few and far between. Zero Mission just never successfully loses the vibe of being a lesser-version of Super Metroid. It sure doesn’t play as well. The movement and aiming is clunkier and the sense of exploration is muffled. The level design is fine, but it’s not amazing. If they were aiming for a sense of claustrophobia, great. I was kind of surprised that’s something that people craved from Metroid, but again, I got into the series through Metroid Prime. While it has plenty of moments of feeling closed-in, the thing *I* most directly associate with Metroid is the believable alien world. At the time I played Metroid Prime, I’d played a lot of first person shooters that controlled better and had better action, but it was the atmosphere and the settings (and the enemy design to a lesser degree) that immersed me like few games ever had. For a 2D game, Zero Mission does okay at that, but there’s not enough of a push towards giving it that lived-in feel.

This is the only cutscene that works, and it’s for one of my favorite game bosses. A giant one-eyed brain with spikes and tubes coming out of it that’s submerged in a giant glass jar is objectively terrifying. On the other hand, the one right before the Zero Suit section of the game was so damn silly that I chortled. It looked almost identical to the opening of the Mighty Mouse in the Great Space Chase, which a young Cathy Vice most certainly didn’t watch so much she wore out the VHS tape. I showed this joke to my parents and they both looked off into the distance like they were having flashbacks. You know, come to think of it, I “wore out” an awful lot of video tapes that my parents hated having to watch over and over again. I just gave them the stink eye, but they claim innocence. “We would never have broken your treasured video tapes, Cathy. We might have lied about our ability to find replacements, though.” Well, that’s fair.

Everything that happens until after the Mother Brain fight has the feel of going through the motions. There’s not really any new items or abilities. There’s lots of gizmos in the levels themselves that you can use to get around, but otherwise, this is just a boilerplate, paint-by-numbers Metroid adventure, and it’s good, really. It’s pretty much impossible to not enjoy Metroid once they perfected the formula. But I found myself waiting for something to happen that really made me sit up in my chair, and it just never happened. You beat Mother Brain, run away, and it feels like a decent but unspectacular game is over. Everything that happens afterward feels almost like a completely different game. I’m guessing they were aiming for an epilogue vibe. They failed badly at that.

The home stretch leading up to the battle with Mother Brain is probably the part of the game that feels most closely pulled from the original. In fact, it’s actually a safe bet to say that the only twist really is that you’re not playing the original game. It’s a little easier to dodge the bullets shot by the indestructible guns and you presumably have super missiles to make breaking through the barriers go faster. Then you get to the Mother Brain fight, and I felt it’s a massive letdown. It’s staged very poorly, with two single-block platforms and a pit of lava underneath you, with two guns continuously shooting at you AND those orange circles. This was a chance to fix one of the worst last boss fights Nintendo ever did, and they just made it SLIGHTLY more tolerable. The only new aspect is now Mother Brain’s eye must be shot, and it’s just not enough. How come Kraid and Ridley get whole new fighting styles but Mother Brain is only slightly updated? “Because she’s the last boss!” BUT SHE’S NOT! It’s a boring Robo Ridley fight that’s basically the same type of fight as Mother Brain with a small target that’s covered in glass that has to be shattered, then you have to wait for the glowing dot (an eye, if you will) to be vulnerable to shoot it with missiles. Only THAT fight doesn’t have lava and over four other things shooting at you from all angles while you balance on two small blocks. I would have preferred something truly fresh over a retread of the same old sh*t. Have the glass itself fight back, T-1000 style or something.

Yes, the Zero Suit stuff is fantastic. So fantastic that I kind of wish they had the guts to do that as the entire game. It pulls off genuinely scary stealth mechanics in 2D just about as good as a platforming-shooter can do. Okay, so it’s nowhere near as hair-raising as the evil Samus in Metroid Fusion was (the first time I realized a 2D game could be scary), but running from the Space Pirates was always exciting. Even if some of the moments chosen as the spot you run to that makes them give up and turn around made no sense at all.

“Duh, let’s see, I was right on her tail when she ran into this room, but she’s not here. All that’s here is this wall that both her and I can easily jump over. I’ll just assume she was so scared of me that all her atoms depolarized and she vanished. Good job, me! The literal brain that’s my boss would be so proud of me if she hadn’t just been killed by some blond chick wearing a superhero suit. Hey wait a second! I wonder if that blond chick wearing a different kind of superhero suit that I was just chasing knows her? Well, too late to ask, I suppose, on account of her atoms depolarizing. Hopefully when they make a game about this some day, all the little space pirates who play it won’t have their immersion completely shattered when they see how my victory over the blond girl who I’m pretty sure isn’t the same blond girl who killed Mother Brain plays out.”

Okay, so Zero Mission requires a LOT of suspension of disbelief at the ends of the chases, but most of the sneaking and running is very well done. I just wish it lasted a lot longer. Once you get the suit back, not only does the game go back to being paint-by-numbers Metroid, but the final stretch leading to the ending leans too heavily on a poorly-designed Space Jump. Metroid: Zero Mission’s jumping I think is the weakest link of the game. Even when you have the high jump, it never stops feeling too heavy to the point of being slightly uncomfortable. Oh, it’s not a deal breaker or anything. You’ll adapt to its limits and timing because they did a first-rate job of designing the levels in a way that puts a focus on the limits of your jumps. Eventually it’ll be intuitive, and that must be harder to do than it seems from a development standpoint because a lot of games where the jumping isn’t comfy never manage to recover like Zero Mission does, especially as quickly as it does. But it’s always the elephant in the room, and that elephant goes on a murderous rampage once you get the Space Jump.

This is one of those mechanics where you have to pause and shake feeling back into your hand.

Unlimited jumping WITH heavy jumping physics is a really, really bad idea, and so course it’s the primary gameplay mechanic of Metroid: Zero Mission’s climax. It’s actually exhausting to use, and in some (thankfully limited) instances, it crosses the line into outright bad game design when enemies shoot you out of the air. Since the heavy jumping leaves no elegance to the timing of when you have to press the button to jump higher, it turns what should be a fun superpower (it’s basically flying when you think about it) into a mindless button master. A chore that you have to do a lot at the end of the game. After the stellar Zero Suit stuff, it pretty much sours the finale of an otherwise perfectly decent Metroid game.

“Nice shootin’, Tex!”

So Metroid: Zero Mission blew-up what should have been a historically amazing ending to a game that already suffers from feeling more like DLC for Super Metroid with little in the way of worlds that are “new” to explore. BUT, the important stuff is all here. Zebes does feel like a living alien world at times. Instead of feeling like a series of samey platforms in a video game, it feels like you’re an intergalactic bounty hunter exploring caves and structures on a hostile planet. That’s what I want, so giving Zero Mission a YES! was easy. And yet, that Zero Suit stuff was such a tease because it worked. As silly and convoluted as it is, hell, stealth stuff in video games, even games more serious than this, are usually silly and convoluted. If I can’t deal with that sh*t, I wouldn’t like the genre at all.

I wonder if the underwhelming reaction to Metroid Fusion was the reason why Nintendo hasn’t done a full Zero Suit game in the style of Zero Mission’s finale, including using a stun gun instead of a deadly weapon. You know, Fusion had a weird suit instead of the normal one, therefore it’s not what people what. No, that’s not true though. I think people sh*t on Fusion because it’s basically a linear game, and the enemy/item format was lame as f*ck. You can learn lessons in critical failure (and Fusion didn’t fail critically. Nobody hates it or anything like that. It’s just not Metroid as we want Metroid to be) but you should never lose your willingness to experiment. I just find it hard to believe that the company that made an RPG series where the Mario cast are instead paper dolls or a Kirby game where he’s made out of yarn don’t have the balls to do a full 2D Zero Suit Samus game.

All I care about is having fun, and the Zero Suit gameplay is the highlight of Metroid: Zero Mission for the twenty to thirty minutes it lasts, if that. It’s one of the best sequences in the entire franchise regardless of whether I’m talking about two dimensions or three. Of course, the timing of when it happens is jarring and awkward. It makes it feel tacked-on, and it kind of is. The whole Chozo origin story is, too, and while the level themes when the Chozo drop awkwardly in and out of the narrative are cool (apparently the way to my heart is having hieroglyphs or petroglyphs in games) it feels shoehorned. I can’t help but wonder if they originally intended to start the game with the Zero Suit, since that would have made so much more sense, and they simply lost their nerve. I would have also been fine with a game where Samus has to abandon the suit multiple times throughout, perhaps to retrieve other times. They can come up with reasons why to do that. They’re smart. Either way, the Zero Suit deserves its own game. I think Zero Suit Samus could be a huge franchise for Nintendo. Not that they’re hurting for those, but there’s so many Mario spin-offs. Would one Samus spin-off kill them?
Verdict: YES!

“Well…… she can’t draw worth a sh*t, so I guess our experiment to create the greatest artist in the galaxy was a complete failure. I haven’t been this disappointed since that giant, spiky, one-eyed brain we created went evil. Who could have seen that coming? Well, I suppose we should toss Samus in the incinerator and start over. She does pack a mean punch though. Meh, just slap some armor on her and tell everyone to pretend like we were trying to create the galaxy’s greatest bounty hunter. Also, maybe we should stop toying with mother nature.”

Filed under Nintendo Switch Reviews, Retro Reviews Tagged with , , , , , , , , , , ,

Metroid (NES Review)

July 27, 2025 by 10 Comments

Metroid
Platform: Nintendo Entertainment System/Famicom Disk System
First Released August 6, 1986
Directed by Satoru Okada
Developed by Nintendo
Available with Switch Online Subscription (Standard)
Listing at Metroid Wiki

Metroid is one of the original “looks like it’s going to be fun but it ain’t” games.

Well, I reviewed Kid Icarus so I suppose I should also review the game that Nintendo thought was the better bet. They were probably right, too, though I can’t stress enough how miserable I was playing Metroid. I’m not ignorant enough to call it the worst Nintendo-developed game ever, but it certainly ranks among my least favorite games by them. Until this review, I’d never actually finished the original Metroid. Like most people my age, my first experience with the franchise was Metroid Prime, which I LOVED as a kid. It was a major milestone in my gaming life, but the larger franchise really wasn’t. I didn’t even play Fusion or Zero Mission on the GBA until many, many years later and my first experience with Super Metroid was on Virtual Console around the same time I played the GBA games. It wasn’t out of malice or anything. The funny thing is, my older readers probably couldn’t have imagined Metroid as a first person shooter, whereas myself and I imagine many people from my era couldn’t imagine it as anything else!

All credit where it’s due that they really did invent a lot of nifty ideas for how exploration could be handled in a 2D space. Metroid is a bonafide pioneer, and I’m saying that to remind the hardcore Metroid fans who do NOT like people talking smack on the original game that nothing I can say can take away from Metroid’s legacy.

I actually did own the original Metroid for my GBA. I hated it so much that I almost didn’t put Fusion and Zero Mission in my Game Boy Player. It wasn’t just the clunky, laggy mechanics either. By the way, if you’re curious why there’s lag, this is an excellent explanation video from Displaced Gamers, one of the absolute best gaming content creators on YouTube, who I discovered thanks to his video on the infamous dam stage from Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, broken down into layman’s terms for dummies like me. But the movement, lag, etc? That didn’t turn me off Metroid, and hell, I think the jumping is pretty dang good, all things considered.

Since this is a largely negative review, I wanted to start off right away by saying the Morphing Ball is an inspired idea. One of the all-time great gaming concepts. It would have been really easy to just say “meh, make her crawl, whatever.” But no, she turns into a ball that even bounces when you fall. When I was a kid, I wondered “does that mean you can play basketball with Samus?” Ooh, I smell an idea for the next Camelot-developed Nintendo sports game! And while I’m on the subject, bring back Metroid Prime Pinball you bastards!

I could handle a challenge, but what I couldn’t handle was taking damage when the controls weren’t in my hands. I couldn’t handle not being able to aim in any direction but straight ahead or straight up. I couldn’t handle having no built-in map, which seems like a massive oversight even for the time period. Hell, even the original Zelda had a map. Many maps, actually, one that gives you an idea of your position in the overworld and one for each dungeon. I really couldn’t handle the repetitive level design. So, I put Metroid away, but thank goodness I plugged my nose and popped in Metroid Fusion, because THAT was the game where I became a fan of the larger franchise, and eventually I would be blown away by Super Metroid and Metroid: Zero Mission, both of which are a LOT better than Fusion was.

This and the Ice Beam are just about as far as I’d made it in any previous attempt before I was too bored and/or frustrated to continue. But a review requires a full playthrough. And morphine, but despite my pleas, my family said it would count a relapse.

After close to twenty years and probably around three or four attempts to play Metroid, I finally told myself I HAD to finish it because it was the next, logical IGC review. Then I quit after thirty minutes and booted up Zero Mission. But then I rebooted Metroid and decided, screw (attack) it, I’ll cheat. So, yeah, I’m not following the rules of my Mario Marathon, IE no rewinding, no save states, no walkthrough. I used all three for Metroid because my ultimate goal is “find the fun, by any means necessary.” Now to clarify, I rewound only to shave time off exploration. In other words, if I went the wrong direction, I rewound it instead of turning around and fighting my way back. I used save states only at the end of the game with the Metroids, and I did use a full walkthrough of the game from WikiStrategy. BUT, I wasn’t glued to it, and not just because the map was small and couldn’t be zoomed-in without making it blurry. I swear! Armed with these tools, which leaves the raw combat and gameplay, did I find the fun that I never found in Metroid before? Well, no. Because, you know, it’s not a very fun game. Hell, the last hour was spent trying to inch my way towards Mother Brain with no means of fighting back. DOES THAT SOUND FUN?!

Actually, I used a combination of save states and rewind to deal with the Metroids because I couldn’t fight the f*cking things and running away was my only option. It turns out that the first Ice Gun I picked up I got out of order. Weirdly, that part happened before I went full tilt into cheating. Later, I got the second Ice Gun THEN the Wave Gun. Well, doing it that way took away my Ice Gun(s). I didn’t know you couldn’t kill the Metroids if you didn’t have the Ice Gun! The Ice Gun I didn’t intend to trade for the Wave Gun! I figured I’d have a wavy Ice Gun! What I’m trying to tell you is that I HAD NO MEANS TO KILL THE TITLE MONSTERS OF THE GAME! WHY WOULD THEY EVEN MAKE THIS A THING THAT COULD HAPPEN? YOU SONS OF BITCHES AT NINTENDO! I HATE YOU! I HATE ALL OF YOU! I HATE YOUR STINKIN’ GUTS! I HOPE YOUR OATMEAL GETS REPLACED WITH MANURE! MANURE!!!

