The Legend of Zelda (NES Review)

August 8, 2025 by 10 Comments

The Legend of Zelda
aka Zelda no Densetsu: The Hyrule Fantasy (Japan)
Platform: Nintendo Entertainment System, Famicom Disk System
First Released February 21, 1986
Directed by Shigeru Miyamoto and Takashi Tezuka
Developed by Nintendo
Available with Switch Online Subscription (Standard)
Listing at Zelda Wiki

There should be a law that any game where you swing a sword must have a multi-headed dragon. Actually I’m fine with that law being for any video game. Madden would be at least 3% better if a multi-headed dragon interrupted field goal attempts, with the percentage going up depending on the number of heads, naturally.

For this review, I played Legend of Zelda between sessions of Legend of Zelda: The Wind Waker on my Switch 2, and two things stuck out to me. The first is that I couldn’t forget that the gap between Zelda 1 and Wind Waker is five years shorter than the gap between Wind Waker and right now, today. That’s insane! Like, where did my youth go? Wind Waker released when I was 13 and it was one of those benchmark games of my childhood. I was a HUGE Ocarina of Time and Majora’s Mask fan and I couldn’t wait for Wind Waker. I didn’t give a squirt if they changed the graphics style because *I* thought it looked really cool and was confident I would love the game, and I did. But the 2D Zeldas seemed different enough that they might as well have been a separate series to me. At the age of 13, the first Zelda game was so old and primitive that it might as well have happened in the stone age. Like so many Nintendo milestones, I didn’t play it until years later when it was on a GBA cart. You can imagine my surprise that I really enjoyed it a lot. Zelda 1 is right up there with Super Mario 2 and Castlevania as far as NES games I’ve played the most times.

From the time I launched IGC in 2011 and continuing to the present day, the average age of my readers is around ten years older than me. It’s actually closer to seven-to-eight years older now, but amazingly, even though I’m now 36 years old, they’re still older than me. Well, this summer I’ve done a ton of games from the childhoods of my readers, with only WarioWare being a pivotal game of my own youth, and I don’t think anyone would call that a major milestone game. So, one of my next reviews will be for Wind Waker, which I first played at the age of 13, because MY childhood matters too, dammit! By the way, I used to make fun of people who used their shiny new $500 game consoles to play retro games and now I’m one of them. Remember kids, you will grow up to be that which you mock now, so try to mock lovingly. You’ll feel like less of a horse’s ass in the future.

The second thing that stood out was how, of all the NES games that serve as launching points for franchises, the first game in the Legend of Zelda series is easily the title that aged the best. Playing it now, in 2025, I admit I was a little surprised by how much of the core Zelda formula has remained unchanged from this first game. The overworld format with distinct areas like lakes, deserts, graveyards, coastlines, forests, mountains, rivers, etc? It all started here. Really, the only major area not debuting is any form of a town. The dungeon format is in the same boat. The map, compass, enemy pacing, and goal of finding the key items and slaying a boss to collect the macguffin? It all started here too. A lot of the enemies that would be Zelda staples are introduced here, as well. Mummies? Here. The centaurs that are major characters in Breath of the Wild? They debuted all the way back here. So did Octoroks, Moblins, Zoras, Tektites, Wizzrobes, and Darknuts. Some have evolved more than others, so maybe the roster isn’t as close to modern counterparts as, say, a Mario game, but they all feel kin to their modern counterparts. For a series as complex as Zelda, that’s pretty remarkable.

Actually, the weakest enemy to battle with in all of the original Zelda is easily Ganon himself. The gimmick with him is he becomes invisible and teleports around the room, and the only way to beat him is to just mash the attack at NOTHING and hope he eventually teleports his intestines into your sword, then after the fourth hit (assuming you have the magic sword), you have to finish him off with a silver arrow. That part is fine, especially since the silver arrow is hidden within the final dungeon itself. But the fight up until the killing blow? What were they thinking? Who the hell wants a final boss that’s beaten by stabbing blindly at air? Ganon, as generically evil as he is, is still one of my favorite gaming villains and he would eventually go on to become a great final boss (Ganon > Ganondorf IMO, the human version of him is TOO generic), but his debut is one of the very worst boss battles Nintendo ever did. Actually, I think it might be at the bottom. A terrible idea executed horribly.

I played both the first and second quests of Zelda 1 for this review, and in the case of the second quest, I had never played it past a few minutes. It really was like a brand new experience, and it was refreshing given what happened in the first game. In the first quest, I had doubled my hearts from three to six and acquired every item you could get out of the overworld or purchase in shops (except the Magic Sword and two heart containers) before I ever played the first dungeon. You can’t exactly tackle the levels in ANY order because one requires the raft to reach and others require the ladder to win (assuming you’re not using glitches), but there’s still a lack of tightness of design. Really, the modern Zelda format as seen in Breath of the Wild and Tears of the Kingdom feels closer to this original game than the Zeldas of my childhood, in that both lean into a sense of overwhelming vastness.

LOOK AT THAT ARTWORK! I want an anime that looks like that! Now, I grew up in the tail-end of the instruction book era, BUT I STILL READ THEM! Instruction books have since gone the way of corded controllers and game rentals. Mention instruction books to my nieces and nephew and they’ll sort of cock their heads to the side and say “in….truck…..shun…… books? What’s a book?” Kids these days, I swear to God. But I checked and if you bought this game for the NES back in the day, the book would give you pointers to get to the first level and then a map of where the second level was, but THAT WAS IT. While researching this feature, I also found out that Nintendo published a pocket-sized guide to Zelda called “Tips & Tactics” that also says “instruction book” on it. I’m not sure if this was sold separately, bundled with the game, or originally sold separately but then bundled with later pressings. If you had Tips & Tactics, let me know in the comments! I want to hear if you remember how you got it! I’ve mostly heard from readers that they got their Zelda maps from Nintendo Power or the precursor to Nintendo Power, the Nintendo Fun Club Newsletter. So, I went through those. The third issue of the newsletter has a complete overworld map and maps for the first four levels. The fourth issue has a guide to the bosses. NOTHING offered a complete walkthrough, though the first issue of Nintendo Power did include complete maps for the second quest’s first six levels and the overworld. If you truly got stuck, you had to call a 900 number to have someone walk you through it. “What’s a 900 number?” Kids these days.

On the other hand, nobody can bitch about Zelda 1 getting off to a slow start. My Wind Waker review will probably contain a lot of complaining about how damn long it takes for the game to feel like you’ve actually finished the tutorial section and are now playing the game properly. Seriously, it could take hours. Zelda 1 just kind of drops you off into the world with no real direction on what to do or where to go. In the above caption, you can see the lengths gamers had to go to in order to find help with Zelda. If you didn’t have access to those things, well, you’re on your own. I only played the first quest as well as I did because this was like the fourth or fifth time I beat the game. The first time? Oh, it’s overwhelming. But, that loose structure also opens up the possibility to make a mockery of the developer’s intent.

In the Famicom Disk original build of Zelda, you can use this heart container, combined with the whistle, to max out your health early. By blowing the whistling and summoning the whirlwind while standing next to this heart, you’ll collect it, but when you return, it’ll be back. I SHOULD have played the FDS build but instead I played the US game, where the only glitch I activated was the famous Level 1 door glitch.

This especially extends to the dungeons. You can purchase keys for locked doors within the dungeons in the overworld’s shops. That’s weird enough on its own since the dungeons provide more than enough keys that nobody should have to search too far to find one, which was a mechanic MY era’s Zeldas leaned heavily into. In playing Wind Waker, I realized the small keys play a larger role in maintaining the game’s tempo than I initially realized. When you get a key in that game, or any of the future Zelda games, it’s a MOMENT. That is not the case in Zelda 1 at all. The original game might have incentivized exploration, but it didn’t put a premium on maximizing the real estate. You actually don’t need to fully explore the overworld OR the dungeons. When I did the second quest, I realized there were large parts of the game, especially in the upper left-hand corner of the overworld’s map, that I had never been to in any of my previous play sessions.

Amazing how many icons of the franchise are in Zelda 1 and FEEL like prototypes for the ones I played as a kid. Gohma, who is the first boss in both Ocarina of Time and Wind Waker, debuted in Zelda 1 and is probably the scariest villain. A gigantic one-eyed crab that spits fireballs? Jeez, that’s nightmare fuel.

The keys show off this haphazard use of space the most. By the second level of the first quest, there are so many alternative routes within dungeons that you can completely circumvent MOST of the locked doors. As a result, I had collected so many keys that went unused that I decided to not grab the magic key in Level 8. I had eighteen keys going into Death Mountain and was curious if I could still beat Death Mountain, and if so, how many would I have when I rescued Zelda? Would I need to use ten keys? Five? Would I finish with a dozen keys? Because surely Death Mountain won’t drop keys when a magical unlock-all key is one of level eight’s items. Well, to my surprise Death Mountain also drops normal keys, and like any other level, it had pathways I didn’t need to take. I ended up finishing +1 over what I had when I entered the level and beat Zelda with nineteen total unused keys (having bought none in stores). It’s safe to say that what evolved in Zelda wasn’t so much the sublime combat or the format as it was the tightness of design.