Metroid is even higher than Little Nemo: The Dream Master on my list of NES games that I seriously do not understand how anyone can be a fan of them or justify some of the level design or mechanical choices made by its developers. There’s some VERY bad game design in Metroid. The pain of the above screenshot is still pretty fresh, literally because I think I injured my throat from all the screaming. I think I had a half-dozen rage quits before reminding myself “you’re right at the end.” I also had to remind myself that I was originally tickled pink when I realized the Ice Gun was gone. When you pick up the Ice Gun, it MURDERS the combat. You can’t turn it on or off, so from the moment you have it, it actually increases the sponge of enemies, which are seemingly not damaged from the act of being frozen, but rather only from being unfrozen. Unless you want to freeze them, jump on them, and plant a bomb on them. If I were a space marine and had to do that, I think I’d probably die because enemies would ambush me while I stared longingly at my gigantic arm cannon saying “what happened? You used to be so cool.”

Or how about this sh*t? In Super Mario Bros.: The Lost Levels, VERY late in the game players encounter fake Bowsers in the middle of the levels, and it’s pretty awesome when it happens. I wonder if Metroid’s designers were sneaking a peek at that game’s development and saying “hey, we should do that!” Because this is a fake Kraid that uses the exact same sprite, only I encountered it well before the real one. And now I’m sparing a thought for someone who saw the Kraid statue in Brinstar, thought this WAS Kraid, beat it, then left this area and returned to the original hub world only to later realize the one they killed wasn’t the real one. IT HAD TO HAVE HAPPENED AT LEAST ONCE! There is some poor bastard out there who remembers the time they walked all the way to Mount Doom, then returned to the Shire only to realize they disposed of the mood ring they got at a flea market instead of the One Ring.

There’s been plenty of people who mention the sloppiness of getting life slapped when you enter a door by an enemy who is placed right on the other side, or the wave gun going through blocks, or the inconsistent item drops. But ignoring all those things, I think Metroid is just not that exciting of a game. There’s no elegance to the combat or the level design. Even for its era, it feels very un-Nintendo like in terms of intuitive combat or navigation. While the enemies explode with a nice crunch, there’s just not enough of them that are actually fun to kill. The lack of flexibility for the combat hurts a great deal. There’s also so many jumping corridors or areas of the game where the platforming layout feels samey. They even recycle the logic of the hidden areas. There’s a few duplicate rooms, the first of which usually has a fake-out hidden door that leads to a dead-end while the second has something in it at the same spot. And now that I really think about it, I’m guessing this is the case because it saved on memory space.

One aspect of the game I didn’t really struggle with was the bosses. Well, two out of the three of them. With autofire and the Wave Gun, I beat Ridley in a few seconds. Curiosity got the better of me and I tried the fight without it and it didn’t end so well for me. My props to anyone who actually got through this back in the day.

I already said the roster of enemies isn’t quite big enough, but you can still take steps to get the most mileage out of a limited roster by spacing them out or mixing them up the right way. Look at all the mileage Super Mario Bros. got out of its smaller roster of baddies. Or maybe I’m wrong. Hell, maybe Metroid’s enemies just have boring attack patterns and there was no actual usage to get out of them besides what we already got. None of them are implemented in a particularly clever way, or at least the ones that aren’t meant to be used as frozen platforms. Or perhaps it’s a combination of poor level layouts with inelegant enemies. The best way I can describe it is the original Metroid’s level design and enemy placement feels like the type of design you would commonly see if a game called Metroid Maker existed today. Tons of single block platforms to navigate and the same clusters of enemies spammed on them until they lose all their excitement, just like so many Mario Maker levels.

For all my bitching, the one mechanical part I don’t mind is the jumping. If Metroid’s platforming physics felt the same way Kid Icarus did, with floaty jumps and heavy momentum upon landing, Metroid would probably not be around today. This original Metroid game relies very heavily on single-block-wide platforms. They’re all over, and the big “escape the planet” finale is ONLY single-block platforms. Hell, these platforming layouts would have been tough even with Super Mario 1’s jumping physics, and that game was considered a major milestone in the history of video jumping. So, why isn’t Metroid? Because I think the jumping is reliable and solid, as long as you’re not buried in the lava. For all its problems, Metroid is a genuine step forward for Nintendo’s education on how to do perfect jumping in platform games.

An even better example of poor pacing is the locations of the items. Nintendo is good at hiding stuff in the Metroid games, but not in this one. Some of the missile upgrade locations reminded me of when I’d pester my exhausted and likely annoyed parents to re-hide easter eggs for the fifth time on Easter Sunday and they’d just lay them down around the couch, whining the whole time about how they thought I’d grow out of this by 36 years old. At one point, you can get five missile pick-ups in a span of a minute or two. I’m guessing they figured players would be overjoyed to find a treasure trove of missile upgrades. They didn’t know yet that hiding five upgrades so close together doesn’t leave any cool down time for players. By not spacing them out, they give players one exciting moment for the price of five. That’s a really lousy deal, especially when there’s plenty of dead spaces that could have been given new life by relocating four of those upgrades.

OH how I hated the whole finale. These indestructible guns combined with bubbles that just spawn from the void. I had to restart this last stretch of the game probably a dozen times just to have enough life to make it through, and it’s not like I was full of life after having no means of fighting back against the Metroids. Then Mother Brain nearly gave me a seizure at the end and I had to take a nap. Man, I hated Metroid. I really, really hated it. But, I got Metroid Prime out of it so, you know, thanks Metroid 1.

The good news is that Nintendo did get something priceless out of Metroid: experience. They also learned that gamers were very interested in the concept of fully interconnected, exploration-based space adventure. The concept was solid. This version might not have been very fun and was sure to age worse than most NES games, but as proof of concept for an entire genre, they could have done a lot worse than Metroid. It does a lot right. Shooting bubble doors to open them. The missiles. The Long Beam being an upgrade instead of the default range of your gun, which should be frustrating but instead feels like an earned moment. The Morphing Ball. Freezing enemies to use as platforms. The Screw Attack. Mother Brain. The whole vibe to this world. The Metroids themselves. And of course, Samus Aran. These are way cooler ideas than an Eggplant Wizard or building up to a climax where a character who already has had wings this entire f*cking time finally gets to fly. Metroid on the NES is one of the greatest foundations in gaming history. But I could have lived without actually playing through Metroid. Every house needs a solid foundation to build up from, but you can’t live in the foundation.
Verdict: NO!

FYI, I played the Famicom Disk version, which has less lag, apparently. I tried to give myself the best possible way of having fun. I didn’t. Sorry, Metroid fans. For what it’s worth I plan on drooling all over Super Metroid soon.

Filed under Nintendo Switch Reviews, Retro Reviews Tagged with , , , , , , , , , , ,

Super Mario Bros. Wonder (Nintendo Switch Review)

July 21, 2025 by 7 Comments

Super Mario Bros. Wonder
Platform: Nintendo Switch
Released October 20, 2023
Directed by Shiro Mouri
Developed by Nintendo
Listing at Super Mario Wiki
$59.99 paid for Mario’s visit to the Betty Ford Clinic in the making of this review.

It took 38 years but Nintendo finally figured out to just run with the “Mario on Drugs” joke.

The above screenshot is from the second level in the game. During the first stage, I was worried that I was heading for another New Super Mario Bros. “I guess this just isn’t for me” experience. And then in the second level, I dropped acid and the piranha plants started singing and having a parade, and I was hooked. Oh they don’t call it “acid.” They’re called “Wonder Flowers” but they have a psychedelic glow to them and they do things like make the pipes come to life like they’re inchworms or cause missiles dropping rainbow smoke trails behind them, and yes, even make you see dragons. This isn’t symbolism, people. This is as on the nose as it gets, and I’m there for it.

The only proof this isn’t really drugs: Mario actually caught the dragon.

For a while, I really thought Mario Wonder was cruising to the title of “best 2D Mario game” with no if’s, and’s, or but’s about it. This was based largely on the stellar level design and batsh*t insane Wonder Effects. But some really head-scratching decisions made it an actual debate, which I’m grateful for because this would have been a pretty boring review for me otherwise. Which isn’t to say you can get bored playing Mario Wonder. Oh no. This is far and away better than any of the games in the New Super Mario Bros. franchise and a return to form for Mario as a 2D gaming stalwart. MOST of the levels are pretty damn amazing, and the three new power-ups are a lot of fun to use. I can’t really pretend this wasn’t the absolute best time I’ve ever had with a 2D Mario game, even with all the problems. Actually, the levels are so phenomenal that it’s kind of shocking the game did anything wrong at all, but it did.

The “Mario on Drugs” stuff really isn’t helped by the fact that the screen becomes trippy during the Wonder Effects. Again, this really isn’t winking. This is a drunk tapping you over and over saying “DO YOU GET IT?”

For one thing, the levels don’t scale right at all, nor are they ordered correctly. In the Magma World, there’s a level where evil popcorn kernels walk across giant rocks that heat up and cool down, and if they touch a hot surface (or are shot by a fireball) they pop and become evil popcorn. But, you can permanently deactivate the heating rocks by hitting them with water, either by throwing a pot of water at them or using Elephant Mario’s ability to store water in the trunk and spray it. It’s a fun stage, but then the stage you unlock is one of the “break time” stages. These are tiny micro levels that have a gimmick attached to them, some of which aren’t even real challenges and are just for funsies type of deals. Well, the break time stage in question is like a tutorial type of stage for the whole “get water on the heating/cooling rocks” concept. That’s not an exaggeration, either. It’s genuinely the type of brief micro stage that you would build to introduce a brand new gameplay concept, except you just finished a massive, difficult world built around the mechanic. What the hell?

This is the big stage in question. I had to beat it a third time to get the hidden exit, which a couple stages in each world has. Mario Wonder, from a pacing point of view, is heir-apparent to Super Mario World. They even have the same initials. Except they don’t because it’s not “Super Mario Wonder” but rather “Super Mario Bros. Wonder.”

I don’t want to imply that the “Break Time” or “Badge Challenge” micro stages are a complete disaster, because that’s not the case at all. Some of them had me smiling ear-to-ear. But the structure of the game, or rather the lack thereof, causes a lot of pacing problems. Sometimes the overworld maps are walled-off and sometimes you’re free to wander off the paved pathway and take a large cluster of levels, full-sized or micro, in any order you want. You also can’t rely on Wonder’s built-in quick travel to give you a proper level ordering either, because it always puts the full-sized levels ahead of the micro-levels. There is an attempt to tell you the scaling. The levels are given a one-through-five rating on their challenge, but I really didn’t feel they were accurate. I beat many four star levels on my first life and died a lot on plenty of two star stages.

Where you’re free to roam around the map, there’s lots of hidden stuff. Rarely a stage, and more typically Captain Toad who gives you 50 purple coins. Since you’re practically picking purple coins out of your ears, I don’t think the trade-off of a less logical level progression was worth it. I’d rather have the game follow a semi-strict linear progression with the occasional branching path. If 1991’s Super Mario World can do it brilliantly and still offer a sense of exploration and discovery even with paved pathways, then it’s proven that there is no need to suddenly allow players to walk around the map.

It feels like the developers just threw together the game’s courses and couldn’t decide on an order, so they gave up on the process almost entirely. But the example in the lava world I cited above was one of those pathway parts of the map. It wasn’t MY choice for how it played out. It was the development team’s choice. This isn’t a nothing-burger complaint, either. Pace and tempo matter a great deal. I put a very high premium on a game’s maintaining one consistent tempo of quality, and Wonder is all over the place. And some of the “break time” levels really are a complete waste of time, offering neither quirkiness nor challenge. It’s been a long, long time since I played a modern Nintendo game that had so many aspects of it that felt like placeholders for something bigger that just never got finished. They also should have probably somehow incentivized the badges that are outright handicaps. The one I hated the most sees you perpetually bouncing. I would never use it voluntarily, but they could have easily added some post-game content just by offering rewards for beating specific levels with specific badges. Without that, most badges will go completely unused outside of their micro-stages.

The new bubble power offers the same type of instakill satisfaction of the classic Super Mario fire flower (which is also in this game) but with the added benefit of being able to use the bubbles as boosts for your jumps. But, what really makes it work well is that it’s not effective enough to be able to use it to cheese stages. Its usefulness for platforming, even in multiplayer, is very situational, but in a good way. Actually, none of the power-ups are overpowered. There’s no p-wings or hammer bros. suits to wreck the difficulty curve. Probably a good thing, since Nintendo screwed the pooch on curve from the format alone. Also, since I couldn’t find a spot to talk about it, the drill power is one of the most satisfying Mario powers when you do a Bugs Bunny attack on enemies. Ain’t Mario a stinker?

And while I’m complaining about things, Mario Wonder has the typical mediocre 2D Mario bosses. Yeah, yeah, I know I’m deeply in the minority on that opinion, but I just never enjoy the traditional Mario “jump on the head” boss fight style. I can, and have, enjoyed it in other games, but for some reason, it’s always a letdown for me in a Mario game. Maybe it just doesn’t feel like it matches the epic scope and scale of the worlds themselves. But the fights with Bowser Jr. in Mario Wonder, even though it tries to change up the formula by giving the battles the “Wonder Effect” after the first hit, never felt big or climactic to me. I couldn’t wait for them to be over with and my motivation for them was purely “I don’t want to go through this again.” Hell, the “bosses” of the airships are a literal single button that must be pressed, and the act of getting to that button was so simple and easy to bypass the “logic” of the chamber, especially if you have a badge that boosts your jumping ability, that I was always startled that the fight was over when it was. I guess I just assume based on the enjoyment of the levels that they’re capable of better bosses.

I don’t think this was the wisest spell to cast, Bowser Jr. It’s right up there with Ralph Wiggum getting the first swing of the sword and stabbing himself through the heart. Holy crap, Bowser Jr. IS the Ralph Wiggum of Nintendo. I just spent five minutes staring off into space, imagining the implication of that. By the way, Mario Wonder’s co-op doesn’t have the old fashioned New Super Mario “bounce off each-other” mechanics, and so I actually had a really great time playing co-op with Sasha.

There’s fifty-six total Wonder Effects throughout the game, but a lot more levels than that, so many effects repeat, and not every effect is a winner. Some are typical video game stuff, like running away from the giant spiked ball, or even returning an old Mario item like Balloon Mario from Mario World. Others are more outlandish, like requiring you to jump in sync with a musical beat or answer trivia questions where, if you look closely, the things doing the trivia look kind of like the viruses from Dr. Mario. All of the Wonder Effects are fun, truly! Well, they’re fun ONCE, and if they were each unique to a specific stage, I wouldn’t even have this paragraph. But I grew bored with several effects. The most annoying repeat is “Wubba Mario” which they must have been really proud of because all four of its appearances happen around the same time and it’s even highlighted in a story-driven level where you rescue a bunch of trapped miners. But it’s really nothing special. I’ve played plenty of games where you’re a sticky mass that sticks to every surface. This has been done, and yet they gave this over to a not-unsubstantial portion of the game, and I kind of hate that they did that. The kids loved it, though.

And actually, I think the levels with Wubba Mario were some of the weaker ones in Mario Wonder. Between its four appearances, they could have constructed one ultimate level that took all the best bits of them and made a full stage out of it, and it would have been awesome and welcome. Or hell, spread it out! It’s a great big game. Nope. It really does kind of hit close to four in a row and it just kills the excitement of getting Wonder Flowers. By the way, you then have to repeat one of those levels, literally just play it one more time, to open the path to that world’s Special Stage level. It might be the best 2D Mario ever, but Super Mario Bros. Wonder is NOT perfect.

There’s also an “easy mode” in the form of the Yoshis or Nabbit, who only can die from things like lava and pits, but enemies don’t damage them and Nabbit doesn’t even get stun-locked. This is important, but first let me say that, like Super Mario World, there’s a bonus Special World where every stage is designed to be extra difficult. When I reviewed Super Mario World and didn’t struggle all that much with Special Stages (which, for the record, I did, the first time I played the game as a kid), someone said “have you considered that you’re just really good at video games?” Which is flattering, but if it were true I wouldn’t have needed over one-hundred combined lives over the course of three days just to beat this one level:

This is one of those levels where whole new swear words had to be invented. I think I got up to eleven syllables for one of them.

It’s called “Special Climb to the Beat” and allegedly jumping to the rhythm is the key to winning. Okay, so I’m tone deaf and I have shaky hands, so this was fated to be my mortal enemy anyway, but it also annihilated the kids too. I sincerely thought I would not be able to finish the game.  I actually finished this review, but that niggling little voice that says “come on, you’re so close to acing the game” started screaming in the head, and I did eventually get to the top. And by the way: I HATE that getting the top of the flagpole is one of the requirements for 100%ing the game, because when I had to replay a few levels to unlock the ultimate final challenge (which is just a marathon of using ten of the badges, though there are a few checkpoints so it’s not THAT bad), for a few of them, the only thing I was missing was touching the top of the flag. There’s nothing worse than replaying a full stage just to do one thing at the very end differently. Anyway, back to the problem with the Yoshis and Nabbit.

Finally!

After beating the wall-jumping stage from hell, Sasha hopped on for co-op, and in fact, we beat four of the Special World levels on our first attempt WITH the purple coins and flagpole. But this is not a +1 in the “maybe she’s just good at video games” pile because co-op made it kind of easy AND the Yoshis made it even easier. Sasha, playing as Yoshi, could not be killed by enemies, and if only one of us was dead, we could come back to life just by our ghost hitting the other within “five seconds” but it’s really closer to eight or nine seconds. So after that stage that killed me a ton, we sort of flew through the Special World. If it took us twenty minutes total, I’d be stunned. Solo? Oh, these stages are brutal. But in co-op? We both died a lot AND beat the stages on our first try. Also, the Special World really isn’t THAT special. What made the Special World stand out in Mario World is that the levels were weird, experimental, and crazy. Well, that’s sort of the whole game of Mario Wonder, isn’t it? Wonder’s Special World stages are harder, but they’re not creatively better because the whole game is this kind of weird, experimental, and crazy.

Now here’s the good news: when Mario Wonder is at its best, it’s pure gaming euphoria. Well, I’d hope so since that’s sort of the point of drugs. One of the many reasons it stands tall over the New Super Mario games is that those always felt like they used the original 8-bit/16-bit games as little more than a checklist. “These are the things we need to put into the games, because nostalgia.” Not Wonder, though. It feels like it used the original games for inspiration to do a game that feels modern and not like a throwback. Which isn’t to say that the games don’t fit with those. The jumping physics are as intuitive as Mario World’s. The cast of enemies is right up there with Super Mario 3’s. The effort made to give each stage its own personality also matches Mario 3’s, and that’s where Wonder really shines. It feels like a true evolution instead of a cash-grab homage.

There are multiple levels in Mario Wonder that are very obviously not designed with co-op in mind. I’m totally fine with that because, say it with me: CO-OP RUINS EVERYTHING. One of the reasons the New Super Mario series is so f*cking bland is because Nintendo put such a heavy premium on the co-op gameplay that came at the expense of the single player experience. Every single stage had to work with four players bouncing off each-other. They clearly didn’t give a crap about that with Wonder, because levels like this one, where you launch super high with each jump, caused more fatalities than a Mortal Kombat tournament. I’m all for it, too.

Like Mario 3, if any stage doesn’t “do it” for you, that’s fine because you’re one stage away from a completely unique experience. Even if the Wonder Effect is a repeat, how the stage is built, and the ebb and flow of it, will almost certainly feel like a one-off. It must be hard to do, because there’s not a lot of 2D platformers that can maintain that for the full length of the game. Even Mario World didn’t completely succeed there. With Mario Wonder, Nintendo has now done it twice in this franchise (probably three times since Yoshi’s Island kind of did it too).

Yes, yes, we all liked Limbo, Nintendo. I wonder if the elongated Mario being framed in silhouette like this was a joke against Limbo the indie game and limbo the thing drunk people throw their backs out doing. “Limbo under the bar when you’re stretched out like this, bitch!”

Super Mario Bros. Wonder is the polished, modern Super Mario Bros. 3, and to a lesser extent, Super Mario World. What stood out to me in Mario 3 is how, in retrospect, Nintendo did a pretty poor job of incentivizing exploration of the stages. They jammed plenty of content if you do explore, but didn’t effectively corral players into it. The most important question a game designer can ask is “why?” As in “why would players find this stuff?” And I don’t think “just because” is a good answer. I don’t think Nintendo knew that “WHY?” was the be-all, end-all design question in 1988, but they sure did by 2023. Mario Wonder is the most effective 2D Mario for convincing players to see everything through natural gameplay mechanics. They asked themselves “WHY?” and came up with answers, and as a result, for all of its glaring flaws, Mario Wonder is the best 2D Mario game. Sorry, Super Mario Bros. 2 and ROM hacks of Super Mario Bros. 3, but you’ve finally been beaten.

As I stated in my Super Mario Advance 4 review, Mario 3 was a game made in Nintendo’s adolescence. As amazing for its time as the game was, it was also still a game being made by people who were still learning how to develop “Nintendo” style games. Almost exactly thirty-five years to the day after Mario 3 released for the first time and Super Mario Bros. Wonder hit stores, and it’s a game made by Nintendo designers who have graduated as game designers. They know what they’re doing now. They ask “WHY?” a lot, and they understand how to maximize every gameplay mechanic. Mario Wonder IS Mario 3, all grown-up. The irony is, there’s still a lot of gamers out there, 50-somethings, who insist they will NEVER play “modern crap” because they just know in their heart the classics can never be beaten. They refuse to grow up, and I’m very happy the people designing games at Nintendo aren’t like them. Growing up ain’t so bad after all.
Verdict: YES!

They really did need better unlockables than this, though. Couldn’t they have given costumes for the characters?

Filed under Nintendo eShop Reviews, Nintendo Switch Reviews Tagged with , , , , , , , , , , ,

Kid Icarus (NES Review)

July 14, 2025 by 11 Comments

Kid Icarus
aka Hikari Shinwa: Palutena no Kagami
Platform: Nintendo Entertainment System
First Released December 19, 1986
Designed by Toru Osawa
Directed by Satoru Okada
Developed by Nintendo
Available with Switch Online Subscription (Standard)

This grim reaper is just so not cool. Sure, this is much better than being Dracula’s flunky, but nowhere near as righteous as teaming up with a pair of time traveling teenagers who are in the afterlife because they were murdered by evil robotic clones of themselves sent from the future by a gym teacher angry that the future is boring.

I’ve been a little too lovey-dovey with Nintendo this month, so how about a game that doesn’t get a YES!? Actually, Kid Icarus is a heartbreaker. The game is no good on its own, but it could have been an excellent first step. There’s something here that’s highly compelling that just doesn’t overcome some terrible design choices and really sloppy play control. I don’t really like the original Metroid either, but it’s in the same boat as Kid Icarus in that both games laid a foundation for something much, much better. But Metroid did get more chances to build upon the first game, and already fun games like Super Mario Bros. and Legend of Zelda got to grow out the base formula with the sequels that improved upon the core game design and especially the play control mechanics. Within just a few sequels, Nintendo had literally perfect jumping physics for Mario, combat mechanics for Zelda, and level design for Metroid. And then there’s Kid Icarus. The franchise that didn’t catch the bouquet so it gave up and became a nun. It’s not fair, really. It had just as much potential as any of their other tentpole IPs.

If you play Kid Icarus, have a second controller ready. In the American/Europe builds, pressing A+B on the second controller haggles with the shopkeepers, who may lower their prices or dramatically increase them. In the FDS version, you have to just blow into the microphone to trigger it. I’m pretty sure no FDS games actually require you to actually speak words to make the mic work. It’s like how I beat the mic games in WarioWare Touched by scratching the microphone. Also, you don’t want to ever max-out your money because you will not get enough credit for collecting money, thus failing to impress the Gods, thus not allowing you to get all four arrow strength upgrades, thus gating you out of the best ending.

Kid Icarus is among the jankiest Nintendo-developed games ever made. It’s sloppy in so many aspects that it’s tough to know where to begin. Play control is the obvious one. I should have saved “skid to my doom my darling” for this game because my most common method of dying was slipping off platforms. But, that could have been a non-factor if the levels were designed for these physics, and they clearly aren’t. Kid Icarus is riddled with things like slip-slide ice platforms, ultra-slow moving platforms, and single-block platforms. Each presents a problem on its own just based on how rough the platforming physics are, before you even take into account that you often have to perform combative maneuvers while navigating all this crap.

Son of a bitch! See, those evil mouths fly around in erratic patterns that make them hard to shoot, and then you have this spongy snowman thing that shoots projectiles at you. It seems like you can duck those projectiles, but if you duck on certain platforms, you almost instantly fall through them. That’s what I found out here, and I burned through a valuable feather.

And then there’s the ultra-jarring tonal shifts. Despite only having thirteen levels, Kid Icarus features a whopping four different styles of level design. The most famous of these is the vertical levels, which represent six of the thirteen stages, and they’re fairly notorious because, as you climb, you also create a bottomless pit, logic be damned. If a platform that had been right at the bottom of the screen is barely scrolled off it, you die if you fall where it had just been. The punishment for falling should be having to make all the jumps again and the risk of losing more health from enemies or hazards. Kid Icarus has too stiff a punishment for failure to stick the landing, and that’s especially true with the rough controls and sloppy coding. Like, look at this:

I’m not ON the platform in this picture. I’m IN the platform. I didn’t do anything special to get there except somehow short the jump without shorting it. It does matter too. Many times, while firing my bow without moving the direction pad at all, I fell off platforms. It’s so inelegant in basically every way movement in a 2D game can be. When there’s nothing under you to catch you, that’s a big problem. especially since the game leans extra-heavily into nail-biting platforming segments. MAYBE if you had the accuracy of Super Mario 1’s controls, this could have worked. But Kid Icarus instead is too floaty and has too unpredictable of momentum. So when the level design is like this:

Kid Icarus is kind of fantastic, at least in terms of the big picture. Navigating the stages, which includes a wrap-around playfield, is exhilarating. The levels look great too, so the game really shines brightly as a thoughtful, original action-adventure with solid combat and a memorable cast of baddies that are satisfying to shoot. BUT, when the level design is like this:

These are moving platforms.
These are moving platforms.

Kid Icarus becomes an unbearable slog and the platforming is NEVER exciting because it controls so poorly and the physics are so inconsistent that it never feels like YOU’RE failing. It feels like the game is screwing you, and it often is. And mind you, this is just one of FOUR play-styles in this game. There’s three more. Three of the thirteen levels are traditional side-scrollers. I guess I must be weird, but I think these levels are much, much stronger than the vertical levels.

The test chambers sadly don’t have you shooting portals. Rather you have to just stay alive until the game says “okay, you’re good” and gives you one of three really fun upgrades. One puts a shield around you, one adds a flame to your arrow that spins around it, and the other gives you additional range. They’re awesome, but the catches are ridiculous. The flame requires you to have two full bars of health, the added range three bars, and the shield four bars. The other catch really sucks: you can’t use these items in the dungeons.

Oh, they’re often still not good. Well, let me clarify: they’re haphazardly designed. For example, level 2 – 2 starts out with not one, not two, NOT three, but four goddamn doors before you encounter a single enemy. You’re supposed to use two of the doors to build up XP in order to get the arrow upgrade. This is where I learned that saving money makes no sense because the Gods get pissy if you’re stingy. But there’s nothing else like this section in the entire game. It’s total amateur hour game design.

Like this here. Kid Icarus utilizes low ceilings to cut off Pit’s ability to jump over enemies, and that COULD have been used to greater effect if they hadn’t put the most basic enemy as the “risk” side of the “risk/reward” scenario. Or if they had given you a way to logic-out which path is the best path to take.

The problem with the side-scrolling levels is they contain none of the exhilarating boldness of the vertical levels. For all the problems that those stages have, it feels like they come from a place of inspiration and there was careful consideration for enemy placement and how it relates to the jumps. I really don’t get that vibe from the side-scrolling stages at all. They certainly make fewer mistakes, nonsensical room placement aside. That’s why I think they’re stronger overall, but they also feel like they’re going through the motions. Hell, large stretches of the stages (like the aforementioned nonsense doors) feel like placeholders that got left in the final design. Don’t rule out that’s what really happened. If you don’t already know, you’ll soon find out why.

Yeah, yeah, I used a guide. The treasure rooms (pictured here) have a sequence to them where you can win every time. What I didn’t know is that the Gods frown upon breaking pots in the treasure rooms. So I didn’t get the final arrow upgrade and thus I didn’t get the best ending.

And then there’s the grand finale of Kid Icarus, where all the janky but memorable platforming action is dumped in favor of one of the worst shmups I’ve ever experienced, and I’ve been playing a whole lot of shmups in 2025. Hoo boy, what a dumpster fire Kid Icarus is at the end. In it, you have to shoot bland targets like falling tiles and an enemy that splits into three over and over and over until you reach a certain benchmark for “doing things.” After the game is satisfied you’re not on cruise control, it’ll let you fight Medusa, which has a safe zone so big that you could build a nursery in it. The level getting there is what drives a stake through Kid Icarus’ heart because suddenly the act of moving is hard. The controls are heavy and unresponsive for the finale, and even if that wasn’t the case, the last level would be a disaster anyway because this style of game is not at all compatible with all the gameplay that came before it. It’s one of the worst final levels and final bosses in any Nintendo game.