Zelda is probably wondering who the f*ck is this locksmith that rescued her. I assume the keys in the shop thing was some kind of holdover from an earlier build that was put into the game as a means to prevent a soft-lock if a player (1) used every key as soon as they found it and (2) picked the wrong sequence of locked doors. Perhaps at some point, it was possible to pick the wrong door to unlock and end up with no option but the shop. But given the layouts of the final game, with the sheer amount of destructible walls, I can’t imagine it’s possible to do that now. Even if you somehow found yourself stuck or missing a key, it’d be quicker and cheaper to grind Moblins until one drops a bomb pick-up than it would be to spend $100 on a key.

Don’t get me wrong: most of Zelda’s play mechanics hold up to the test of time. It might have the best offensive mechanics in the entire NES library. The sword is VERY satisfying and the concept that it shoots a laser out when you have full health is both bonkers and inspired. Unlike the majority of classic gaming tropes where you say to yourself “someone WOULD have come up with something like this eventually” I don’t think the laser-shooting sword is the type of idea that was inevitable, you know? And honestly, I still think the NES version of it is the best one in the franchise. It’s kind of weak in future games, but here, it feels powerful and cathartic, with perfect sound design and that little explosion it makes at the end being the chef’s kiss.

In the second quest, these things that you can grease with one arrow show up long before you get the bow. In the Famicom Disk version, you can blow into the microphone to kill them. In Zelda’s second quest, you have to just hack at them with a sword for a few hours until they croak. HAVE FUN!

To go with the excellent sword, the enemies are generally well made. Probably the best roster of enemies of any early NES game, if not the best overall roster on the entire platform. Given the limitations and the overall experimental nature of the game, the cast is HUGE, but the enemies do feel distinct. Okay, so the mummies are kind of just the skeletons with more hit points (well, at least until the second quest) and the bosses are a little too cinchy. Actually, with the exception of the multi-headed dragon, I found the Wizzrobes and Darknuts to be worse to deal with than ANY boss. Like, they certainly overuse the dinosaurs and the four-headed Manhandla. Uh, this thing:

Overused or not, one-shotting it with a bomb is one of those “stand up and cheer!” moments.

But they utilize the enemies in a way that gives both the dungeons and especially the overworld personality. Zoras always show up in the water to give those areas a sense of menace. The moblins rule the forests, while the centaurs control the mountains, and the spider-like Tektites only appear where it’s rocky. Forty years later and Hyrule STILL feels like a real, living world because of where they put the enemies. It’s just so smart. The Legend of Zelda’s offensive game gives you everything you would want in combat with no real downside besides not getting the best out of the roster of enemies (see the below caption). Nearly forty years later and the combat STILL isn’t boring. What else can you say at that point?

I don’t think they maximized the potential of the roster at all. There’s a lot of repeat bosses, some of which are just baffling. The dragon that’s at the end of the first level also shows up as the boss of the seventh level, but without being buffed-up. By that point, he might die in two shots. Why not replace him with one of these things, called Patras, that are only found in Death Mountain? I get that they wanted that level to feel climatic by having some dangerous creatures, but the Patra feels like a boss. Hell, there’s even two types of them, one of which has the orbiting eyeballs curve differently. There’s also fast moving, dangerous worms called Lanmolas that feel like bosses that are exclusive to Death Mountain. If I didn’t know better, I’d swear that they intended for these creatures to show up earlier and then lost their nerve because they didn’t want the game to be too hard.

However, Zelda’s defensive game isn’t as strong. It feels arbitrary when the magic shield works or not. Like, it’ll shield you from the blasts of the Zoras in the water but not from identical looking blasts from bosses. So frustrating, especially since hearing that PING of a shot successfully deflected is just delightful. Also, the difficulty scaling is pretty bad in general. Level seven could have easily been level three for how much of a cinch it is. I assume they placed it near the end on the assumption players would be hard up for the cash to buy the enemy bait since it’s the only time you NEED it in the first quest. Meanwhile, levels five and six feel like they could be bumped up a slot or two.

“Hey bats, if you have a moment I’d like to have a word with you about our lord and savior Jesus Christ.” “Ugh, someone hit me with a boomerang, already.“

They also ran out of ideas for useful items to fill out the stages. The magic wand and book are just about the most useless items in any Zelda game. One of those “sh*t, we gotta put SOMETHING here for the players to find!” And there were other options. Hide the letter to the lady in a level! Hide the arrows! Hide the ability to carry bombs in a level! Hide the power bracelet in a level! That one really befuddles me. It’s found in some arbitrary spot on the map under one of the statues that comes to life in both quests. It’s so subdued for such an important item. Except, it’s not really important. All the power bracelet does is make it so you can shove rocks that reveal warp zones, at least in the first quest. They could have changed it so you need the bracelet to shove anything in the overworld, making it essential towards getting the magic sword out of the graveyard. My point is, they had better options and the wand sucks. But Legend of Zelda doesn’t suck. It’s one of the best 8 bit games ever, to this day.

The second quest doesn’t f*ck around. Yes, you permanently lose a heart container if you choose the first option.

Even with the rough pacing, sloppy difficulty scaling, and somewhat underwhelming boss roster, it goes without saying that Zelda is a masterpiece that leaves the test of time laying dead with a sword through its heart. There’s nothing I can say that you’ve not already heard before, and the world certainly wasn’t aching to hear what Cathy Vice thinks of the first Zelda game. Finding something unique to talk about was tricky. And then I beat the game, saw that Link was now holding up a sword, and I remembered that Zelda had a second quest that rearranged a lot of the locations and order of the items and upped the difficulty. This is so underplayed that the famous wiki Zelda Dungeon doesn’t even have a walkthrough for it. Until I started this review, I genuinely don’t remember hearing anyone really talk about the meat of the second quest in features or casual conversation. Even the GOAT of NES coverage, Jeremy Parish, pretty much glosses over it. So let’s talk about it!

Famously, you can also enter “ZELDA” as your name and skip right to the second quest. If you’ve never done it, trust me, it’s worth a look.

The second quest of Zelda is a completely different beast. Of the nine dungeons, only the first one remains in the same location. The other eight? They’re somewhere out in the world. Good luck! Some are where dungeons were already previously located, though in different orders. Level four in the first quest is still a dungeon, only now it’s level five. Other levels are in such arbitrary locations that I would never have found them without a guide. Level eight especially is insanely well hidden. The starting sword, white sword, a couple of the heart containers (including the ladder one and the raft one), the bracelet, and some of the burnable bushes are the same. But, the item order is totally different. The bow? You don’t get it until the fifth level. The whistle you normally got in the fifth level? It’s now in the second level, and there’s a LOT more hidden stuff to uncover with it in the overworld, in places you wouldn’t normally think to look. You don’t even get the ladder until the sixth level, and it’s impossible to grind-up heart containers and get the white sword before you start gathering the Triforce pieces.

Even the letter from the old lady that you need to buy medicine isn’t found until VERY late in the game. It was literally the last thing I found before entering the new Death Mountain. In the first quest, it’s in the above door, but it ain’t there anymore. Instead, this is just a shop now. I did manage to grind up enough money to get the Blue Ring before playing the first stage. The shop that sells it I found by accident, as it had previously been a location of a high-yielding coin drop.

And then there’s the dungeons, which have an entirely different vibe to them. They’re MUCH more maze-like this time and some are pretty hard to find their way through. That’s not just because a lot of them put tougher enemies much earlier than you previously encountered them, either. It’s how you find your way through them. Instead of just having a ton of bombable walls (dear auto-correct: bombable is a word, dagnabit), you might have to just walk THROUGH the walls, like this:

The design logic dives really hard into the invisible doors. In fact, a key item is hidden in one of the levels BEHIND the Triforce piece. The second quest’s progression is based more around confusing players after the first quest and having no real rules or flow to the progress, though it mostly works. Mostly, but the level design itself can be problematic. The layouts of the first five stages spell out the word E-A-L-D-Z. I have no clue why the letters are not in the correct order. I assume they were at some point in development and it was changed due to the difficulty, but either way, the third level, the “L” is probably the single worst dungeon in the entire history of the franchise. Hell, it doesn’t even climax with a boss battle. You know those things that throw boomerangs? The big finale to the third stage is a room full of them.

The locked door? It’s the Triforce room. Yes, really! The room on the right directly across from the Triforce room on the map contains the blue boomerang, and you have to use the enemy bait to get it. So these things are the bosses. They’re not even the tougher blue versions! I thought this was supposed to be the harder second quest?! She said after already dying once.

Okay, so when the second quest is bad, it’s REALLY bad, but it never gets worse than that third stage. Other levels have several clever twists to them. The skeletons? Their swords shoot lasers now, just like Link’s does when you have full health. Full sized bosses appear more frequently in dungeons (in fairness, that happened in the first quest too, but not to this degree). There’s red herring keys laying around that there’s hypothetically no way to get since you won’t have the ladder yet. I mean, unless you return to the dungeon at some later point in the game to collect them. It feels like the second quest’s main objective is to trick players and take away any sense of predictability. Some of the staircases might send you to a room that doesn’t have a return staircase, and it becomes easy to get lost or go around in circles.

The “staircase drops you off in a room without a return staircase” gag that I found hugely annoying is paid off in a big way during the game’s climax. It’s actually the key to solving Death Mountain in the second quest.