How did Kid Icarus turn out so janky when games like Mario, Zelda, and even Metroid, at the very least, control well? Actually, Metroid is kind of to blame, but really it was just bad corporate decisions. Metroid was considered a very high prospect game, so Nintendo devoted all their resources to it while one guy, the debuting Toru Osawa (who went on to direct games like Mario Clash and Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time) had to spec out Kid Icarus all by his lonesome. He had to design the world, the enemies, and most of the levels. He only got a full working team to help him once Metroid was mostly done, and then the team he got were exhausted from doing the already dead-serious space adventure so they usurped his concept of a dead-serious mythological adventure by inserting “humorous” things like the credit card and the Eggplant Wizard.

Kid Icarus was the first game released in North America with the revolutionary MMC1 chip that allowed the NES to do bigger, more detailed games. In screenshots, it looks amazing. But you actually have to play it.

But the thing is, while the staff liberally plied Kid Icarus with humor and stuff like the haggling with the shopkeepers, what nobody bothered to do was refine the actual gameplay. Then the release date was set for the end of 1986, well ahead of when the game could reasonably be completed, so everyone just hung around Nintendo HQ in the freezing cold (apparently the building wasn’t heated) to finish the game. They BARELY finished in time, and in fact, Kid Icarus was only sent to manufacturing three days before it was set to release. Consequently, it wasn’t subject to the same type of play testing and polishing that other games from this era got. Kid Icarus is Nintendo’s E.T.: The Extra-Terrestrial, and it speaks volumes to how talented they really were even back then that the final product is as good as it is. But what we got is a fraction of its potential. Nobody did the responsible thing and delayed it.

Yet another example of jank are these things. Touching them even once costs you the power items you won in the test chambers, which you either have to win back in another test chamber or buy back on the black market. MAYBE this could have worked if you could fight back and reclaim the item before they vanish off the screen. That would add proper risk/reward balance. Well, you can’t because they’re indestructible. What an overall terrible game. Well, except one aspect………

“Cathy, you left out one gameplay type.” I know, but I saved it for last for a reason. Because the one thing Kid Icarus unambiguously does well, it does it so well that I almost want to cry that it’s not the whole game. It’s the dungeons, which are kind of like side-view versions of Zelda’s dungeons. I mean much more than Adventures of Link’s dungeons. They’re designed like legitimate mazes, where you might think you’re plotting the right course only to find out the room you’re making your way to has no means to continue on the path you’re trying to take. Well, at least two out of three of them are like that. Because I enjoyed these levels so much, I put away the guide and it took me quite a while to beat levels 1 – 4 and 2 – 4. Then in the third dungeon (3 – 4), I found the boss so quickly that it took me a moment to process it. I literally couldn’t believe it was placed where it was, which was next to a shop.

The hammers you collect in the levels via the harps or treasure rooms can be used to smash these statues in the dungeons, which free the Centurions that were turned to stone by Medusa. You want to do this because they’ll help you fight the (relatively spongy) bosses. Too bad they have absolutely no survival instinct.

But the dungeon levels worked for me. Oh, did they ever. And that’s why it’s such a punch to the gut that there’s only three of them. I can’t help but wonder if Kid Icarus would have been better off being based entirely around this specific style. Instead of nine total vertical and side-scrolling stages and the lame-ass shmup finale, I would have preferred a game that had eight to ten dungeons. Had they gone that route, I honestly think Kid Icarus might be remembered as highly as Metroid or Zelda. I think the combat-focused maze explorer done in this style and with these themes, separate from Nintendo’s other flagship IPs, makes Kid Icarus stand tall in a crowded field. The problem is, in order to play these three amazing dungeons, you have to play nine mediocre-at-best levels that are really nothing like the dungeons.

There’s no happy ending here, because Kid Icarus is one of the few early Nintendo franchises that they never put a good faith effort into building upon that initial foundation. There’s a Game Boy sequel that I might take a look at soon (Update: the review is up) that apparently has most of the same problems, and then there’s the 3DS game which basically is nothing like the original game, changing the genre and gameplay. These days, Pit is more famous for his role in Smash Bros. than he is as the star of his own franchise. This despite the fact that Kid Icarus was big enough decades ago that it contributed a main character to the unwatchable animated series/Nintendo infomercial Captain N: The Game Master, and then was still memorable enough in the present era that it was one of the games featured in 2024’s Nintendo World Championships: NES Edition. Granted, Kid Icarus had the challenge that took me the most attempts to get an “S” rating and that outcome was largely the result of the sloppiness of the whole thing. But, nearly forty years later and Nintendo actually said “yeah, we better put Kid Icarus in this thing.” But the one thing they’ve never done is redeemed that original base concept.

Okay, so the boss graphics aren’t strong. That’s supposed to be Cerberus in the corner, but instead it looks like two dinosaurs humping. After having unforgettable sprites for the Eggplant Wizard, grim reaper, and even the basic enemies, having this thing look like someone sneezed while filling it in is such a let down.

What Nintendo should do is take all the space age technology they’ve since invented and do a true sequel to Kid Icarus. Not a third person shooter either, but a REAL sequel that builds much more heavily around the best part of the game: those dungeons. If you want, go ahead and make a few vertical levels as well. I’m fine with that because they would certainly have to apply everything that’s been learned in the fields of level design and play control. They could keep the humor or dump it like Osawa wanted. That doesn’t matter because gameplay is king. Kid Icarus is a bad video game, but not ALL bad. It just never got the redemption that Nintendo’s own game design evolution would have given it. Those amazing dungeons still feel fresh in 2025 because, really, there aren’t a lot of Nintendo-made games where their exploration feels like Kid Icarus’s three dungeons. It might not be a game worth playing in the 2020s, but the idea of Kid Icarus is an idea worth saving.
Verdict: NO!

Can’t be unseen. 🖕😶🖕You’re welcome.

Filed under Nintendo Switch Reviews, Retro Reviews Tagged with , , , , , ,

Super Mario World (SNES Review)

July 13, 2025 by 6 Comments

Super Mario World
Platform: Super Nintendo Entertainment System
First Released November 21, 1990 (JP) August 23, 1991 (US)
Directed by Takashi Tezuka
Developed by Nintendo
Available with Switch Online Subscription (Standard)
Listing on Mario Wiki

Is Mario pointing at what to eat or is he slapping the side of Yoshi’s head? Because if it’s a slap, and since all dinosaurs are birds, is this just the first step towards preparing a meal of foie gras?

Gosh, uh, this is awkward. Because when I reviewed Super Mario 3 last week, I said that Super Mario World was the gourmet meal to Mario 3’s bag of highly addictive potato chips. Now that I just played through Super Mario World using the same rules as the other games in my Super Mario 40th Anniversary Marathon where I have to play through every level without using any items to bypass the action (see my reviews for Super Mario Deluxe, Lost Levels, Doki Doki Panic, and Super Mario Advance), I really thought I would enjoy Mario World’s level design the most of any “traditional” Mario game. Super Mario 2/Doki Doki’s level design is hard to top, but that’s a totally different style of game. I thought Mario World was the peak of “pure Mario” design and I would have the time of my life studying it. Well, I didn’t. It wasn’t that I was bored playing Mario World, either. It’s awesome. One of the best 2D platformers ever made, easily. Even needing to immediately replay some levels so I could score a 100% didn’t bother me at all. But the massive upgrade over Super Mario 3 that I remembered never showed up. What just happened?

Remember kids: pick the middle file or they win.

For years now, I’ve always held World up as the benchmark of platforming mechanics. THAT I’ll still stand by that. Super Mario World has the most intuitive jumping physics of ANY Super Mario game, 2D or 3D. It’s so intuitive that you can launch yourself off Yoshi, fly through the air and hit a question mark, and then stick the landing on Yoshi’s back without even needing to really think about it. It becomes second nature in record time. Okay, so the cape takes practice, but it also offers a lot more versatility than the raccoon tail. It can also be used to bypass large sections of the game. More on that later. But the point is that Mario World is the most polished 2D playground that ever existed up to this point. You’re provided the tools to make the controller vanish in your hand. You can tell that Nintendo realized they had to make the best controlling platformer ever in order to make sure players adapted to the new six-button SNES controller, and they nailed it. The controls are perfect.

Like Mario 3, I found the bosses overall to be weak. Before the Bowser fight, I guess I liked the Reznors the most. It’s really not that different in the way you fight it than, say, dealing with Hammer Bros. in any other Mario game. But it’s staged differently and it works. The first time, at least, but then an identical fight happens three more times and the thrill is lost.

The levels are less than perfect. Oh, they’re certainly better than Mario 3’s. Most of the seventy-three full-sized stages are bigger in scope and scale than anything in Mario 3. They also better incentivize exploration. On the map screen, you’ll notice that normal levels have yellow and red dots. Stages with red dots have two exits, and acing the game requires you to not simply beat every stage but find every alternative exit. But, only a little over a third of the levels actually utilize that, and if you miss an exit, the game doesn’t tell you. After I thought I had everything, I played the second form of the Bowser stage, won the fight, and then reset the game after the credits to find out I had 93 out of 96. I found two exits I was missing, which got me up to 95, but then I was stumped. It was actually Star Road 3, which can be beaten in about three seconds. I just never crossed the tape on it. But I had to figure that out on my own. It didn’t indicate which levels I’d found everything on.

The haunted ship feels like a missed opportunity. It’s just an underwater ghost house that doesn’t utilize the maze concept as well as it should. Simply swimming around enemies isn’t as exciting to me.

The actual gameplay is also a clear upgrade over Mario 3. Okay, so I don’t think the cast of enemies is quite as memorable as Mario 3’s. The dinosaur-themed basic enemies just don’t feel very Mario-like. Even though the Adventure Island games don’t really use evil dinosaurs, the dino-cast part of Mario World’s roster feels like it would be more at home there. On the other hand, Mario World’s non-enemy obstacles are stellar. It has a much wider variety of indestructible hazards, and with the new spinning jump, you might even be able to use them to your advantage. Like in this level:

You could play it safe, like I did this time. Or you can throw caution to the wind, take a deep breath, and do a running spin jump and try to bounce across them and hope like hell you’ll eventually reach land, and it’s exhilarating. Or you can use Yoshi to do it since Yoshi’s feet are immune. Speaking of Yoshi, this was his debut game and he’s a lot of fun to use. He also adds an interesting risk-reward dynamic to the exploration. It’s tougher to explore with Yoshi. You can’t climb vines with him. You can’t use the cape’s parachuting mechanic with him. That’s one of the biggest differences between Mario 3 and this game: there’s a lot more consideration for tempting the player to choose the wrong thing. Instead of the game funneling you by providing you with the exact right tools you need, it might do something like offer you a fire flower when you really need the cape. There’s small hints of this in Mario 3, but it happens constantly in Mario World, and I love it for it.

YOU ARE A SUPER……. OVALTINE DRINKER?! Son of a bitch!

So why didn’t I have as good a time as I thought I would? Maybe Mario World is just a one-and-done experience, and I’ve done it before. Unlike Mario 3, I remembered where almost everything was. Even if I didn’t remember the specific locations of keys or the solutions to the Ghost Houses, I remembered enough to have a general idea of what I was supposed to do. Worst case was I mixed up the solution for one ghost house with another, which I did a couple times. Otherwise, I apparently didn’t forget anything about Mario World. Okay, well, how much difference could THAT make? After all, Super Mario 1 and Super Mario 3 offered me no surprises either. Well, except for one key element: challenge. Mario World didn’t. I died four times this entire play session, and two of them were in the “Special Zone” area. All but one death was the result of mistimed jumps. I even stuck to the rule of playing the levels instead of bypassing them with the cape, and I just utterly shredded Mario World. It’s too damn easy. I had the max 99 lives before I even got out of the third world.

You know the bonus stage that you get for breaking the tape, pictured above? After a while, curiosity got the better of me and I tried to see if I could not win any lives playing it. I needed eleven total cracks at it before I finally did it. Twice I got one life, and every other time I deliberately tried to lose, I got two or more. I couldn’t even lose a mini game on purpose. Yeesh.

I think the reserve items were a bad idea in general. But, I also think the cape is too powerful and allows you to cheese stages too easily. Mario 3 had a similar problem with the raccoon tail, and while I noticed Mario World did a better job of limiting places you can build-up a running start, if I had wanted to I could have easily skipped several sections. It got me wondering if flying is a good idea at all in Mario games. If you’re going to do it, the way Super Mario 64 did it seems like the best way to handle it. Instead of the flying cap being a permanent upgrade, you have a time limit to accomplish what needs to be done. It seems to work, because I had very few “cheer out loud” moments with the 2D flying sequences, but plenty with the cap in the 3D game.

It’s no coincidence that the most exciting flying sections in the game, at least for me, used the balloon, which has a strict time limit.

Mostly, I think it’s because Mario World is more of an experience than a game. As colorful and interesting as Mario World is to just gawk at, you just have too big an advantage over it even if you force yourself into the thick of battle, especially if you know what’s coming. So this leaves me in a weird position where my gut still tells me that Super Mario World is the better game because of the more elegant level design and historically great play mechanics, BUT, it still wasn’t the game I enjoyed the most during this marathon. That still belongs to Super Mario Advance 4: Super Mario Bros. 3, and not just for the eReader levels, either. Subtract those and I still give the slight edge to Mario 3 based on the fact that I couldn’t just sleepwalk my way through it. I might have had more fun playing Mario World over Mario 3 in 2003, but in 2025, my replay of Mario 3 required me to actually focus and think about what I was doing. It’s something I just learned: challenge matters more the second time than the first. It’s the real replay value.

The one and only boss in the game that ticks all the boxes (except maybe challenge) is the Bowser fight. Mario World has TERRIBLE boss fights, right up until the finale, where Bowser has a memorable design and a fun way of attacking him. Each of the six shots you need to land on him feel great. If you ignore “the weird one” in Mario 2, this is the first truly great Mario boss.

I had the same problem with Shadow of the Colossus once, too. The second time I played through it, even though it was as good as I remembered, it wasn’t as fun as I thought it would be, either. Maybe that’s the paradox of historically great games. Once a game reaches the status of “unforgettable” in the literal sense, it actually becomes harder to hold up to replaying. That’s because all that’s left is the base challenge the game has. So while Mario World is truly excellent the first time around, it’s never going to come close to being as enjoyable because too much of it is based around the sense of discovery or other surprises. Besides the cheesable stuff with the cape, it doesn’t even really lend itself to the type of scrutiny that comes with reevaluation because Super Mario World is so damn awesome that it’s almost boring to reevaluate. Almost.

I still loved the “find key and insert it into keyhole” bit but that was quite muffled by the fact that most of the keys are right next to the hole. This feels like Mario World’s biggest missed opportunity to crank-up the difficulty. Just place the keys further away from the holes.

Again, I had fun yesterday. It’s hard not to when the controls are this perfect and the gameplay is as fine-tuned as you see here. I just didn’t have as much fun as I expected. So I can take the glass half-empty approach and say that Mario World has too many slow and dull auto-scrolling levels and not as strong of a basic enemy roster as Mario 3 so I may have overrated it before. Or I can take the glass half-full approach and say that Super Mario World is so well made that it’s perfect your first time playing and doesn’t lend itself to fun retrospective looks. I’ll go with Option B because that way it’s not my fault I didn’t have as much fun as I wanted.
Verdict: YES!

 

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Super Mario Advance (Game Boy Advance Review)

July 1, 2025 by 11 Comments

Super Mario Advance
Platform: Game Boy Advance
First Released March 21, 2001
Directed by Toshiaki Suzuki
Developed by Nintendo
Available with a Switch Online Expansion Pack Subscription
Listing on Mario Wiki

Oh, sweet Clawgrip. How did they ever do Doki Doki Panic without you?

I’ve already said everything I need to say about what masterpieces Super Mario Bros. 2 and Doki Doki Panic are. All that’s left is the game that introduced me to that world, which I first played in the wee hours of the morning following the GBA’s launch. I probably clicked-on my GBA at around one o’clock in the morning on June 11, 2001. At about 1:01 A.M. I was probably red in the face angry over how sh*tty the GBA screen was. It didn’t matter how many launch games I got, because I could only see two of them: this and ChuChu Rocket. It’s funny that I look back on 2001 with such fondness, because two of the three major launches SUCKED! My hands were too small to properly wield the Duke, and I couldn’t see the GBA’s screen. At least the Xbox issue was fixed by my father snagging an imported S-controller for me relatively quickly. Nothing could save the GBA though.

I wasn’t even into puzzle games during this era, but I liked the versus mode of ChuChu Rocket, which was the first console game I ever played with online play. Except it had seriously horrible, ruinous lag. That was fine. On Dreamcast, I played the hell out of this against CPU opponents, which is why I wanted a copy for my new portable game device. Would have been nice if I could have seen the screen. ChuChu Rocket, like Super Mario Advance, is pretty bright, but still not bright enough to overcome the GBA’s horrible original screen.

I was pissed because the game I had actually been hyped for, and the one that was the first game in my brand new Game Boy Advance, was Castlevania: Circle of the Moon. I can’t believe there’s apologists for the GBA screen, because I thought it was un-f*cking-playable. Circle of the Moon was clearly not fine-tuned for THAT screen. I’m actually certain the only explanation was the development team didn’t know the screen wouldn’t be backlit. Meanwhile, ChuChu Rocket was obsolete because I already had a version of it that I could, you know, actually see! I wanted ChuChu Rocket for car trips, but even in sunlight, I thought the screen sucked. So the only reason why the GBA’s launch wasn’t a complete letdown for me was Super Mario Advance. Even though I really enjoyed it, I had no idea what Super Mario Bros. 2 had actually accomplished. To my credit, I was still 11, about to turn 12.

If you want to be mean about it, you can steal Birdo’s bow. They should have had it get pissed and fire eggs like a machine gun if you do this.

In that original 2001 session, I remember thinking that Mario Advance was maybe the easiest video game I’d ever played up to that point. I’m pretty sure even back then I didn’t die more than a couple times, with world 5 – 1 and 7 – 2 being the only levels that got me more than once. I only remember one specific death: when the door came flying at me right before the Wart battle, I was so startled that the damn thing killed me. Otherwise, besides the odd jump to my death, I quickly got through Mario Advance, and while I enjoyed IT well enough, I enjoyed the squinting required to play it so much that my GBA went into a drawer, pretty much never to see the light of day again. I never got another new game for that model. I was excited for another installment of Pokemon, but when those came out, so did the GBA SP, and the Game Boy Player followed soon after. So really, the only game I ever played with my original GBA was this one, and while I really liked it a lot, it wasn’t exactly like it blew my mind. I think the reason it didn’t was entirely that f*cking screen.

The funny part of that story is that I had no idea that Nintendo had actually made this version of Super Mario Bros. 2 unfathomably easier than the already pretty damn easy NES original. How?

  • They added a third hidden mushroom in every stage, so now your max health is five.
  • Health refills are just sitting around pretty much everywhere.
  • Including inside boss chambers.
  • And you get health refills for every thrown object (be it an item or enemy) that results in a kill combo of two or more. The POW blocks are the exception to this.
  • Just the act of throwing the new giant Shy-Guy, even if you throw it at nothing, gives you a heart every throw, meaning every single appearance by them is basically a full life refill.
  • There’s significantly more enemies, which sounds like it should make the game harder, but instead, they’re there specifically to be combo victims. That means even more opportunities for health refills.
  • They’ve significantly increased the amount of weapons you can pluck from the ground.
  • And they added more weapons tailored towards mass destruction of the enemies.
  • They also added many more extra lives in the stages.
  • They made it so you can bet all your coins on a single spin of the slot machines, paying off tons of lives if you win.
  • A kill combo of five gives you an extra life.
  • Plus you get an additional extra life for every enemy after five.

There’s just no way I can spin these decisions in a way that makes logical sense. This goes beyond simply nerfing Super Mario 2. This is like full-on baby proofing of a game to a level never before done, unless you count emulator stuff like save states and rewinding. If you manage to Game Over playing Super Mario Advance, you should seriously consider another hobby because this gaming thing just isn’t going to work out for you.

The Birdos especially get it bad, as there’s usually additional weapons in their chambers AND life refills.

Everything I disliked about Super Mario Advance as a soon-to-be 12 year old is still 100% accurate. I’ll tell you this: if you have a REALLY young child, you might want to consider this as the game to break them into platform games, or even gaming in general. I mean, it’s colorful, has a wide variety of levels and enemies, tons of stuff to do, memorable characters, satisfying bosses, controls like a dream, and it’s basically the most easy video game this side of playing Pong against someone with a broken paddle. If you’re a challenge seeker, there’s nothing here for you. Okay, so the whole “games as an experience instead of a challenge” is my driving force, and was my driving force even back when I was 12. But there’s SOME limit to that. Games need to push-back. Mario Advance is the game that not only doesn’t push back, but it practically switches sides and pushes with you against itself.

It wouldn’t be until years after it launched that Mario Advance grew on me. I’d just finished Mario Galaxy and realized I’d never REALLY played Super Mario Advance 4: Super Mario Bros. 3. After that, apparently I still had to work Mario out of my system because I played Mario Advance 1 again. Back then I DID NOT replay games once I finished them. That just wasn’t something I ever did. But my Mario Advance experience had been tainted by Darko Nintendočić, so I popped it in my Game Boy Player. It was almost like it was divinely inspired, because I remember thinking “how did I never notice this game is f*cking brilliant?” I hadn’t aced the game the first go around and didn’t expect to this time, either. But I did. Every Advance Coin. Every Yoshi Egg. Okay, the Advance Coins weren’t THAT hard to find and neither are the Yoshi eggs. Why it matters is nabbing a 100% completion means playing EVERY level.

In a sense, the Yoshi egg hunt could be considered the game’s “hard mode” since the eggs replace two of the mushrooms. This would be swell, except they’re almost always hidden close by where the mushrooms they replaced were originally found. Plus you have to unlock the egg hunt by beating the game. Thankfully, you don’t need to nab every Advance Coin to do this, something I forgot. I wish I had just warped really quick to the end, but I didn’t. I beat the game with Mario, and realized quickly I didn’t want to get every egg again. I think I’ve overdosed on Mario 1 & 2 and need to move on.

In my first replay of Mario Advance, I enjoyed experiencing all twenty levels so much that I was crushed when I found out getting a 100% completion didn’t unlock more content. I was blown away by how all twenty of them feel completely unique from each-other, and how playing them with each character also changes the, for lack of a better term, personality of each level. I came to realize that they really went all-out on the layouts and enemy design and fine tuning the controls for the characters. Mind you, it wouldn’t be until decades later, when I played Doki Doki Panic, that I realized how truly fine-tuned it actually is. I think that actually speaks volumes about how good Super Mario Bros. 2 is that so many people who love it are completely unaware that the version they’re playing isn’t even the game at its most idealized.

I swear to God, the first time I played the NES version of Super Mario Bros. 2, I had no clue there was no Robo-Birdo. When I got to the end of World 3 and another Mouser was waiting for me, my heart sank. I really thought the game was going to alternate between Mouser and Tryclyde until the Wart battle. This is such a fantastic boss battle that I think it sucks they didn’t replace the second Mouser with a second new boss. Maybe for the next remake, Nintendo? I’m kidding. Please don’t remake this again. Make a brand new game with this type of gameplay.

I first played Super Mario Advance as a soon-to-be 12 year old. Now I’m a soon-to-be 36 year old, and like so many things in life, my opinion on Mario Advance has changed dramatically over the years. Of the four versions of Mario 2 (not counting BS Super Mario USA, a modified version of the Super Mario 2 found in Super Mario All-Stars that made for the Satellaview, which isn’t even the full game), Mario Advance I’d put third, with only the version found in Super Mario All-Stars behind it. It’s still an amazing experience. Veterans of Mario 2 or even Doki Doki Panic can enjoy playing “spot the difference.” with the subtle changes made to level layouts or enjoy one of the easiest collect-a-thons ever made. I did one single full playthrough for this review and I got 99 out of 100 coins.

Son of a bitch. Forgot one f*cking coin in World 3 – 1 and somehow never noticed. Yes, I went back and got it. You can collect the coins in the Yoshi Challenge. Unfortunately, by the time I unlocked that, I was too burned out on Super Mario 2 to go get all the eggs.

But, I do question why they took such extreme measures towards lowering the difficulty. It’s almost unprecedented in the history of gaming. The irony is Doki Doki Panic became one of the biggest games in the entire history of the medium because the original Super Mario Bros. 2 was too hard, yet they subtracted from its difficulty in Super Mario Bros. 2 USA. But that version still does little things that prevent you from going on complete cruise control, like having you be committed to a single character every stage. Pick someone not as suitable for a level? Tough sh*t, and in retrospect, I’m fine with that. But then they removed even that from the Super Mario All-Stars version, which allows you to swap every life. (shrug) That’s why, as much as I love Super Mario Bros. 2 and even Mario Advance, I really hope they don’t remake it again, because what’s left to nerf at this point? Have it literally rain hearts? Have enemies surrender on sight? When you pull Birdo’s bow off, the brain spurts out of a hole? Get to Wart’s chamber only to find him dead with an empty can of V8 laying next to him?
Verdict: YES!
It’s my little blog’s anniversary! Thank you everyone for fourteen incredible years! I love you all! For keeps!

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Super Mario Bros. 2 aka Super Mario Bros.: The Lost Levels (Famicom Disk System & SNES Review)

June 29, 2025 by 11 Comments

Super Mario Bros. 2
aka The Lost Levels
Platform: Famicom Disk System, SNES
FDS Original First Released June 3, 1986
Super Mario All-Stars Released July 14, 1993
Directed by Shigeru Miyamoto & Takashi Tezuka
Developed by Nintendo
Both Available with Switch Online Subscription (Standard)
Listings on Mario Wiki: Famicom Disk System – Super Mario All-Stars

Super Mario Bros. 2 (1986 – Famicom Disk)
Super Mario All-Stars (1993 – SNES)
Super Mario All-Stars (1993 – SNES)

Does the “bounce off the turtle shell for easy 1ups” trick seen above count as cheating? If the answer is “no” then I just beat the infamous Super Mario Bros.: The Lost Levels twice in one day without cheating. Sort of. I also didn’t warp, but one time in each version, I would have warped if I hadn’t rewound the game. Since a full tour of all the levels requires you not to warp, and since I had no intention to replay these once I was done, I used rewind to take me back to the start of the branching path. But that’s it. If I died or lost my power-up, I didn’t undo it. Now, at the start of this process, I didn’t intend to play the original FDS version as anything more than a sampling. In the original Famicom Disk Version, if you want to see four out of the five bonus worlds, you have to beat the game an absolutely ridiculous EIGHT TIMES. On Super Mario All-Stars, they’re lumped-in with the ninth world that you get for not warping. Besides, I was certain I would be miserable playing Lost Levels. I wasn’t, and thus:

Oh I didn’t beat the game eight times. I’m not that insane. Also, my FDS session came after I’d already beat the game with Mario on Super Mario All-Stars. One thing became really clear when I played the game with Luigi: the overwhelming majority of Lost Levels’ challenge is based around Mario, and only Mario. The only real difference in movement physics between Super Mario 1 and Super Mario 2 is that this game introduced the concept of Mario springing off enemies. It’s not as dramatic as it would eventually become, but Mario 2 is clearly the prototype for that gameplay concept. If that’s not the tough stuff, the sheer amount of long jumps and single-block platforms is.

Oh I died here. Damn turtle needed to be a little higher.

But all those jumping challenges were designed with Mario in mind. Platforms or long jumps that you need a running jump for with Mario can typically be handled by Luigi with a lot less effort. Luigi jumps a lot higher and a lot further, so unless there’s a low ceiling, he nerfs most of the tough jumps from the Mario side of the adventure. Luigi’s biggest drawback is how far he slides before coming to a stop when you use the B-run. Most of my deaths with Mario were from shorting jumps. Most of my deaths with Luigi were from some form of sliding, mostly off the edge of platforms. But, I had a much easier time adjusting to Luigi’s quirks than Mario’s shortcomings.

♫ Fly through the stage, Cathy! Zoom, zoom, zoom! Forgot for a second it’s not the thing to do! Lost another life sliding! Boo hoo hoo! This ain’t the red plumber! It’s a different hue! Luigi’s traction doesn’t stop like glue and I skid to my doom my darling!

One other thing became clear while playing this: I was wrong about Super Mario Bros. 2 or Lost Levels or Super Mario for Super Players or whatever else you want to call it. I always dismissed it as a glorified ROM hack, no different than any of the hundreds of fan-made ones of the original Super Mario Bros. I wasn’t entirely wrong, but I wasn’t entirely right, either. Yes, it’s just a mod of the original game with some changes to background graphics and a new whammy: the poison mushroom. I think the poison mushroom is a flop that only works the first time IF you don’t already know it’s coming. Once you adjust to it, it’s not that hard to just not pick it up even if you spring one from a question mark block. More problematic are the red piranha plants. Normally, the plants become shy if you stand next to the pipe, but the red ones require you to be ON the pipe to trigger their bashfulness.

They also added wind, but I didn’t think it was that big a deal. I didn’t lose more lives than average because of it. It’s not unpredictable. It’s just another fixture. Part of the level design. Hell, if anything, I welcomed it when it showed up because it broke up the monotony of playing more of the same with Super Mario Bros. I wish it had more gimmicks like that. It was certainly better than the green springs. They launch you so high into the sky that you can’t even see where you are. Well, except you can use the scrolling to aim. There’s two stages built entirely around them that both feel nearly identical. Launch off the spring, clear a massive gap, land on the next spring, or maybe it’s a small platform. They weren’t very hard, and I honestly didn’t remember losing a single life on either version. Actually I did lose one but it’s because I got greedy and tried to make it further than I realistically could.