While some aspects of the second quest can be taken out of order (for example, I beat level four before level three), it’s a lot harder to cheese by getting the sword upgrades or other key items before the game wants you to have them. It wasn’t long into the second quest that I started to wonder if some of the locations and dungeons were actually the original concepts for the main quest that were moved to the bonus after-game content because they were too hard. Like the mechanic with the bubbles in the caption below? That just feels like something that was meant to be in the game all along. It’s too elaborate to have been an afterthought. The same with the walking through the walls bit. While the Z-E-L-D-A shaped dungeons probably weren’t part of the main design, I think most of the gameplay mechanics from the second quest likely were. Maybe. The story behind the second quest is kind of one of those “spilled mold into bacteria and it killed” moments.

Like (like) I’m pretty sure I can’t reach this key yet. I think they did these things to send players on wild goose chases.

Because of how the memory on the NES worked, all the Zelda maps had to be made to fit like a jigsaw puzzle on a grid, and the second quest only exists because Takashi Tezuka only used up half the available space for the nine dungeons of the first quest. Okay, fine. It was a happy accident. But I’m still willing to bet that they used the opportunity to dump gameplay ideas that were deemed “too hard” and deleted from the original build back into the game. These are just too elaborate, too thoughtful, and dare I say it, too elegant to have been throwaway bonuses that only happened because someone only used up half the memory they were supposed to.

The biggest change to the monsters is with the bubbles. In the first quest, if you touch a bubble, you temporarily lose your sword. In the second quest, bubbles come in three colors: the normal ones that shift between red and blue that temporarily take away the sword are still around. But now, there’s also ones that are always red and ones that are always blue. The always-blue ones are harmless and have no negative effect on Link besides causing him to recoil as if he’s taking damage. The always-red bubbles are by far the most dangerous and annoying things in the entire game. If you touch one, you lose your sword permanently until you do any one of the following things: (1) touch a blue bubble (2) visit a fairy fountain, and yes, the effect will linger even if you leave a dungeon (3) use a potion or (4) get a Triforce piece. This isn’t a rare thing, either. Many rooms will have multiple red bubbles and a single blue bubble, while others might have quite a journey between rooms that have red bubbles and rooms that have the blue bubbles you need to regain your sword. There’s a couple REALLY annoying rooms full of red bubbles where you have to hug the wall and there’s no room to dodge in any direction. Since the bubbles have no preset attack pattern and can change direction without any warning, they’re very, very dangerous.

And it’s not a throwaway bonus. In the second quest, there’s an undeniable method to the madness that should make it a stronger experience for veterans of the franchise. I’m SO happy I finally played it. Again, nobody needs me of all people to recommend playing one of the most famous games ever made. BUT, I suspect a lot of my readers have never tried Legend of Zelda’s second quest. It’s not just more of the same. There’s hints of that, but what the second quest really has going for it is that sense that the gameplay is what Zelda 1 would have been like all along if they didn’t have to consider how new this whole idea was. Because there had never been a game like Legend of Zelda (well, except Tower of Druaga, the NES version of which I reviewed for Namco Museum Archives Volume 1), I’m guessing they had to significantly tone back aspects of it. The speed of the darknuts. The red/blue bubbles. The skeletons shooting swords. I suspect that somewhere between the first and second quests is the definitive version Big Shiggy Style and Tezuka WOULD have made if they weren’t breaking new ground. And I think you’ll get that vibe too if you give it a try.
Verdict: YES!

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

Wario Land: Super Mario Land 3 (Game Boy Review)

August 1, 2025 by 5 Comments

Wario Land: Super Mario Land 3
Platform: Game Boy
First Released January 21, 1994
Directed by Hiroji Kiyotake and Takehiko Hosokawa
Developed by Nintendo
NO MODERN RELEASE*
Listing on Mario Wiki

*I made a mistake when I first published this and said Wario Land is on Switch Online. It is not.

From here out, if there’s an option to do color versions of classic Game Boy titles (meaning more than just four Super Game Boy-like colors), I’m taking it. If home developers are going to go to all the trouble of colorizing these games, at least one person with a semi-big review platform should acknowledge them. All the color screenshots in this feature are from Wario Land: Super Mario Land 3 Color Edition by korxo, who did a very good job given the limitations.
Link to the Patch

The fire attack and the dash attacks don’t show up all too well in screenshots. Thankfully, I barely used the dragon hat.

Okay, I’m pretty sure this is the last game that’s officially part of the Super Mario franchise’s 8 bit and 16 bit era that I haven’t reviewed. Like Yoshi’s Island, it’s only technically part of the Super Mario franchise thanks to a subtitle and really exists to act as the starting point for its own spinoff franchise. As of this writing, there’s been eight Wario Land games (assuming you count Wario World for GameCube and Wario: Master of Disguise for Nintendo DS as “Wario Land” games, and I do), and it all started here with a game that built to the strengths of the Game Boy. It’s certainly not Mario-like. Wario Land is actually more of the spiritual successor to the legacy of Doki Doki Panic and later Super Mario Bros. 2. It’s a much, much slower action game with a focus on exploration. There’s no B-running and no fast reaction times required. Even when you’re being stalked by a killer Thwomp, the tempo is kept pretty low and the focus is on creating tension, not panic.

Actually, it does the “chase” gimmick twice, with the second time turning the Thwomp into a boat at the end.

Which isn’t to say there’s no action in Wario Land. Wario’s tackle is satisfying enough, and it’s always fun to pick up a downed enemy and throw them off their perch and to their death, hopefully involving lava. If it worked perfectly, the combat would be S-tier for 8-bits, but that’s not the case. Wario is one of the first 2D retro games I’ve reviewed where the physics are wonky to the point of being genuinely unpredictable, mostly thanks to the level layouts. If you attempt to pick up an enemy with any structure nearby, whatever you’re carrying will be knocked out of your hand, and the enemy might instead shuffle around like they’re square dancing upside-down around your sprite. There’s a roughness to Wario Land that’s obvious right from the start and sticks around until the bitter end.

This is not a traditional hop ‘n squash game. I took more damage fighting the most basic enemies than I did in all other Mario games in this marathon combined. I don’t know if a single goomba so much as nibbled at the tip of my boots in the Mario games, but these little things called Pirate Gooms got me several times. Usually because they recovered right as I was reaching them. I may or may not have lost lives to them as well. (cough) Hey, it wasn’t MY fault. It was the physics. I swear.

Thankfully, the combat takes a deep back seat to stellar level design, but even that has this undeniable roughness to it. Wario Land has one of the strangest progression structures I’ve encountered, as some early levels have multiple exits and branching paths, one of which leads to an entirely different game world that’s otherwise inaccessible. Hell, the very first level in the game takes place on a beach, and the level’s format changes after you beat the first game world and the tide comes in. It’s a great idea that had me so pumped-up to see what other wacky changes would happen to the game world.

And then, after the 23rd of 40 stages, the “multiple exits” concept is abandoned completely, never to return. In total, only five stages have hidden exits. Imagine if Super Mario World didn’t have any key holes after the halfway point. Well, Wario Land actually does that, and it’s so goddamn weird for it. The idea of changing world maps is also largely abandoned, as I’m pretty sure there’s only one instance of it with any consequence after the secret exits stop. A lot of games give off the impression of having more ambitious plans that were left on the drawing board, but with Wario Land, I really think that might be what happened. The only way I can make sense of the structure is that they ran out of time and had to delete multiple exits and possibly stages when the time came to code the game, only many earlier ones had to be left in because they stuck a game world off in the corner, where nothing else on the map can logically reach it, and there was nowhere else to hide the treasures within.

Unlike Mario World, the keys that unlock the fifteen hidden treasures are often placed away from the skull doors that hold them. Sometimes, they’re on the total opposite end of the level, and carrying the keys from Point A to Point B is a pain in the ass. In a good way, I mean. Thankfully, the keys don’t vanish if you scroll them off screen, and you can also use them to kill enemies.

The good news is that hidden doors aren’t the main thing you’re searching for in Wario Land. What you’re really trying to do is accumulate money to buy a bigger house than Mario lives in after Wario’s attempt to claim squatter’s rights in Super Mario Land 2 didn’t work out. The plan is to steal back a gold statue of Princess Peach that was stolen by Captain Syrup, the ruler of Brown Sugar Pirates (why is it always food-based names? Does Nintendo not feed their developers? It would explain a lot!). Surprisingly for a Nintendo game, Wario doesn’t intend to fetch the statue in order to court Peach. Oh no. Wario might be a greedy Mario doppelgänger, but he’s a greedy Mario doppelgänger who follows the golden rule: don’t stick your d*ck in crazy, and when the ruler of a country commissions a golden statue of themselves, it’s a safe bet they’re f*cking nuts. Go ahead and cringe, but Wario played Super Princess Peach. He knows what’s up. So he plans on ransoming the statue to raise funds to buy a castle. It’s the most petty reason to go on a harrowing adventure, and it ends with Mario stealing the statue anyway.

As luck would have it, the final boss is a genie and, once Wario has won the fight, he gets to make a wish. He probably should have made it “I hope that my action-adventure franchise doesn’t completely evaporate by the 2010s” but I’m getting ahead of myself. Because the absolute monarchy of the Mushroom Kingdom is so capitalist that even a genie needs to get a bag, to make Wario’s wish come true, you need to accumulate as much money as possible. The hidden treasures are given value in coins after you beat the genie, and I’m fairly certain that if you find all fifteen of them (and complete all forty courses as well), you will max out the coin bank and get the best ending, which is Wario getting his own planet.

Update: WRONG, you will need about 10K in coins plus the fifteen treasures plus have an all-clear for the forty courses to get Planet Wario.