This is the one I died on.

For all the hoopla of how hard Lost Levels was supposed to be, thanks to the 1-up trick (which is literally possible right at the start of level 1 – 1), I never came that close to a game over. The stages are hard but not insurmountable. I only timed-out once on one of the castle mazes. I only dropped ten lives or more in a single stage twice, and never when playing as Luigi. Hell, I was acing levels even late in the game. It’s tough and there’s a lot of trial and error, but once you get a feel for the design logic, it’s not that bad. Like, if a jump seems TOO impossible, chances are there’s invisible blocks around to provide some kind of assist or boost. That’s the part I was wrong about. It might be a glorified ROM hack, but there is a predictable method to the madness. Once I approached Lost Levels as a challenge of my gaming skills instead of as a gaming experience, it’s kind of an exciting game.

Really, just the act of taking your time should reduce the difficulty by 50%. I think a lot of the moaning is probably based on how quickly players are able to run through Super Mario 1. It’s one of the most speed-run games in history. But for Lost Levels, I noticed the more I paced myself, the fewer attempts I needed to beat a stage.

Where the game still feels kind of janky is in the difficulty scaling. One thing that the original Super Mario Bros. got right was the progression of the challenge. Well, that’s out the door here. Lost Levels has a difficulty curve that resembles a heart monitor. One of the levels I dropped more than ten lives on was 4 – 3, which it turns out is actually a cut & paste from the coin-op version of the original game, Vs. Super Mario Bros. Okay, that’s kind of funny, especially since I’m pretty sure that was the stage I died the most on. But then I breezed through worlds five and six and even got my first fire flower in a few worlds, which I still had to use against world six’s Bowser. Now, some of that can be chalked up to adapting to the types of challenges in the game. But certainly not all of it can be.

By the way, I was STUNNED by how easy World 9 was, though it seems that was meant as a kind of reward and a winking nod to the minus world from the original game by the development team. The color scheme for world 9 is especially weird on the Famicom Disk. It’s worth mentioning that the FDS version has an additional twist for world 9: you only get one life. Don’t worry though, because it’s not THAT tough as long as you remember to jump on the ceiling during the home stretch of 9 – 4.

But, to the shock of my friends, I had fun on Saturday playing this. Lost Levels became one of those games that I thought I’d knock out in a morning and instead I played it for the better part of a day and never really got bored. Okay, the whole “beat the game eight times to get the final four hidden worlds” thing is ridiculous, but future re-releases dumped that. I think Nintendo made a big mistake not bringing this out in America in the 80s. They really underestimated gamers. There’s people who beat games blindfolded, and they vetoed making millions off this because there’s a poison mushroom near the start of the first stage? Really? Oh, I’m totally fine with our version of Super Mario Bros. 2 getting the “#2” label, but if Nintendo was worried about alienating the fan base by releasing such a hard game, don’t call this Mario 2. Call it “More Super Mario Bros.” or something like that.

Skid to my doom……
….. my darling!

Lost Levels is actually very modern in many ways. I know I’ve said a lot of games feel like DLC packs, but in the case of Super Mario Bros.: The Lost Levels, it REALLY feels like a prototype for modern DLC. It wouldn’t be hard to make this even more modern. Replace the lives system with a death counter and maybe a clock for speed runners and Lost Levels could pass for a 2025 design. So, yeah, I was wrong about Lost Levels, kind of. I really don’t think it’s for EVERYONE. If you’re not specifically seeking a challenge for your platforming skills, don’t bother. Nothing new it offers over Super Mario Bros. is worth the suffering you’ll experience, and that’s before I even consider that most of the elegance of the original game is lost. But if you want an often clever platforming challenge that maintains the purity of Super Mario 1, then I’d say Lost Levels is worth dying for again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again………….
Verdict: YES!

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Castlevania: Circle of the Moon (Review)

February 7, 2025 by 9 Comments

Castlevania: Circle of the Moon
Platform: Game Boy Advance
Released March 21, 2001 (JP) June 11, 2001 (US)
Designed by Koji Horie
Developed by Konami
Included in Castlevania Advance Collection

Bats are basically just sacks of blood, apparently.

I got Circle of the Moon on the day the Game Boy Advance launched in North America. Oh, I didn’t play it then. Did you ever watch the White Walker battle in the final season of Game of Thrones? Probably not, even if the TV was tuned into it, because you couldn’t see a damned thing. Castlevania: Circle of the Moon was kind of like that when it launched. Even after my father installed one of those aftermarket, warranty-voiding light kits to my GBA, visibility wasn’t very good and I still didn’t play it. Actually, because the Game Boy Advance screen was so impossible to see, I didn’t play a lot of GBA at all until the SP and the Game Boy Player (for my younger readers, this was a device that let you play Game Boy Advance titles on the TV via a GameCube) came out in 2003, both of which came with the novelty of being able to see the games you bought. Well, the Game Boy Player did. The original SP was front lit, because Nintendo never admits to mistakes until they’ve exhausted all other possibilities. But, for me at least, the killer app of the Game Boy Player was Circle of the Moon. In fact, I binged the three Castlevania GBA games back-to-back-to-back. And it was a couple of the happiest weeks of what would be a very crappy year for me. So, I cherish the Castlevania GBA trilogy. But, did they age well?

Find the right enemies and grinding can go so quick that it’s kind of shocking. Does it still count as “grinding” if you can get a couple levels in under five minutes?

As the second “Metroidvania” game in the series and the first since the legendary Symphony of the Night, Circle of the Moon had a LOT to live up to. Circle of the Moon doesn’t attempt to be quite as RPG-like as that game. Actually, it’s more like a noncommittal hybrid of a traditional Castlevania game and a Symphony of the Night-style adventure. While the actual map is massive and sprawling, your only primary weapon is the Vampire Killer whip. Apparently this is not THE whip of the Belmont clan and instead is called the “Hunter Whip” but who gives a f*ck? It’s the Vampire Killer, period, and there’s no permanent upgrades for it and no alternatives. Luckily, the whip is one of the most satisfying of any Castlevania whips, with plenty of OOMPH and a lot of magical spells to buff it and the standard assortment of Castlevania subweapons to complement it. The action is top-notch. Controls really well, too. This is one of those games that plays so well that it completely lives and dies on the merits of the design.

This was my map when I finished the game. Dracula is directly to the right of the first yellow block from the left. With his room filled in, this is a roughly 90% complete map, and I have no idea how many HP/MP/Heart boosts I missed along the way. I didn’t use a guide for them, and actually, I only used a guide for which enemies drop which weapons.

Instead of finding weapons, there’s only armor and accessories which are dropped by enemies. In fact, each individual enemy drops only two potential things, one common, the other rare. I’m not the biggest fan of this design because I hate having this type of thing come down to tracking down lottery tickets. Like, the second best armor in the game is dropped by an enemy that exists only in one specific room. Also, the base drop rate for this armor is 0.5%, and since there’s only one of these enemies in the entire game, if you don’t get it, you have to leave the room and come back and fight it again. Something about that is really inelegant to me, and for this game, I decided not to play along. Instead, I used save states to make some of the drops go quickly. Sometimes it made a big difference, but other times? I’m not at all encouraging you to watch this whole video, but even cheesing the game with save states, it could take quite a while for the item I was seeking to drop.

By the way, the dice seem to be rolled the moment the fatal shot is THROWN, not LANDED, so if you have a boomerang about to kill an enemy on the return trip, reloading the state won’t change whether or not the enemy drops something or not. Speaking of the Boomerangs, they’re pretty rare in this. I’d recommend holding onto them when you first get one because they’re seriously overpowered for all bosses.

Additionally, some enemies drop cards that allow you to cast spells. Unlike armor, card drops happen only once, but if you want to do THAT, logically the first kill against the target enemy should result in a drop. It doesn’t. Lame. There’s two tiers of cards that have to be combined. These mostly enhance your whip. For the most part, I only used two combos, one of which gave me a fire sword and one of which made my whip twice as long. I might switch to one that increased the damage I inflicted by 25% for bosses, but otherwise, I mostly stuck to those once I had them. The problem is the same as the accessories: they’re random drops from enemies. Every treasure that can be found (besides post-boss upgrades) are either upgrades to hit points, magic points, or max hearts you can carry. I didn’t start cheesing the game with emulation trickery until over halfway through the game. If the drop system had been remotely rewarding, I would never have done it. Random drops might be great for the surprise factor, but I can assure you, it gets old. I really think it would have been more satisfying to hide the big armor and accessories as treasures in the castle.

Mercury Card + Golem card ended up being, no joke, my favorite Castlevania whip ever. It reaches nearly half the screen and, although it comes at a cost of speed, it sure made backtracking a lot less painful.

So, this is awkward to say, but I found the RPG elements of Circle of the Moon to be some of the worst in a good game I’ve ever played. Too many enemies that are pushovers pay off too many experience points. Like this room here:

That “frozen shade” paid off so much that I was able to grind up about ten levels in under half-an-hour. It’s not up to players to use the honor system to protect the integrity of the game from lazy design. Designers are supposed to discourage that through challenge, right? Clearly that enemy was not something I was supposed to be fighting then and there. It had easy-to-dodge attacks and, with the fire sword spell and the star bracelets it dropped for me, I was wasting it in four or five hits, before it even fired at me. And since magic refills slowly (another bad choice, in my opinion) I didn’t have to hold back while fighting it. I have no idea how they determined some of these XP totals, but it makes Circle of the Moon one of the most exploitable RPG systems in the entire history of gaming.

One neat thing that it does do is replace weak enemies with strong ones as you make progress, though it waits a little too long to do this, and it doesn’t implement it nearly enough. If you want to put such a heavy emphasis on backtracking, you need more of this. These enemies are at the start of the game, but they don’t show up until you’re nearly finished.

There’s just absolutely no sense of balance, and no balance means no risk/reward to calculate. This is where you have to give turn-based RPGs props. In those, if you encounter an enemy that pays off so huge that you can hypothetically grind out hours worth of leveling-up in under half-an-hour, a punch-for-punch battle would see you go tits-up, lights-out in probably the first attack the enemy got on you. Action games can be that way too, but if you don’t PERFECTLY distribute the enemies or accessories, at some point the opportunity to cheese the game will present itself. Circle of the Moon does that a few times. It’s really badly done in that regard.

Don’t get me wrong: finding the hidden stuff is f’n awesome. I cracked a smile every single time a wall broke.

Now here’s the good news: the level design is mostly pretty good. There’s a ton of annoying backtracking and not nearly enough fast-travel tunnels. According to the game’s clock, it took me six-and-a-half hours to finish the Circle of the Moon, and I’d guess at least a third of that was spent making my way back to areas just to get one previously inaccessibly stat upgrade or find an enemy who dropped a card I missed. If the combat wasn’t so damn satisfying and the level design some of the best in this genre, I wouldn’t have been up for it. Yet, there’s a lot of really weird design choices that made me shake my head. Stuff that shattered my immersion that I was a badass vampire hunter exploring a castle. Like, this for example:

Are you kidding me?

One of the very last items you get from defeating a boss is the ability to shove boxes. Okay, that’s a time-honored staple of the genre. EXCEPT, one of the very first upgrades you get in Circle of the Moon is the ability to shatter stone blocks with a dash move. So, let me get this straight: Nathan Graves (hero of the game) masters the ability to shatter stone with his shoulder before he learns how to push a wooden crate out of the way? I had a spell that turned my whip into a goddamned flaming sword that, by all rights, should have set the box on fire, but I had to wait until the game was almost over to schlep a box? And by the way, they put a lot of those boxes throughout the “levels” of the game, so after getting this upgrade, if you want to boost your stats you have to spend about an hour just making your way to them so you can push them out of the way and pick up the boosts.

When the game is over, you get a series of passwords that allow you to replay the game in a different way, though the hero sprite is still Nathan. Thankfully, you don’t have to beat the game to get these, but honestly, they’re all really boring and feel like the type of challenges that pro gamers come up with to keep themselves amused. The Wizard (pictured here using a spell that turned me into a skeleton) is activated by putting FIREBALL as your name, which is also the name of Angela’s dog. Funny. The wizard is weak in everything except magic, and you start the game with every card so you basically have to magic your way through it. GRADIUS is the fighter, who can’t cast spells but his strength is insane. CROSSBOW is the “shooter” who has weak stats and has to use sub-weapons (including a new version of the dagger) that come at half the cost of hearts to use. This is one of the worst ways to ever play a Castlevania game. Finally, THIEF has weak stats but enemies drop stuff at a significantly higher rate. Sorry, no upside-down castle this time.

In terms of a pure action game, Circle of the Moon is clearly one of the most elite launch games in the history of the medium. It’s actually astonishing to think about: this was a day one Game Boy Advance game. I mean, pity about the vision thing, because the wide variety of enemies, settings, and huge boss fights make this legitimately a pretty good Castlevania adventure. While the RPG aspect is a complete airball in my opinion, the epic scale of the boss fights almost makes up for it by itself. This includes one of the best Grim Reaper fights of the 21st century, a memorable encounter with a gigantic minotaur that’s practically trapped in a pillory, and an even more gigantic two-headed dragon. Sadly, after several top-notch boss fights, the game ends with back-to-back AWFUL fights: the battle against Nathan’s rival, the insufferable Hugh Baldwin (who was originally going to be a playable character) and one of the most sloggish Dracula battles ever. Seriously, the final form of Dracula includes this dashing attack where he’s invulnerable and it’s just the worst. Castlevania: Circle of the Moon sticks the landing about as well as that pole vaulter who landed ass-first on the pole.

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Okay, so Circle of the Moon wasn’t as good as I remembered it. Not even close. I can’t stress enough: this WAS the killer app for the Game Boy Player twenty-two years ago. It was the reason I wanted to own one in the first place, and I suspect I wasn’t alone in that. In 2003, at the age of thirteen/fourteen, it felt like it lived-up to my high expectations. But, it certainly didn’t hold-up perfectly two decades later. As great as the map is, it’s not an optimized map. More fast travel points would have been transformative of this game. Hell, just get rid of those and turn the save stations into fast travel points. Why not?

I’m a complete idiot, because it turned out I had the ability to do this much sooner and I just somehow skipped past that card.

Plus, the lack of balance really shows a roughness that I never noticed the first time. Like, the first time I played the game, I beat levels out-of-order because the way you clean the toxic water out of that level is so far away and disconnected from that area that I actually missed it back in 2003. I beat the toxic water level without ever cleaning the water. I just thought it was a really hard stage. That’s on the designers. Actually, knowing where to go next is not intuitive. The first time you play this, expect a LOT of aimless wandering. Thank god for the combat. Circle of the Moon is lucky that Castlevania’s core combat is so bulletproof that you can tack on a terrible RPG system and some haphazard Metroidvania progression and still have a good game. But I’ve been wrong for the last twenty years, because I thought Castlevania: Circle of the Moon was great. It’s pretty good, but nowhere near great.
Verdict: YES!