Mario would later top this by getting his own galaxy. Always a bridesmaid, huh Wario?

Finding the treasures IS hugely satisfying because the game doesn’t tell you where they are. While the five stages with hidden exits are marked on the overworld map, there’s no indicators for which levels have treasures (something Virtual Boy Wario Land did). The only thing you can really use to help is the fact that the fifteen treasures have spots sequentially on the scoreboard. So if you’re missing the “G” treasure, it’s going to be found in one of the levels between where you found treasures “F” and “H.” I love this, and the only thing I wish for is that, once you found the treasures, the game told you what stages you found them in. I also wish Nintendo would build a much bigger game based around this idea. I found MOST of the treasures on my first playthrough, but the act of getting them was rarely a layup. In fact, the second-to-last one I could not find for the life of me.

When you do find the treasures, it’s a moment. It never feels anything short of great.

As a proof of concept first attempt at a new franchise, Wario Land holds up shockingly well. I don’t think it will be for everyone. The slow movement will be a major turnoff for a lot of players, as will be the clunky mechanics. It also has some exceptionally weak bosses. At one point during a boss fight, I was dodging attacks and hunkering down for a typical “three hits and your dead” type of battle. But after a few passes, nothing was happening, so I charged at the boss and it worked. When he was stunned, I picked him up and threw him in the lava and the fight was over. Curiosity got the better of me so I rewound the fight and this time, I charged as soon as I could. It worked.

Even with satisfying combat, I wouldn’t recommend playing Wario Land specifically for it. It’s just not polished enough for that. From an action perspective, it’s for sure the roughest 2D combat I can remember Nintendo doing, including Kid Icarus. But as a true treasure hunt game, I was constantly surprised by how much fun I was having. Wario Land has NO bad levels among the forty total courses, which is nothing short of remarkable given the limitations of the Game Boy. And, as I said, even the basic enemies can pose a threat, so you can’t sleepwalk through it like you can the Virtual Boy sequel that was the only Wario Land I really ever played through all the way. Okay, so the difficulty is largely thanks to the janky physics and stiff jumping, but it’s charming even when it feels like it doesn’t work the way the developers intended.

The later levels that take on maze-like characteristics are so strong that I wouldn’t have minded if EVERY level had been that way. They basically did have that mentality for the sequels.

I’m sure a lot of people will say Virtual Boy Wario Land is the superior game, but I’m not going there. Both games are vastly underrated, but once you stack the eagle helmet and dragon helmet in VB Wario Land, it’s all over but the shouting. The game becomes too damn easy, and that broke my immersion a lot more than the eye-melting red and black visuals did. While there’s a few pits that I feel are too touchy and the collision is never as good as you want it to be, Wario Land: Super Mario Land 3 never allows you to go on cruise control. It’s an imperfect build of the perfect 8-bit mix of platforming, action, and exploration. But even the imperfection feels like it fits Wario like a glove. What other character could get away with a game that feels this unfinished? I assume since it was 1994, they thought the Game Boy was near the end of its life cycle and they had to rush it out. Hah.
Verdict: YES!

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

Donkey Kong Country (SNES Review)

July 31, 2025 by 5 Comments

Donkey Kong Country
aka Super Donkey Kong (Japan)
Platform: Super Nintendo Entertainment System
First Released November 18, 1994
Directed by Tim Stamper and Chris Stamper
Developed by Rare Ltd.
Published by Nintendo
Available with Switch Online Subscription (Standard)
Listing at Mario Wiki

Well, um, the rain still looks like rain! Or oatmeal. It kind of looks like oatmeal. But RAINING oatmeal.

I swear to God that I didn’t deliberately review this back-to-back with Super Mario Land 2 because both games were more focused on looking pretty than being mind-blowing from a gameplay perspective. Actually, I thought Donkey Kong Country had a much better chance of scoring a YES! than Super Mario Land 2 because it would still have the horsepower to pull off clever level design. And sometimes it does! Like, take a look at this:

Oof, that does not look beautiful. I bet it did in 1994, and that’s literally the only time it had to. No matter what anyone thinks, even Nintendo games (or games Nintendo paid to have made, as is the case with DKC) are ONLY made to appeal to gamers at the time of release, and if they happen to be valuable as catalog titles later, that’s just a bonus. I know people want to believe the mighty Nintendo plays 4D chess and has this big roadmap of when catalog titles will be worth money again, but they don’t. Nobody does. That’s why gaming licensing planks are so very, very one-sided and sh*tty. 

You have to hit those STOP/GO barrels to freeze the red-eyed enemies, which turn into stones. You never know how much time you get for each barrel, and they staged the level in a way where the last few only give you a split second. It’s quite exciting, and the enemies are creepy enough. I just wish there were more stages that made me sit-up like that, but that wasn’t the point of Donkey Kong Country. It was made only to be 1994’s big smash hit, and if it’s worth some scratch in the 2020s, hey, lucky us. So when people say “Donkey Kong Country doesn’t hold up” it’s okay to say “well duh!” It accomplished exactly what it set out to do in 1994: curb stomp the 3DO into oblivion while keeping Nintendo fans on the hook while they got the platform that would come to be known as Nintendo 64 ready. “Holding up to the test of time” was not on the agenda.

You can’t say that they overplayed level gimmicks. Despite the fact that the STOP/GO barrels had legs as a gimmick, they only show up in that one level. These parrots only show up once too, though they’ll be featured characters in the sequel.

So in a sense, it’s kind of remarkable that any aspect of DKC holds up at all. I think my frustration with Donkey Kong Country is that it doesn’t feel like it squeezed all the potential out of the gameplay concepts it has. Maybe they were saving-up for the inevitable sequel, but I dunno. I’m a big fan of leaving it all on the court, and Rare sure as hell didn’t do that. It’s actually one of the most conservative games I’ve reviewed lately. As a franchise builder, few first steps are rarely this enticing and leave you wanting more in a bad way. Maybe any more bold ideas were canned for being too difficult when they were trying to make a game to appeal to everyone, including very young gamers, whom I’m guessing will like DKC in 2025 more than I did. I hate to guess on these things, but Donkey Kong Country seems like a great starting title for introducing young children to platforming. From what I can remember about the sequels’ difficulty, I’m guessing I won’t be able to say that about them.

Then again, there’s moments that feel like the bottom of the barrel is being scrapped. No pun intended, but this evil barrel is my least favorite boss trope: fighting the same regular enemies you’ve been killing en masse this whole time.

Even the Stampers recognized the game was too easy, but I think that could have been fixed by adding a difficulty toggle. A hard mode wouldn’t have been too hard. Just remove a lot of the DK barrels from stages. I took plenty of damage playing DKC, but I never had to wait more than a few seconds to undo that, so there was no tension. Still, the addition of Diddy Kong was probably the smartest move. What Donkey Kong Country really does right is removing hit points in favor of having two different characters, and whoever you’re playing as is lost when you get hit, at least until you find the next DK barrel two seconds later. Being able to swap between two characters who have different skills was also inspired. Diddy Kong can cartwheel through enemies and seems to have more hangtime when you cartwheel off a ledge before he has to jump. Plus he carries barrels in front of him, which makes it easier to uncover hidden doors. Meanwhile, with Donkey Kong you can do such tactics as tagging Diddy so you can use him instead. Again, a great idea that would be utilized better in the sequels. Are you noticing a theme here?

The only time I used Donkey Kong was when I was afraid of losing Diddy. It became clear really quickly why he’s not playable in the first two sequels.

Unlike Super Mario Land 2 which, besides having a lot of pointless bonus levels, really did nothing wrong besides having too basic of level design, Donkey Kong Country did PLENTY to leave me terminally annoyed. The methodology of 100%ing the game (or 101%ing because ain’t that quirky?) is strange. Every level has K-O-N-G tokens to find, some of which are so well hidden that I couldn’t find them. Sounds great, except they don’t contribute to the final completion percentage. Instead, acing the game only requires finding every bonus room. Probably not the best way to do it since there’s too many of them and they completely bust the game’s flow. My favorite levels were usually the ones that back-loaded the bonus rooms near the end of the stages. Those tended to have above-average level design. Hell, I normally hate swimming stages, but at least none of those have bonus rooms, so they were some of the better levels.

I found myself carrying barrels and walking up against walls because I was more focused on getting 100% than I was just enjoying the boilerplate, paint-by-numbers level design.

What wrecks the game’s tempo even worse than the bonus rooms are the animal tokens. No matter what you’re doing or where you are in a stage, once you collect the third and final token of any set, you drop what you’re doing and enter that specific animal’s bonus stage. It would make so much more sense to instead bank the reward until after you beat the level. That’s a time honored gaming tradition, right? But no, it’s an interruption, and not always (or ever) a welcome one. The levels take a while to finish, and it gets worse, because sometimes after the round is finished, it takes you quite far back in the level you were playing. Maybe even to the start of the stage.

Okay, so the animal bonus rounds are fun. Well, until you have 99 lives. Then they become annoying.

I did end up 101%ing Donkey Kong Country, but the irony is, I probably would have enjoyed my time with the game a lot more if I hadn’t bothered. I mean, not enough to give Donkey Kong Country a YES!, but it would have been a lot closer. I found myself deliberately avoiding animal tokens and losing the bonus rounds as soon as they started just to make them go faster. When just the act of finding the rooms is all you need, why bother? DKC is a game where lives are so plentiful that you’ll almost certainly not game over even if you struggle with some later stages. That’s a big if, by the way. The only stage I died more than twice on was the second mine cart stage, which shows up pretty late in the game. And it’s not that I never enjoyed the exploration aspect. Actually, I was happy that, if you miss a bonus room and have to replay the level, you don’t have to finish it to get credit for the stuff you missed. As soon as you locate the bonus rooms you missed, you can pause the game and press select and return to the map with full credit.

If the game had required all the letters, I would still be playing DKC, but it didn’t, and instead I’m trying to finish up this review as fast as I can.

There are a handful of gimmicky levels to keep the experience somewhat fresh, like the above screenshot. That treadmill runs on fuel barrels that you have to collect, and it kept my attention for the full length of the stage. The mine cart stages are some of the stronger auto-scrolling types of levels I’ve experienced, and a stage where you slide up and down ropes automatically actually provided a solid, enjoyable challenge. I’d say around a third of Donkey Kong Country holds up and remains clever today. But two-thirds of the game is too basic to hold up to the test of time. You never quite shake the proof-of-concept feeling when playing it, and that makes sense because the gameplay isn’t what they had to get working. Nintendo paid for a game that looked high tech enough to buy them time for the Nintendo 64. Donkey Kong Country for the third best-selling SNES game, so they got it. But being more bold and experimental with the level design? That came later, with the sequels.

Donkey Kong Country’s bosses are all dull, but King K. Rool takes the cake. His arena is much bigger than the screen, and his attack pattern is basically adding one pass across the full length of the arena after every hit. So when he drops cannonballs across the screen, instead of an exciting pattern like dodging them for several seconds, the cannonballs drop one at a time across the length of the screen. It’s the most unimaginative way of handling any boss, let alone a final one.

As a prototype for better games to come, Donkey Kong Country is a good start. It’s never BAD from a level design point of view and the barrels that you fire out of are fun enough, though not quite barrels of fun. The controls are pretty good, and it’s easy to get a feel for how long you can roll or cartwheel off a platform and float in the air before you have to jump. But the level themes are basic and dull and there’s not a big enough cast of enemies. The bosses are REALLY bad, too, and since they take even longer to fight than enemies in Mario games, they come across as punishment for finishing a world instead of a reward.

The barrels are certainly a great idea and probably the one aspect of Donkey Kong Country that I feel they didn’t hold back on. They got every molecule of gameplay out of them without being boring. I really think they’re why this ended up such a potent franchise.

The test of time is cruel, and no games have a tougher time facing that test than games based around cutting edge graphics first and gameplay second. Since the graphics were the main selling point, I figure I should mention I thought the game was pretty damn ugly. The character models are fine, I guess, but the architecture is really rough, with backgrounds often looking like Sega CD levels of splotchy. The funny thing is, after Donkey Kong Country became the last big mega hit for the SNES, Nintendo would have given anything to have Yoshi’s Island look like this game, and the only reason it didn’t happen is because it was too far in development to change the entire art direction. That’s kind of hilarious, because Yoshi’s Island still looks good in 2025 including all its cutting edge special effects. Donkey Kong Country, well, doesn’t. These days, DKC is just another middle of the road SNES platformer that looked better in 1994 than other middle of the road platformers, but it did leave a franchise with much better games in its wake, so it has that going for it. Take that, Plok.
Verdict: NO! But I want to talk about one last thing.

Donkey Kong Country: Competition Cartridge

My best score for Competition Cartridge. I couldn’t find what the highest scores were but there’s people who have scores in the 3,000s. Most of my runs also ended around the same spot, too.

There’s a version of Donkey Kong Country that acts as a spiritual successor to the 1990 Nintendo World Championships cartridge (which I reviewed in Tetris Forever: The Definitive Review’s bonus section). It’s really well made, too and actually the one aspect of Donkey Kong Country that unambiguously holds up. The timer stops during all transitions. There’s no overworld map, so finishing one stage takes you automatically to the next. They even redid what’s inside the bonus rooms to make the scoring for entering those rooms more logical, and the scoring system is, you know, fine. I actually had a lot more fun playing this than I did in anything in Nintendo World Championships: NES Edition. It’s fast-paced and genuinely exciting. So, why isn’t THIS on Switch Online? Unless Blockbuster Video’s IP holders also hold the publishing rights (don’t rule this out) I can’t think of any good reason. If you get a chance it’s worth checking out, though it’s probably not worth the $5,000 it fetches on Ebay.
Verdict for Donkey Kong Country: Competition Edition: YES!

The math checks out.

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Super Mario Land 2: 6 Golden Coins (Game Boy Review)

July 30, 2025 by 4 Comments

Super Mario Land 2: 6 Golden Coins
Platform: Game Boy
First Released October 21, 1992
Directed by Hiroji Kiyotake and Takehiko Hosokawa
Developed by Nintendo
Available with Switch Online Subscription (Standard)
Listing at Mario Wiki
Color screenshots are from Super Mario Land 2 DX by toruzz
Link to the Patch

I really don’t think it’s Mario or Zelda or Kirby or Samus Aran that prove Nintendo is the Death Star of video games. It’s Wario. You know, the throwaway final boss in a Super Mario Bros. spin-off that went on to star in twenty games where his name appears in the title, and that’s not even considering that he’s one of the most popular characters in Mario Kart. Hell, Wario can even lay claim to being the star of a killer app for an entire video game platform. Okay, so it’s Virtual Boy, but it still counts. Meanwhile, Wart is like “f*cking seriously?”

I can’t imagine how mind-blowing seeing Super Mario Land 2 must have been in 1992. Mario as a Game Boy franchise went from looking like this:

To looking like this:

Cool. Nintendo set out to give players the Super Mario World experience on the Game Boy. A task that was basically impossible, but they really did give it the old college try. I suppose that’s why Mario Land 2 is maybe the weirdest game in the entire “Super Mario” franchise. Most of the rogues gallery are one-off enemies that don’t really feel like Mario baddies. This even includes things like pigs with cannons for snouts, a Kid Dracula-like vampire that shoots bats at Mario, and Jason Voorhees-like evil hockey masks complete with a f*cking knife sticking out of them. Seriously, what?

6 Golden Coins feels like it has just enough Mario staples like the mushrooms and fire flowers, Goombas and Koopa Troopas, or the right kind of destructible blocks to pass as a Mario game and not some kind of weird ROM hack. I assume this was done because turning a popular colorized 16-bit game into an 8-bit black and white game was too tall an order. If they copied too many enemies, then all they would be making is a much, much lesser version of the game everyone really liked. Which is sort of what they ended up with anyway, but I do kind of understand why they created such a large roster of new enemies and locations. Probably the best thing I can say about Mario Land 2 is it still feels pretty fresh. Instead of the typical hill stages, fire stages, ice stages, etc, you go into outer space, a graveyard, or a giant mechanical statue that Mario built to honor himself, I guess.

For seemingly no reason, here’s a stage where the ground is shaped like LEGO. It doesn’t do anything different. It’s just a floor, but, look, it’s shaped like LEGO (or Nintendo’s LEGO knock-off)!

So, uh, this is the one that gets me assassinated but I didn’t really like Mario Land 2 at all. I didn’t hate it or anything. It controls fine and has decent jumping physics, but I was just really bored playing it. I imagine a child in 1992 would be more than satisfied with this brisk, easy-going Mario game that looks great but had its potential held back by the Game Boy’s hardware limitations. While the enemy sprites might look original, they couldn’t really do anything creative with their placement or have too many on screen at once. Hell, the hockey masks are just normal Goombas that look different when you get right down to it. Granted, most enemies in Super Mario games are cannon fodder, but these ones are especially easy to deal with. Some of the indestructible underwater ones had a tight squeeze to avoid, but otherwise, there’s just not enough threats in Mario Land 2. The bosses are all pretty weak too.

Tatanga, the final boss from Mario Land 1, was the second boss I faced and the first enemy that damaged me at all. About three seconds after he got me with one of his projectiles, I nailed all three hits against him in a row because they didn’t give him hardly any invincibility frames. He basically reverse-stomped himself into my feet.

If the level design was amazing, that wouldn’t be a problem. But despite the original backdrops, I found myself listless playing the stages. Even the ones structured like mazes are too basic for their own good, and the act of exploring isn’t very rewarding because so many of the unlockable bonus stages feel samey. Only one of them provides any reward besides just an extra stage for the sake of an extra stage, and that’s a shortcut in the Macro Zone that skips two of the levels and takes you straight to the zone’s final stage. Okay, so it was cute that the moon got pissed off at me for getting the Space Zone’s bonus level, but the novelty wore off when I had to actually play the stage and it was just more of the same. I don’t mind the level count, but the bonus levels need a reason to exist. Hell, there’s even a random level in the map, the “Scenic Course” that just sort of is there for no reason besides “why not?” It does nothing. It unlocks nothing. It’s pointless. I think Nintendo was capable of better than that by 1992.

Hey, don’t look at me like that! You’re the one that only has two levels.

So, yeah, I’m not a fan of Super Mario Land 2. The rabbit ears aren’t a very fun power-up (they’re basically the racoon tail without the soaring through the sky part), the game is far too easy, and things like how carrying a turtle shell is done by balancing it on your head because they couldn’t squeeze in an animation of Mario carrying the shell thanks to the hardware limits made me cringe instead of smirk. Really, the only purpose Mario Land 2 serves today is being a reminder that ALL games are a product of their time. Most of Nintendo’s catalog holds up remarkably well to the test of time. It’s their most astonishing achievement. But the Game Boy wasn’t ever really meant to do that. It was designed to provide a lower cost portable experience that was good enough for the standards of over three decades ago.