THE INDIE GAMER CHICK CASTLEVANIA REVIEW SERIES
 Castlevania (NES) Dracula’s Curse (NES) Adventure (GB) Belmont’s Revenge (GB)
Super Castlevania IV (SNES) Dracula X (SNES) Rondo of Blood (SuperCD²)
Chronicles (PSX) Circle of the Moon (GBA)  Kid Dracula (NES) Kid Dracula (GB)
ROM Hacks (NES) Konami Wai Wai World (NES) Wai Wai World 2: SOS!! Parsley Jō (NES)

I’m now convinced Dracula has a plant fetish.

Filed under Nintendo Switch Reviews, PC Reviews, PlayStation Reviews, Retro Reviews, Xbox Reviews Tagged with , , , , , , , , , , , ,

Super Mario RPG (Switch Review)

January 28, 2025 by 2 Comments

Super Mario RPG
Platform: Nintendo Switch
Released November 17, 2023
Directed by Ayako Moriwaki
Developed by ArtePiazza
Published by Nintendo
Listing at Mario Wiki
$59.99 is never going to get 100 jumps in the making of this review.

SPOILERS AHEAD for a nearly three-decade-old video game. You’ve been warned.

This is going to be a largely whinny, negative review focused on the changes (and lack of changes) from the original, so I wanted to state right here and now: this is some of the most fun I’ve had in the last couple years playing a game. I loved this remake. I recommend even non-fans of RPGs who have held out on Mario RPG check it out. But, it’s a remake and I have a lot of opinions on it, and remakes in general.

If you think this looks bad for our heroes, you should see what happens when they say “I don’t know!”

I have a bonkers conspiracy theory about Super Mario RPG: Legend of the Seven Stars that is 100% for sure not what really happened (based on the concept art that you can see at Cutting Room Floor), but I’m sharing it anyway. I think the game was originally going to be Mario fighting a demented mechanical Santa Claus who, instead of making fun toys for good girls and boys, made weapons that caused kids to turn violent. The whole “machines want to take over the world” thing is a little too Power Rangers Zeo for me, but is it just me or do these weapons look a little.. toy-like? They crash into Bowser’s castle for no reason, and when you finally enter the thing that crashed into the castle, it turns out to be a factory of these toy-like weapons. A workshop, if you will. Perhaps the story was about saving Christmas and Santa Claus, or maybe even saving ALL the holidays. And what does the final boss look like? EXACTLY like an evil Santa Claus.

“MECHA-SANTA WANTS A HUG! HUUUUUUUUUUUUUUG ME!”

I’m telling you, I’m on to something. Or on something. Either/or.

Regardless, this is probably the first Mario game where the story matters. I really don’t want to play an RPG with a paper-thin story, but here we are with a story so thin it’s measured in atoms. I played Mario RPG for the first time when it debuted on Virtual Console in 2008, and writing in RPGs had come a long way from the 8-bit/16-bit era. *I* grew up on the PlayStation Final Fantasy games, which were essentially the bridge to the modern well-written/well-translated era of RPGs. Going back to play games with blunt, on-the-nose writing is something I struggle greatly with when I do these retro reviews. I’ve liked a couple old school RPGs, but that’s usually based on the gameplay merits. Like, Final Fantasy VI? AKA the one the generation before me was told was Final Fantasy III? It’s fine but it didn’t “move me” because, again, a different time and era.

“Okay, I found a scenic cliff. Now, according to Simon Belmont, if I just stare at the castle with triumphant satisfaction, it’ll crumble. Okay, HMMPH, there. Okay, crumble. Any second now..”

I won’t say the plot of Mario RPG is deep, and hell, most of the actual writing is just okay. It is somewhat cleaned up in limited areas, but most of the script carried over from the original game. When I first played it in 2008, even though the dialog often had me cringing, I thought it was one of the funniest games I’d ever played. They would NEVER call it a “comedy RPG” but it clearly is. Playing this now, in 2025, most of the jokes still hold-up. That’s why I’m kind of puzzled as to why they ruined the best gag in the game: the introduction of Geno. In the SNES game, when Mario is shot by the child with the Geno doll, it’s a really violent impact with a rocket. In the remake, Mario is shot with what looks like a few Nerf balls. It completely ruins the entire bit. Why’d they do that? Ugh, you just know someone said “we can’t have a child violently shoot Mario! Someone will say we’re being insensitive towards people who are shot by children who fish their daddy’s pistol out of his sock drawer.” YOU KNOW IT’S TRUE! That’s probably why they changed it and it’s stupid. On the other hand, there’s this:

Jesus mother of God. Okay, maybe I’m wrong.

Otherwise, most of the humor still lands. It is somewhat lacking the charm, because it no longer feels like it’s squeezing the most out of the limited technology. Like how the heroes change into other characters to act out the story for new characters? That was done that way because it was a novel and entertaining way to do expository dialog using the limited space of the SNES. They did add a few brief and context-limited cutscenes that are mostly used for major character introductions (and boss introductions). They look great! I mean, like this:

Christ, can you imagine the fan fiction this led to?

Actually, bad example because that was a cutscene in the original game. Okay, the part where Peach joins the team by jumping out the window. That’s a pre-rendered cutscene now.

That looks like it’s straight out of a modern Mario game! Fine with me, but there’s just not nearly enough of it, and the timing of when to use them isn’t exactly perfect. The above whining about ruining the Geno gun gag? Wouldn’t that have been an awesome time to cut to a pre-rendered cutscene? If my hunch is right they were really worried about the visual of a child accidentally no-scoping Mario, change the gag! Have the rocket knock a statue over that falls on Mario. I also found it annoying that they have to spell out that you’re not really joining Bowser’s minions. In fact, they continue to spell out that you’re only pretending to believe Bowser’s bravado basically every time the character is given dialog. It’s kind of condescending, but I assume that’s because the script was written in 1996. I’m surprised Square didn’t have the characters look into the camera and say “DO YOU GET IT?” So, while the humor still works, the writing typically doesn’t. Too on-the-nose, too clunky, and it really doesn’t have a lot of faith in people to get what the intent is.

“Sir, I keep trying to tell you that you can’t always get what you want.”

Okay, so the plot and writing wasn’t fated to age perfectly, but do you know what did? The combat. I re-played the SNES game back in 2021 and by that point, you’d think Mario RPG’s peppy timing-based combat system would have started to show its age. Well, it didn’t at all. Twenty-five years after the game’s original release and I found myself grinding XP just for fun because menu-based combat had never felt so impactful. If there was one aspect of the game that nobody could possibly complain about being copied and pasted as it was to the remake, it’s that battle system. Well, besides the graphics themselves, ArtePiazza barely changed any aspect of the main game. The dialog, script, mini-games, enemies, bosses, etc. are mostly unchanged, with the small exception of the names of a few basic enemies and items. If they’re leaving that much alone, why rock the boat by changing the most famous, celebrated, and evergreen aspect of the game?

Hell, for the Beetlemania game, they didn’t even change the graphics.

But they did change the combat system. The balls on them for doing that, too. The riskiest change to make, easily, and if it sucked, you could insert the Stan Lee “broke, or made better?” meme from the Simpsons and call it a day. Thankfully, that’s not the case at all. The combat is even faster paced and more rewarding, with attention to the little details. I really don’t think there’s any aspect of it that isn’t better in this version. Like, it didn’t bother me but the SNES game paused a little bit when enemies cast spells. In the remake, the pause is briefer and feels like it flows directly into the attack. A small change, but one with profound gameplay results. Most of the special effects for unblockable enemy spells are faster. They turned one of the speediest combat systems in RPG history into an even peppier one. It’s a pretty remarkable achievement.

In the remake, it’s a LOT easier to time the “LUCKY” shell game and double your earnings. Once I figured out the timing and how the game occasionally does a little sleight of hand at the climax of the shuffle, I never lost once. Combined with the Exp. Booster you can buy with frog coins in the back half of the game, I was basically maxed-out going into the final two game worlds.

By far the biggest change is the addition of splash damage. If you hit the timing perfectly on basic attacks, it creates a shock wave that has a high chance of damaging all other enemies. Not as much as if they were attacked directly, but it still made the basic battles and even a few boss fights fly by. This also made backtracking a lot less annoying. If you’re searching for stuff you missed in previous stages and have leveled-up enough, instead of having to fight every enemy, a single basic attack might wipe out the entire battlefield. If the splash damage isn’t the biggest change, it’s the combo system. There’s now a meter for stringing together both offensive and defensive timing. This not only buffs your characters but builds up a new triple-team special meter. The triple teams can be devastating attacks, create unbreakable shields, etc., and each three-character combination has their own unique move. Assuming one of the three characters is KOed, the special is replaced with Toad providing a roulette wheel to buff you in the battle. That roulette single-handedly saved me from defeat in the final-final battle of the game against the 3D Culex.

This is the “!” warning that helps players get the timing down. If you want, you can opt to play “breezy” mode, which gives you a much bigger grace period on the timing-based stuff. This can be toggled on and off any time.

There’s even more changes to the battle system. KOed/transformed characters are allowed to be swapped out mid-battle for a reserve character. And yes, if the situation provides, you can swap one KOed character for another KOed one. The game also now tells you what magic attacks from enemies can’t be blocked, something the original game never stated. There’s also a visual cue of when to hit the action button for both attacks and defense. BUT, here’s the thing about that cue: once the game is satisfied you have the timing down for the thing triggering the action, the game stops doing it, like training wheels. Later on, if your timing gets out of whack, the prompt returns. It’s SO SMART. The whole combat system is!

I think this might technically make Mario RPG the best Power Rangers game of the 90s.

The improved battle system is also the reason why I can’t overlook all the changes they didn’t make. Jeez, and I thought the Link’s Awakening remake was stubborn about fixing stuff. Like, the lame puzzles in the sunken ship or in Bowser’s Keep are copy and pasted wholesale from the original 1996 game, including the solutions to those puzzles. In the sunken ship, you’re trying to ascertain a six-letter secret word. The answer is the same in the 2023 version as it was in the 1996 version. Would it have really killed them to change it to something else? Some of the puzzles in the first version were just plain not very fun. Like this one:

This is a blind jumping maze. Behind those boxes, you have to randomly jump around until you find your way through it. No visual clues to help once you’re behind the stack. No real way to logic through it besides the abstract shape of the maze. It’s so inelegant, especially for such a rich and layered game. This is scraping the bottom of the barrel. So, like.. replace it! How the hell do you justify so many additions and enhancements to the BEST part of the game while leaving the gameplay elements that were kind of the f*cking pits the same? And I’m only bitching about it because they proved their bonafides with the battle system. The remake designers clearly could recognize areas where quality of life could be seamlessly applied. They’re just too talented to leave the bad parts bad. And by the way, there’s also parts that are significantly worse. Remember this mini-game:

I found it to be a lot more sensitive when turns are made. I never cared for this part to begin with, but I didn’t *hate* it. But in the remake, I really didn’t care for it at all. Or how about the Goomba Whack-a-Mole game with the pipes? I found it to be a lot less precise and I’d never want to play it again. That was actually true of most of the mini-games this time around. I remember grinding-up frog coins by doing the waterfall/river mini-game over and over. Something about it in the remake just didn’t “do it” for me. Very few areas where an improvement NEEDED to happen were actually improved, while the thing nobody would have expected to be overhauled was overhauled dramatically. It’s F*CKING WEIRD! It’d be like bringing your car into the shop because it has faulty brakes, and when you pick it up, the mechanic says “we decided not to fix your brakes, but hey, we installed heated seats and a sat-nav for you!”

They didn’t fix the Yoshi race, either. It’s still one of the most unnecessary and ultimately boring parts of the game.

Speaking of the frog coins, that’s another change to the battle system and overall game that wasn’t capitalized on. In the remake, 20% of enemies will now be “special enemies” that hit harder and have more HP, but when you defeat them, you get double the coins, double the experience points, AND a frog coin. Awesome, except one little problem: they didn’t really create more situations that require frog coins. They’re basically only good now for finishing your journal 100%. There’s a detailed list of monsters in the game that, when you use Mallow to read their mind, get a check mark on the list. Some of these are one-off beasts, and if you aren’t using Mallow, you have to pay a guy hidden in Booster’s Pass three frog coins, and you don’t even get to choose which one he checks off. I’m pretty sure it’s done randomly.

It IS a cool feature. You can watch every attack animation, spell animation, etc.

And, that’s basically it for the frog coins, other than the stuff that was already in the game. I never liked the items sold in the tadpole pond, so the frog that sells accessories like the Exp. Booster in Seaside Town is really the only legit use of frog coins, and in the new system, you’ll be able to buy out his full inventory pretty fast. That’s the extent of ways to spend this massive windfall of what had been a rare and desirable currency in the previous version. Sorry, but you just can’t do that! If you add more of a LOT more of a currency, logically you have to add a LOT more ways to spend it, and they didn’t. So, while I enjoyed the special enemy encounters quite a lot, all they ultimately do is take all the risk/reward out of how you spend frog coins.

If you’re into soundtracks, that also gets unlocked post-game. Not only that, but it comes with a fully decked-out player that also lets you listen to the original versions and even do random play.

I swear I’m done bitching. Well, mostly done, but now, here’s the good stuff. Super Mario RPG Remake is, no doubt about it, an easier game than the SNES one, so, I didn’t know what to expect from the post-game content. The framing device is that, once you restore the Star Road and wishes can be granted again, seven previous bosses had THEIR wishes granted. Now, getting this unlocked is busy work on top of busy work. Toad gives you a voucher for the honeymoon suite in Marrymore. When you use that, Geno looks longingly out the window. You have to go a couple screens into Star Road, and there you’ll discover the boss wishes. Unfortunately, instead of just clicking them and going to the new boss fights, you actually have to make your way to the original chambers where you fought them. Sigh. Okay, so that’s the bad news. Here’s the good news: most of these fights are legitimate RPG challenges, and lengthy battles to boot. The first one, a rematch with Belome, took me over twenty minutes to finish. In the second one against “Leveled-Up Punchinello”, the first thing that happened was he one-shotted Mario to death.

I guess he played Mike Tyson in Punch-Out!! before making his wish.

Actually, the Punch-Out!! comparison is pretty accurate, because the best way to describe these bonus fights is to think of the rematches from the Wii Punch-Out!! Only the final fight against 3D Culex is a normal punch-for-punch RPG battle. The other six all have some kind of twist to them, and for five of them, it’s a twist that makes them almost puzzle-like. Belome clones one of your party members, like in his previous fight. Only, this time you HAVE to fight the clone, because the clone’s first act is to cast a shield that deflects everything. Do you know how I won this fight? HE RAN OUT OF FIRE POINTS! I didn’t even realize enemies had FP, but the fight dragged out so long that he ran out of them.