You know, having the Three Little Pigs would have been a cute idea if I hadn’t already fought a completely different species of pig that shoots cannonballs at me. Do YOU guys shoot cannonballs? No? Then how come that thing wasn’t the boss and you are?

I actually tried to do this review back in January, when I reviewed Super Mario Land, but I got bored pretty quickly and shut it off. I gave the original game a YES! because, rough as it is, it’s a unique Mario experience unlike any other Super Mario game before or since, something you can’t really say about Mario Land 2. The two games have a lot in common. Like 6 Golden Coins, Mario Land 1 has unique-to-it locations, enemies, and themes. I guess I just like the idea of Mario exploring Ancient Egypt, Easter Island, and a world based on Chinese folklore more than lock blocks or a graveyard. But it’s not just that. Mario Land 1 feels like a one-off Mario gameplay experience. Mario Land 2’s gameplay is just the best approximation of Mario World they could muster within the limits of the Game Boy. An impressive engineering feat? Sure.

The level design just never rises above being okay. I’m happy I waited until after playing every other 80s and 90s Super Mario game to do 6 Golden Coins, because it really aged the worst out of any other game in the series. It just offers so very little that holds up. All that it really has left is a lot of personality, but hell, every Mario game has that, don’t you think?

Fated to age well? Nope, and that’s okay, because it worked for the kids of 1992. I’m happy for them. It’s just not 1992 anymore, and from the moment I booted up Mario Land 2, I couldn’t wait to be done with it. God, I really hope they don’t remake this one. Oh, Nintendo will eventually, but when it happens, I hope it’s a full reimagining with new level design and power-ups that keeps the basic frame work. The idea of Mario Land 2 is fine, but it’s a product of its time, and that product is about thirty years past its expiration date. Thanks for giving us Wario, though. I do like Wario.
Verdict: NO!

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Metroid: Zero Mission (Game Boy Advance Review)

July 28, 2025 by 1 Comment

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 7 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 5 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 , , , , , , , , , , ,

Super Mario Advance 4: Super Mario Bros. 3 (Game Boy Advance Review)

July 6, 2025 by 8 Comments

Super Mario Advance 4: Super Mario Bros. 3
Platform: Game Boy Advance
First Released July 11, 2003 (my 14th birthday!)
Directed by Hiroyuki Kimura
Developed by Nintendo
Available with a Switch Online Expansion Pack Subscription
Listing at Mario Wiki

After not having that tough a time playing Lost Levels, I got swallowed by a goddamn fish three times.

Super Mario Bros. 3 is one of the most celebrated video games ever, and one of the most studied. If you have twenty minutes to spare, well, please keep reading because I work really hard on these things. BUT if you have forty minutes, after me, go read everything Cutting Room Floor has on Mario 3 because it’s fascinating. The amount of drawing-board content that made it into the final game’s code rivals the volume of deleted content you’d see in something like a modern Grand Theft Auto game. It’s also the final console-based Super Mario game to first release before I was born. More importantly for the sake of this feature, Mario 3 is a game that I tend not to like anywhere near as much as my older readers, and I swear to God, it’s not just for the sake of being contrarian. Who would actually say something that’s good isn’t just to be a prick? Well, that’s not my argument with Mario 3 anyway. I like it a lot! I just don’t love it.

In the making of this review, I 100%ed Mario Advance 4. No levels were skipped. No P-Wings were used. I didn’t use rewind to cheat and I never laid down a single save state. I also got every Advance Coin and e-Coin out of the 38 E-Reader levels. Then I replayed probably 25% of the core levels to figure out why I was just not digging them as much as my older readers. The answer involves one-of-a-kind circumstances that can never be replicated along with a dash of science! And if you’re looking at the above picture and saying “hold on, what?” and you’re a Switch online expansion pack subscriber, stop reading now, pick up your Switch, open up Mario Advance 4 and go play the E-Reader levels. It’s cool. I already got your click. It might screw up my “average read time” though so just leave the window open. Thanks.

I can’t appreciate the level of anticipation that gamers of the 1980s went through in the lead-up to Mario 3’s release. I mean, of course there were games I looked forward to as a child, but Mario 3 was arguably the last major game to come out before anything resembling a console war was happening. It’s a situation that will likely never be replicated. The Genesis didn’t really blow up until 1991, so Nintendo stood alone and Mario 3 was the single biggest title that kids wanted. For anyone my age, go back to your childhood and think of the game you wanted the most, and now imagine it was the ONLY game in town, with McDonald’s Happy Meal toys and a cartoon series and motion picture tied into the advertising campaign. Yeah, this will never happen again.

I swear there will be a game review here. Eventually. But this stuff is important to the review I’m going with, trust me.

Super Mario Bros. 3 came out in North America a whopping 477 days AFTER the Famicom release. Publicly, Nintendo blames a ROM shortage, but I think there’s more to it. Oh, I’m sure there was some ROM manufacturing hiccup, but I think they took advantage of it because they didn’t want Mario 3 to cannibalize Game Boy sales. It was their first non-NES device that was released around the time Mario 3 was originally penciled-in and they sort of needed it to do really good to prove they weren’t a flash in the pan. Maybe selling millions of copies of Mario 3 AND millions of Game Boys in 1989 would have been a flex, but who knows? Maybe it could have gone the other way. Gaming had already crashed once, and asking for Mario 3 undermined the Game Boy’s pitch. This is still firmly the “most children’s bedrooms didn’t have a TV” era, and Nintendo’s pitch to parents was “buy your child a Game Boy and get the living room TV back!” But if children in 1989 were asked “it’s either a Game Boy or Mario 3, so take your pick” I think they pick Mario 3, don’t you? Hell, the most famous Mario 3 ad doesn’t show a single f*cking second of gameplay. That’s how hyped the game was, and if Nintendo forced a competition between their own products, I think Mario 3 would have left Game Boy in a smoking crater. Why even create the possibility for that scenario if you don’t need to?

Well, clearly they didn’t need to. Assuming I’m right, sitting from my comfortable distance decades later, I kind believe they were vindicated for the choice to delay. Game Boy was a big hit and Super Mario Land is one of the biggest sellers ever. So was Super Mario Bros. 3 for that matter. The extra time allowed Nintendo to go hard on the Mario 3 advertising with a media blitz that included a Happy Meal promotion at McDonald’s and a cartoon series that was so popular that reruns were still on TV when I was a child. I thought it was completely unwatchable when I was 6 years old and I think it’s still unwatchable now that I’m about to turn 36 years old. Okay, TECHNICALLY the Adventures of Super Mario Bros. 3 aired after the game released, something I wish I had checked on before I watched the entire f*cking series, all twenty-six 10-minute-long shorts, for this feature. Here’s my review: Oh God, the Koopa Kids (who are all the wrong names for some reason, WTF is that about?) are a parody of Ninja Turtles. HAH, because they’re turtles! Someone got paid to make that connection. Oh God, Milli Vanilli is on the show. That sounds like I’m making a joke but I’m not. That’s really them. Oh God, Luigi’s a dog now. Is that a thing they planned for the game?

Nope, this doesn’t work for me. I need someone to take a drill to my head and get it out. I’m not kidding. It feels like The Adventures of Super Mario Bros. 3 is digging at my skull from the inside. Get it out. GET IT OUT! GET IT OUT! GET IT OUT! GET IT OUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUT!

Most famously of all, Mario 3 was the climax of a feature length Nintendo/Universal Studios advertisement called The Wizard, which was released in theaters two months before Mario 3’s US debut. No need to drill this one out of my head. My film buff sister and her pretentious friends (sorry, sis) watched it during a “bad movie marathon” last year and honestly they didn’t think it was bad enough to be included, because it’s not so much “bad” as it is “completely shameless, cynical, and/or soulless.” Even though I was there ruining the experience for them by pointing out that not a single one of the video game scenes in that movie makes a lick of sense. Somehow Jimmy got 50,000 points on Double Dragon in approximately thirty seconds. I tried this myself, syncing Double Dragon for the NES with the scene in the movie. In my best run, my score from the opening cinematic (seen in the movie) until the time Fred Savage says “50,000?!” was 2,050 points.

I guess that’s why Jimmy is the Wizard and I’m not.

That’s even giving me a full extra second or two since Fred Savage needed a moment to process that his brother is obviously a legitimate wizard. As in a practitioner of sorcery and/or witchcraft who clearly possesses the Time Gem, and possibly all the other Infinity Gems which he used not wipe out half of all life in the universe but instead change the scoresheet for Double Dragon so that every landed shot scores about 4,000 points, give or take. Diabolic. Hey, it’s either that or there was a cigarette burn on the screen right where the score is displayed that looked like the number 50,000. What? It could happen! The Wizard is the definitive “kids’ product made by people cashing in on a kids’ trend who aren’t interested in figuring out why the popular thing is popular.” And it’s really bad about it, too. Even Roger Ebert said he knew that the shots of Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles that were purported to be of the third stage were only the first stage while Gene Siskel recognized that nobody who made this loved the games featured. It’s THAT obvious, even to a non-gamer. But ask gamers at the time if they remember that part, and they don’t. They remember this:

Even though that scene makes no sense either. Why would they be scoring points as soon as the host said “GO!” How would Jimmy even know the warp whistle is there? Why would warping boost his points? Shouldn’t he be scoring no points while he f*cks around with the warp whistle, and how did he even know how to activate it in the first place? Why would losing a life cost you points? If Jimmy lost so many points, how did he still win when Lucas is the only one on stage who never died? This thing has more plot holes in the big finale than all of Season 8 of Game of Thrones. I take back what I said about the Wizard, because it’s so much worse than simply being disinterested in what kids are into. It’s a movie made by people who think kids are stupid. Not that it matters. It more than doubled its modest $6 million budget at the box office, and that’s before you consider that normal Hollywood metrics don’t apply since the movie was not meant as a normal movie but as a feature length advertisement heavily subsidized by outside forces. Hell, even the finale I’m pretty sure was partially subsidized by the state of California for a sh*thole roadside attraction, the Cabazon Dinosaurs. I went there as a kid before it was turned into a creationist museum (I just found out it’s back to being a run of the mill tourist trap), and remember it had an intense musty smell.

Pictured above: how this review is going. But I do have a point: I want you to consider everything I talked about above. Prerelease circumstances that have never, and will never, be replicated. I think that’s part of the reason why Super Mario Bros. 3 is a huge deal to my older readers and not so much to my generation. I’ve met plenty of people who have it on their short list of “greatest video games of all-time.” I’m so sorry to my 40-something to 50-something readers, but I’ve never really understood it, because I don’t think Super Mario Bros. 3 should even be in the GOAT conversation. It’s fine. The flying racoon idea (with tail-whip attack) was inspired. Some of the levels are truly breath-taking. The enemy design especially never gets the credit it deserves. I think the roster of basic enemies is even better than Mario 2’s. Super Mario Bros. 3 is a solidly good game. Maybe even a great game. Maybe, as in I wouldn’t passionately argue against someone who wants to call it “great.” BUT, I do have a case to make against its greatness.

One of my biggest problems is that I think the Koopalings are boring bosses. They’re not that different from the Boom Booms in the fortresses (which I also think suck, they’re too easy to cheese). In fact, only this one pictured here feels different from the other six. Before fans get mad at me, I didn’t think they were particularly strong in Super Mario World either. Want to know the best appearance by the Koopa Kids? It’s EASILY Yoshi’s Safari (as seen in my Definitive Review of Nintendo light gun games), where each of them feels unique. Ironically, the game where you point a f*cking bazooka at them is the only one where they don’t feel like cannon fodder.

Mario 3’s base game only has a couple stages I’d consider to be particularly strong. Don’t read that as “she’s saying the levels suck” because I’m not. My attitude towards the base game in general is “it’s fine” and when it comes to the level design I’m going to stick with “it’s fine.” Except, you know, when it’s not. It just often feels like there’s no good incentives to explore the levels. Take level 2 – 1 for example. They built these two massive hollow structures that you literally walk over the top of. You can go inside them and collect an extra life and some coins. Except extra lives are plentiful and coins just aren’t enough of a reward. This is just bad risk/reward design and a poor use of real estate, and if this were ANY game but Super Mario Bros. 3, I think people would universally say this is nonsensical design.

As punishment for nonsensical design on the part of designers, I made Mario, their bread and butter, wear the Tanooki suit in the scorching-hot desert environment. You made me do this, Nintendo.

But that kind of head-scratching design is all over Super Mario Bros. 3. Even in levels that are fun to explore. You’ll notice that I didn’t say the structures themselves are stupid or anything because I’m not sh*ting on them. Their shapes are perfectly logical platforming game layouts. Good enemy placement on the inside. Not so much the roofs, which are, you know, the parts you have to actually walk across to get to the end of the stage, which is right there past the second structure. Hell, the second one didn’t even have a single enemy on its roof. But I think the little jumping flames inside the structures are quality enemies and a credible threat to Mario. There’s just not a good reason to go inside of them. This could have easily been fixed by creating some kind of circumstance that necessitates going through structures. A key. A switch. Anything besides a nominal reward with no risk/reward balance consideration.

The one thing about Mario 3 that I just plain do not like are the maps. I think the whole map system is TERRIBLE. Bypassing levels. Confusing pipes. The airships flying off to other parts of the map and creating busy work, especially if you went for a 100% like I did. Shouldn’t scoring a 100% in the world before you enter the castle just automatically anchor the airship so you don’t have to play fetch every single time you die on the stage?

But the thing that bothers me most about Mario 3, and this will annoy my older readers quite a bit I imagine: I think it’s too conservative. Like, the Tanooki suit can make invisible things visible, including platforms and doors. You can do a LOT with that idea, but they really didn’t. There’s only a small handful of uses for it, most of them quite subtle, and none of which made me sit up in my chair. The Hammer Bros. suit can kill enemies other suits can’t, but they never once built a stage specifically tailored to that strength. I hate to keep using the same argument, but if ANY OTHER GAME had an item like the Hammer Bros. suit and never once worked up the courage to make a level where it’s a necessity instead of a luxury item, I think the average gamer would question why they bothered. And you know they’re capable of better since they certainly did a good job building reasons to use Racoon Mario or even Frog Mario.

No complaints about the Frog Suit. It’s the one element of Super Mario Bros. 3 where the risk/reward factors are given proper balance. Okay, so the maps could have used much more clear indicators of what stages have practical usages for it.

Now, in fairness, Mario 3 does offer plenty of highlights. World 1, as in every single stage in Grass Land, is one of the most downright scientifically perfect opening sequences ever in any platform game. The absolute perfect education for everything to come. Along with Mario 1’s World 1, these stages could be the whole curriculum of game design school for how to introduce mechanics into your game. After World 1, the level design keeps up a consistent drip of uniqueness, including several one-off moments. You don’t expect that from a 1988 game. The most famous is, of course, the shoe. Hey, who doesn’t love the shoe? I mean, it would probably be lame as hell if it was just a regular roster item, but it ain’t! It just shows up in a seemingly random World 5 stage (specifically 5 – 3), gives you a short playground that takes under two minutes to beat even if you f*ck around, and then it’s taken away from you and never shows up again until it had its mystique utterly shat upon by about fifty-thousand uncreative people in Mario Maker.

It’s just so random, you know? “Hey, for this level, ride a shoe!” In fairness, if the shoe had been an option in World 7, you might as well gather the kids around and tell them that World 7 is going to a farm upstate where it’ll get to run around free and happy with all the other worlds.

That’s the thing though. For all my bitching, the bite-sized level format also kind of makes the game bullet-proof. Even when Mario 3 is outright bad, and on rare occasions it is, it’s still okay because, barring a loss of life, you’re two minutes or less away from something that’s different. Well, besides those damn airships, all of which felt interchangeable except the first one (again, perfectly balanced like everything else in World 1) and the last one (the series of speedy ones in World 8). I’m really not a fan of auto-scrolling in platforming games and I didn’t enjoy the airship concept at all. Otherwise, nobody can accuse the levels in Super Mario 3 of feeling samey. There’s clearly an effort being made to give stages individual personalities, unique game design goals, and their own one of a kind “vibe” for lack of a better term.

While World 1 might be “perfect” my favorite world, except for that busy-work-inducing map, is World 7. Something about it just worked for me.

That’s the ground Mario 3 really broke, and it’s VERY modern in that regard. A rapid-fire series of unique platforming challenges that hit one after another, with tonal whiplash that would leave you in a neck brace if it were any genre but a 2D platformer. That individualism overrides the actual gameplay content. While I might be very frustrated by how de-emphasized exploration is, I’m also picking nits with full knowledge that’s NOT the point. Mario 3 isn’t a five course meal. It’s a bag of potato chips. That’s not an insult, by the way. Who doesn’t pig out on potato chips? You can’t just stop at one! That’s the point! It’s why I don’t really think there were any truly stand-out “holy crap that level was amazing” moments in Mario 3. Instead, it just maintained a consistent tempo of quality stages, and I kept reaching into the bag to have another, and another, and another. If you want gourmet food, you want to play Super Mario World, where Nintendo applied the lessons they learned making Mario 3 to make much more logically-sound levels that have exploration highly incentivized.

Or you can play the E-Reader levels.

Yep, that’s the cape from Mario World. Yep, this is still Mario 3.

If you’re a Nintendo Switch Online expansion pack subscriber, you can play the E-Reader stages in Super Mario Advance 4, and trust me, they’re absolutely f*cking phenomenal. Well, 33 out of 38 of them, since the first five are just remakes of Mario 1’s World 1 and Level 2 – 2 because of-f*cking-course they would do that. If you want those to be fun, you have to make your own fun. I just flew around with the Mario World cape dive-bombing enemies out of spite. F*ck them.

Goomba: “Yep, this is going to hurt.”

Now don’t expect all of the E-Reader levels to offer some kind of hardcore white knuckle challenge. All of them have some kind of gimmick and several of them are just plain silly. But, they all remember to have fun. Okay, so maybe it IS a cinch to use the sticky blocks to run around a track. You just hold the B-button and forward on the D-Pad and watch the game beat itself with minimum effort, but that’s not the WHOLE stage. It’s there because that’s fun, and that should be all that matters. Even the weakest of the E-Reader stages are so damn charming in how out of f*cks they are about presenting any resistance when they could just have some toy for you to play with that they shoot the moon and becomes genius. Like at one point, a Boomerang Bros. shows up and he has a blue boomerang that, once you kill him, you get to pick up and throw at the next enemy. It happens once and never again and I LOVED IT!