You even fight Booster in the post-game quest, which never happens in the main game. He’s seen here, about to one-shot my entire party for the second and final time in this fight. Yep, I game overed against Booster, who is, for lack of a better term, a “special” individual. This is one of those “sit in the corner and think about what you’ve done” moments of my gaming life.

Now, these seven extra fights don’t scale correctly at all, at least in the order the page on the Wiki said to tackle them. The rematch against Johnny Jones, the 5th fight, is a one on one, no items allowed Mario v Johnny fight, and I won it on my first attempt when Johnny offered to let me swap my party members (who give you buffs even if they’re not part of this fight) and equipment. I put the best armor on Mario and just whittled him down. So that one kind of sucked. On the other hand, the final battle with Culex 3D took me a whopping 40+ minutes to finish. It has 9,999 health, and the crystals are beefer too AND killing them causes the crystal to buff whatever is still alive as it dies. And IT WAS AWESOME! Besides the Johnny Jones fight, all the bonus bosses were! The best part of the game for me, easily.

There’s still a hard cap on leveling-up. 30 is the max.

Two things annoy me about the bonus bosses. First is that there’s only seven of them. Seriously, they’re SO fun that I wish they had done one for EVERY boss. All-in, I spent about two hours locating them and fighting them. Two hours of additional content sounds like a lot, but this is a nearly three decade old game. Come on! The second annoyance is that this type of post-game beef is entirely limited to those seven boss fights. They didn’t enhance the overworld basic enemies post-game at all. Why not? Now granted, they added fast travel via the map, so it doesn’t take THAT long to reach them, but there’s also the emphasis on finding all the enemies you didn’t use Mallow to read the mind of. Post-game, those fights are spent having everyone else do nothing but defend while you wait for Mallow’s turn to read another mind. Had the developers added some muscle to the post-game overworld enemies, I honestly ain’t sure I’d be writing this review right now. I think I probably would have felt compelled to go out and fill out the whole monster checklist. So, I’m pretty frustrated with Mario RPG Remake. In fact, I don’t remember a game I liked that disappointed me off more. That KEPT disappointing me consistently.

Spent a solid 20 minutes trying to jump from the yellow vine to the green one, kept grazing it, but I couldn’t hold my grip on it. I was getting angrier and angrier, until my father asked “are you sure there’s not a platform there?” I said “I checked” and I truly believe I did, but yea, there was a platform there. So embarrassing.

But, even through all the disappointment, I never had to remind myself “this is one of the best video games ever made.” It never lets you forget that. It absolutely holds up to the test of time, changes or not. I guess that’s a big part of why I’m so frustrated by leaving so much of the game unchanged. Because there aren’t a lot of games out there that are honest-to-God contenders for the title of greatest of all-time. Mario RPG surely isn’t in that discussion. There’s just too many head-scratching decisions that were no doubt compromises based entirely around what could and couldn’t be done with the limitations of the Super NES. But, it feels like what’s already in the game could be tweaked slightly and transform Mario RPG into that legit GOAT contender. There’s a big difference between “one of the all-time greats” and “THE all-time greatest.” As much as I loved playing this remake, there’s something heartbreaking about a culture of development where “the greatest of all-time” is on the table and they don’t go for it,
Verdict: YES!

“You’re sure he said ‘triumphant satisfaction?’ Sounds like baloney to me! If this worked, why would he go through all the trouble of fighting Dracula? Logically, wouldn’t he just need to stare at the castle whenever Dracula resurrects? Okay, I’ll go back to staring. Just had a thought is all.”

Filed under Nintendo Switch Reviews, Retro Reviews Tagged with , , , , , , , , , , , ,

Super Mario Land and Super Mario Land DX (Game Boy/Game Boy Color Reviews)

January 4, 2025 by 5 Comments

Super Mario Land
Platform: Game Boy
First Released April 21, 1989
Directed by Satoru Okada
Developed by Nintendo
Included with Switch Online Subscription (Standard)
Listing at Mario Wiki

I used the “Game Boy Pocket” screen filter in the NSO Game Boy app.

2025 is just starting and I’ve got Nintendo launch games on my brain. I can’t imagine why. Now that I’ve reviewed the Game Boy Tetris in Tetris Forever: The Definitive Review, I wanted to look at the road not traveled. The game that was developed to be the pack-in for the Game Boy, until Henk Rogers and Bullet-Proof Software convinced Nintendo that Mario Land would make Game Boy a children’s product, while Tetris would make Game Boy an EVERYONE product. The end result? Tetris became a global mega hit, Game Boy went from black and white curio to genuine gaming powerhouse, and Mario Land did okay. And by “okay” I mean it’s the #2 selling original black and white Game Boy title that wasn’t a pack-in (only Pokemon Red/Blue/Yellow’s combined sales are greater).

To the game’s credit, especially since the guys behind it weren’t exactly Nintendo’s varsity team, it looks great given the limitations. Nowhere near as silly as the Game Boy version of Batman: The Video Game looked.

In fact, Super Mario Land outsold Super Mario Bros. 3. Yep, really! It’s astonishing, isn’t it? This little, unassuming tech demo, the first Super Mario game made without Shiggy’s involvement, defeated a game that many would consider to have been the most anticipated sequel in gaming history, and certainly a game that actively reigns as one of the most cherished and beloved video games ever made. Is it really all those things just because it wasn’t packed-in with the Game Boy? I mean, duh, along with coming out the day Game Boy did as well. Mario Land is fine, but it’s not amazing. It’s not even so good that being one of the best selling games of all-time makes any sense outside the context of being a launch title for a relatively cheap, yet scorching-hot platform. I’d love to see what the attach rate was for the Game Boy and Mario Land through the first two years of Game Boy’s existence. It had to be in the high 90 percentile. It’s a strange game for someone of my era to look back on, because Mario Land is incredibly weak compared to other Super Mario games. Yet, I honestly don’t remember meeting anyone who was around for the Game Boy launch who had anything but glowing memories of it. Mario Land is as beloved as any other 80s Mario title. And it’s SO WEIRD.

I accidentally beat the third boss in about a second, before I even realized I was fighting a boss. Just one running jump, then walking off a platform onto a switch was all it took. I had been prepared to whine about this more, until I remembered that the Bowser encounters in the original Super Mario Bros. ended when you hit a switch at the end and weren’t exactly epics.

Mario Land is certainly the jankiest Super Mario game. It’s the movement physics that threw me off. There’s absolutely no sense of inertia at all. Whether running or landing from a jump, Mario stops on a dime. Hell, he stops on the rivets at the edge of the dime. You would think this would make platforming much easier, since it turns every jump from a calculated, athletic type of action that has to account for momentum into just a matter of raw distance. But, you do have to continue to hold the movement, because you can stop in mid-air too. My brain couldn’t adjust to this, I died just as much from screwing up otherwise basic jumps as I did misjudging enemies. I’m not trying to sound like an amazing gamer or anything, but I suffered the type of deaths playing Mario Land that I haven’t had playing a 2D platformer in a LONG time. I’m talking about screwing up some very basic stuff, and I felt so awkward when it happened. Like “jeez, I know that was on me, too. Yeesh.”

On the other hand, the lack of weight and momentum does make any interval-based enemies easier to get past. No worries about skidding INTO these fish. There’s no skidding! So, the physics engine isn’t totally challenge-creating. It’s just as often challenge reducing. Compare this game to the Cheep Cheep bridges in Super Mario 1, such as level 2-3. It’s not just that they fly out from the ground from underneath you, but it’s just as much your own momentum that makes those some of the hardest sections in Mario games. But, if the levels based around Cheep-Cheeps controlled like Mario Land does, I don’t think they’d be that hard at all.

Presumably, the lack of sliding was done to accommodate the motion blur issues in the early Game Boy screen. It’s also safe to assume that the length of the game was based around being a fraction of the OG Game Boy’s battery life, since there’s no means of saving. Not that you need it, as at only ten standard levels and two shmup levels, Super Mario Land is the shortest of any Super Mario game (at least when playing EVERY level, start-to-finish). Should take you 45 minutes, tops. When I first played Mario Land years ago, I didn’t like it at all. Now, eh, it’s fine. The ten normal Mario-style levels are decent enough. They’re a few steps above “basic” Super Mario gameplay, with things like hidden elevators or invisible floors that don’t really do all that much, but are fun to discover. And yet, outside of the question mark blocks and general hop ‘n bop gameplay, it never feels entirely like a Mario game. It feels like a Mario knock-off. But, like, a really decent, really flagrant knock-off.

You get to where I am by an invisible floor. If you’re not Little Mario, you have to deliberately take a hit, or you can’t go this way and have to fight the robots directly. There’s a couple areas like that in Mario Land.

I have two big problems with Mario Land. While I enjoyed the shmup stages well enough (hey, I like shmups!), ending the game on one was a massive downer. But, all credit where it’s due: this is the rare “let’s add a shmup to a platformer” game where the shump section doesn’t feel completely divorced from the rest of the game. They do a good job of making it feel like it’s the same character in the same world. The other big problem is the game is just too easy. Despite some pretty humiliating deaths, I never had to sweat a game over because there’s too many coins, extra lives, and short-cuts. I won’t say that it crosses the line or anything, because I did lose like six or seven lives along the way, including four to the final boss, but I still finished with around two dozen lives to spare. And when I threw on toruzz’s excellent Super Mario Land DX ROM (review up next), I finished the game with 58 lives. FIFTY-EIGHT! There’s only twelve levels, for Christ’s sake!

I don’t think ending a Mario game with a shmup boss is the wisest choice, but apparently this was the original intent by Miyamoto, who wanted something like this to be the finale for the original Super Mario Bros.

The best thing I can compare Mario Land to is watching the first season of The Simpsons. Everything is alright and certainly the product you’re familiar with, yet somehow also somehow so horribly wrong that it’s kind of a little spooky for it. Weirdly, it’s for the same reasons as the Simpsons, too: everything is off-model, including the locations, and very against the established canon. In the case of Mario Land, it’s full of one-off settings and enemies that never showed up in the franchise again and often feel like they belong to an entirely different franchise. Hell, the first three bosses can be defeated in the same way you beat Bowser in Super Mario 1, AND EVEN THEN, it never feels like they’re Mario villains, and the last boss sure as sh*t doesn’t. But ultimately, Mario Land doesn’t last long enough to bore, or even really to frustrate. I imagine a child in 1989 was probably thrilled that they had something that was a LOT better than the Super Mario Game & Watch for a portable Mario experience.

The most remarkable aspect of the game is it actually does make you feel like you’re in different worlds instead of against a static screen. It’s immersive, and in a way that holds up well in 2025. I didn’t expect that at all.

I played Mario Land twice in black & white and twice on DX (coming up), and I never shook the feeling that I was playing a glorified tech demo. That’s not necessarily a bad thing. It’s the reality of a launch title. When I look back on those Mario games that served as springboards for new platforms, most are pretty rough. Even Super Mario 64 feels like the whole engine could collapse at any time. Which makes sense, because they had to cut a ton of content from the game to make the release date, and even then, Miyamoto kept asking for more time to polish it, until Nintendo President Hiroshi Yamauchi told him the game was good enough. What strikes me most about Mario Land is, yea, it’s only twelve levels long, but there ain’t a stinker in the bunch. Every level is solid. Hell, you can’t even say that about every level in New Super Mario Bros. U Deluxe’s first world. So, maybe Super Mario Land hasn’t aged particularly gracefully in terms of its build. This is the roughest game in the entire franchise, and really there’s nothing even close to it in that regard. But, they still managed to show that the Mario formula is so airtight that it’s almost impossible to screw-up. Mario Land is solid, and as the Grand Marshal of the Game Boy, it’s hard to imagine getting the platform off to a better start.
Verdict: YES!

Super Mario Land DX
Platform: Game Boy Color
Latest Release: April 20, 2022
Unauthorized ROM Hack of Super Mario Land
Developed by toruzz
Link to Patch at ROMHacking.net
I use THIS tool to apply patches.

Super Mario Land DX isn’t merely a colorization of Mario Land, but that part certainly stands out the most. I’d previously played toruzz’s colored version of Super Mario Land 2 (which I will do a review for both the original and the DX version at some point in 2025), but Mario Land DX is equally impressive. The new sprites for Mario and enemies look great, and the whole game POPS as it never has before. It’s so visually pleasing that you really wish Nintendo would just buy this build and make it official. It’s beautiful, and Mario games should be beautiful, right? Plus the notorious slowdown in the hard mode (IE the replay of the game after you beat it) is gone too. I’m pretty sure the version on Nintendo Switch Online also corrects the slowdown issue but don’t quote me on that.

Yep, that’s Luigi. Yep, he controls kinda like you think he will. No, it’s not as cool as it sounds.

Mario Land DX’s big-big-big addition is Luigi, which is done in the same style as Luigi in the Japanese version of Super Mario Bros. 2 (aka The Lost Levels). He moves looser and jumps higher. However, it’s just not as fun as it sounds. I think it’s too loose. It’s probably best to think of Luigi as “Mario Land if the controls weren’t as good.” Unlike Mario, Luigi does have a little momentum. It makes lining up with the tiny blocks pretty hard. There’s a few sections in the game where you can smash a block between other blocks to reveal a hidden elevator. It’s insane how long it took me to line up Luigi to get that. I also went back to skidding off platforms. Yea, I wasn’t building up 50 lives in this run. Nope, not happening. With Mario’s platform games, for me, what makes them stand out in the genre is precision controls and precision movement. Mario took off as a franchise because, above all else, they control the best. Turn those controls rotten and Mario games wouldn’t be the biggest franchise in the genre. There’s a reason why Alex Kidd isn’t an icon, folks. 

This took FOREVER for me to get.

I’d only recommend the Luigi quest if you’re a REALLY big fan of Super Mario Land and want to experience it in a new way. I’ve never been a fan of games that use deliberately bad (or if not bad, difficult) controls for challenge. This is NOT made for me. But, it’s super easy to recommend Super Mario Land DX to anyone who wants to dip their toes in the wonderful world of ROM hacks because, golly, what an effort. And if you like color but really hate the new sprites (and some people do), you can toggle them off. There’s a few ROM hacks out there that change the levels, but I really sort of get the impression that the original design team already wrung every single drop of gameplay out of the limited Super Mario Land engine. I don’t really want to play more levels of it, especially when the only option left is to become trollish with the stage design. What toruzz has done here is EXACTLY what I want, and all I want, from a Mario Land ROM hack. Good job.
Verdict: YES!

Filed under Nintendo Switch Reviews, Retro Reviews Tagged with , , , , , , , , , , , ,

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