I hope I didn’t just imply that some of the stages aren’t pretty tough, because THEY ARE. Most are middle of the road in terms of difficulty, but when the E-Reader levels show their teeth, they REALLY show their teeth.

Plus, nobody can accuse THESE levels of not wringing every drop of gameplay out of their real estate. The best way I can describe these stages is that they do for Super Mario Bros. 3 what the Special Zone stages in Super Mario World did for that game. This is the culmination of everything that has been learned by those who worked on these games saying “okay, let’s really show ’em what this engine can do.” As a result, the rough sloppiness of Mario 3’s level design is completely gone in these stages, replaced with fine-tuned level themes that very specifically require the players to explore. In fact, my absolute favorite levels of the core game, the ones that are mazes, are the main style of game in the E-Reader stages.

Oh it’s not just the items from Mario World that show up.

And even the gimmicky levels, like ones with timers so short that you only have 20 seconds, give players an actual reason to explore: the Advance Coins and the rarer e-Coins. I have no f*cking clue why these weren’t added to the core Mario Advance 4 game. Assuming they placed the coins in the right locations, and I have no reason to believe they wouldn’t have, it would have been transformative. I was constantly saying “what the f*ck was the point of having that entire section there?” That would have been off the table, but they didn’t do that and that’s pretty heartbreaking. When I did Mario Advance last week, I didn’t go for 100% of the post-game Yoshi Eggs. But, had they done the same kind of post-game bonus with Mario 3, I would still be playing Super Mario Advance 4 instead of writing this. I would have gone for 100% in the eighty-eight core levels just like I did with the thirty-eight E-Reader levels.

Oh, these stages are so good. They actually created space for 72 such stages. I wonder if, somewhere in the bowels of Nintendo’s archives, there’s even more of these waiting to be released.

That’s why, while I’m so happy I finally played Super Mario Bros. 3 for an IGC review, I also walk away feeling that it’s maybe the most overrated “all-time great” in terms of its actual content. It’s fine, but almost all my happiest moments came from playing the E-Reader levels. They felt more like the type of stages I would see in a Mario game from MY lifetime. I still think the core game isn’t as good as Mario 2 or Mario World. Not even close, and some of the ROM hacks I’ve played of Mario 3 annihilate it completely. So, why do older people tend to put this on such a pedestal? Is it really “you had to be there?” Well, yeah, but it’s much more complicated.

Okay, there’s SOME sloppiness. The Big Boo from Mario World returns a couple times in the E-Reader levels, but because you don’t have the ability to kick things upward in Mario 3’s engine like you can in Mario World, the fight is kind of janky.

I can’t imagine how big the leap from Super Mario Bros. 1 to Super Mario Bros. 3 must have felt for my older readers. Literally, I cannot, because there’s no comparison to anything in my gaming lifetime, especially since I just missed the jump from 2D to 3D. My gaming lifetime started in 1996, with the PS1, and really took off in 1998, when I got my Nintendo 64. If my parents had let me play Grand Theft Auto, then the jump from GTA 2 to GTA 3 would have been the Mario 1 to Mario 3 killer, but I was 10 and then 12 years old when those games came out and I wasn’t allowed to play them. My parents were afraid if I played the wrong kind of games, I’d become a cynical, foul-mouthed deviant. The results speak for themselves. Anyway, from a game design evolution point of view, I experienced a series of incremental steps forward. That’s kind of crazy when you think about how close I was to the dawn of games. I was only a decade late. Maybe a decade-and-a-half, but either way, I pretty much missed the age of big progress in game design entirely. And if you don’t think I’m so jealous of my older readers that they got to experience one gigantic leap forward after another that I want to swap their shoes with mouse traps, you’re wrong. You f*ckers were spoiled!

My favorite levels were almost always the fortresses. Anything that REQUIRED exploration and experimentation in Mario 3 was usually elite level design that holds up to the test of time.

But I also think those leaps might have made games seem better than they were. I’m not condescending my older readers, either. There’s actual science on this, and with games that make those gigantic leaps forward like Super Mario Bros. 3, it’s deeper than the simple nostalgia science of “Mario 3 is your favorite game because you played it as a child and didn’t have the burdens of adulthood weighing you down.” Oh no, it’s actually even more potent than that. Since the leap between Mario 1 and Mario 3 was so huge, it’s safe to say that Mario 3 was practically a whole new experience unlike anything you had experienced before. Agreed? Good. Well, get this: new experiences cause your brain to literally trip a sort of circuit breaker and go into a “recording” mode. And, of course, it does this with the brain’s favorite chemical: dopamine, which makes you even happier, which lights up even more neurons and gets them ready to record, which releases more dopamine, and so forth, and so forth. There’s actually a reason your brain is doing all this, too. Your brain is putting itself in a state for memories to form easier and last longer because it’s now operating under the assumption this new activity that you’re enjoying is one you will do again, so whatever you’re doing now, you’ll need to clearly remember what you did and how you did it so you can do it even better next time. Neat, huh? But consequently, anything similar that follows will lose that sense of “newness” so it won’t trigger the same reaction in your brain, and so you can NEVER replicate it. If you played Mario 3 when it was new in 1990, maybe that’s actually why nothing has felt quite as fun as it since. Your brain was literally configuring itself for almost all video games based on your experience playing Mario 3, and to assure that, it made you drunk on happiness. People my age aren’t looking down on you. We’re in the same boat with different games. For me, it was Banjo-Kazooie, Ocarina of Time, and Goldeneye.

The hammer suit in Super Mario Bros. 3 has to be one of the most overpowered items ever in a Mario game. It’s ridiculously effective, taking out too many otherwise impervious enemies like the ghosts and thwomps and dry bones. They can even kill Bowser directly. I imagine this is why it’s not until the last third of the game that you can get it “naturally.” I got my first hammer suit at the end of world six in this play session. Fun fact: if you don’t count Mario Maker games, the hammer suit is the only item in the Mario 3 to never be reissued in future Mario games. It’s the Black Lotus of Mario items.

Well, unfortunately for Super Mario Bros. 3, I had played games like Mario 3 before I played it. I even played Mario World before I played Mario 3. That’s why it felt like a step backwards. I can’t stress enough that I’m not hating on Mario 3. The base game, all by itself, is fine. I’d even give it the title of “Mario game with the best first world and best final world.” World 8 not only feels fantastic, but genuinely climatic. That’s harder to do than you would think. It’s a milestone in terms of scope and roster of characters. It shouldn’t just be studied by would-be game makers for introductory stages, but also for basic enemy design. It might be the most up-tempo 8-bit action game EVER. Needless to say, it would get a YES! even without the bonus E-Reader content. It’s kind of impossible to not like it. Also, nothing I can say is going to take away from Mario 3’s place in history. It’s in Cooperstown. Its star is on the Walk of Fame. Even among legends, it’s a big deal.

Seriously, even the flying beetles get an unforgettable bonus stage. By the way, the E-Reader content is now 22 years old. I really think Nintendo is sitting on a winning lottery ticket with bonus content for older games. The engines themselves are so flexible that Nintendo could make 33 of some of the best Mario stages ever decades after the fact. So, why quit at all? Seriously, if Nintendo announced tomorrow that they were putting out an expansion pack for Legend of Zelda: A Link to the Past that added eight full-sized dungeons at a cost of $29.99, how many copies does the DLC pack sell? 500,000? A million? Two million? More? They could also use development of new content for old games as a way to train a new generation of designers on how to make “Nintendo-style” games, because that’s an art form I NEVER want to see lost, but it could happen. Big Shiggy Style, Tezuka, and the rest are aging-out. They’re not going to live forever, and neither are the people they already trained. But these older games are a proven stepping stone in learning how to make not just great video games, but timeless masterpieces. Such DLC will not eat into the profit of new games. Nobody is going to buy Link to the Past DLC in lieu of Breath of the Wild 3. They’ll buy both. It’s what Nintendo fans do, and they know that. New content for old games would ensure a brighter future for all of us. I want my nieces and nephew to have the quality of Nintendo games I have now when they’re senior citizens. Well, the best school for game design is the Nintendo catalog itself. By the way, a lot of people still think I’m a Nintendo hater. Do I really sound like one? Seriously?

Super Mario Bros. 3 is also a game where you can clearly feel the designer learning curve, and hell, I’d say it’s more obvious than even the original Super Mario Bros and probably the single roughest mainline “Super Mario” game ever made. They didn’t know exactly what they were doing yet, but they were getting better. You can even feel the progress as the game goes along with strong worlds like 5 and 7, and 8 really feeling like they’re putting it together and starting to get weird and experimental. And yet, you can also feel where they used the brakes just a little too much. So, I really hope my older readers aren’t offended when I say you probably liked Mario 3 more than “modern crap” because you were still developing as a person. But, here’s why that’s okay: because everything I dislike about Super Mario Bros. 3 is a result of the people who made it still developing as game designers. It’s Nintendo’s adolescence at its peak, where you can see that they’re going to go on to do some spectacular things, after they get done sprouting peach fuzz and popping zits.
Verdict: YES!

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Super Mario RPG (Switch Review)

January 28, 2025 by 1 Comment

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 , , , , , , , , , , , ,