Super Mario 3D Land

The 3DS is now generally considered a success after a difficult period after its launch where there weren’t really many games to play. In Japan, it’s Monster Hunter that took it from a portable it was possible to ignore to must-have. Here, what really boosted the Christmas sales were the release of the two updated in-house classics, Mario Kart and Super Mario Land. Mario Kart is a very addictive game that’s the best in the series for a while, if slightly frustrating. What, then, of Super Mario Land? I just finished it yesterday, getting four stars in the end. To get five I’d have to redo all the levels with Luigi, which I have no interest in doing, and to make them golden I’d have to start all over again, so I feel I’ve finished with the title.

First impressions were great – lovely slick graphics, smooth gameplay and the charming old world full of things that remind me of the first time I turned on my SNES with the Super Mario All-Stars bundled with it in the cartridge slot, and I was forced to accept that it was much better than The Great Giana Sisters. The 3D effect, still somewhat iffy in the cinema, works superbly on my 3DS and the subtle ways it enters into the gameplay pleased me. I spend a while around Christmas getting through a world each evening, and though it was all a bit easy, I felt sure that there would be harder levels to come.

Unfortunately, it was the bridge between silly, hand-holding casual game to challenging brain- and reflex-tester that let the game down. I’m happy that the whole game wasn’t easy, but where the game became more challenging, I found it only irritating to play, fiddly and with many instances of artificial difficulty.

The last Mario game I played with any seriousness (at least as a platformer) was probably Super Mario Bros. 3 in that compilation, when I was still a pretty small kid. Since then Mario has always been there on the gaming scene, but I’ve paid little attention. Super Mario 64 was heralded as a great advance in gameplay, one magazine I read keenly back then going so far as to award the game an unprecedented 100% in the reviewing system of the time, which made a bit of a mockery of percentage reviews thereafter. I never had an N64, so played the game only a few times, and thereafter wasn’t very interested in the likes of Sunshine or Galaxy, which dispensed with the open level design, preferring more direct and clear-cut level goals, which carried over to this version. It wasn’t that I disliked the games, I just never felt very attached to the properties and had started to prefer games with very strong plotting and characterisation – most of Nintendo’s in-house titles, including the Zelda games, have an archetypal plot and extremely simple characters, focusing on gameplay, and at the time that just didn’t appeal.

Well, this copy came with my 3DS, and it seemed a great way to get used to the system. As usual, Mario discovers that Peach has been abducted by Bowser, so goes to get her back with the use of various mushrooms, fire flowers, super leaves and little boxes. During the easy first half of the game, if you die five times you get given a power-up leaf that makes you totally invincible, while after ten deaths you can be teleported directly to the end of the level.

It’s totally understandable that games reviewers give the game such high praise – they have deadlines, and the first few days of gameplay, even if intensive, are going to be incredibly good fun. This game is excellent for people who don’t care to finish what they’re playing and casual gamers. The problems come much later on, when a bit of precision is needed, or an evil Mario clone three times your size is chasing you all through the level.

It’s then that the inadequacies of the controls are highlighted: you are expected to perform jumps with great precision, to land on little platforms and get moving before your clone lands on you, or to land on little ledges that switch every time you jump. Sometimes the fake difficulty is ramped up by making you jump towards the camera, especially if you want to collect all the bonus coins that give you starred ratings. And the controls are just made that bit too fiddly. The amount of run-up it takes for Mario to jump farther never seems well-defined. Often it’s just very hard to see where he’s going to land. The collision detection is often highly suspect, especially when it comes to the large Mario shadow clone, and generally making little corrections to your jump as a 2D platformer may be used to will ruin your momentum and result in pathetic little jumps that end with you dying horribly. If there’s a use for that stupid backflip move Mario does if you change your direction after running and press jump, I have no idea what it is, but all it ever did was get me killed by my clone.

Ultimately, it held my interest almost long enough to get me to the very end, where your only reward for perseverance is a final level that’s just the (spectacular) final level of the first half again, only with no chance of getting the items that make it incredibly easy, and then the same ending with one extra image of Peach in a Tanooki outfit. It just got that bit too annoying at the end by being tricky in the wrong way, by testing my luck rather than skill, or simply annoying me by killing me off when I didn’t feel it had any right to. It was also bad when a level was very hard without a super leaf but could be breezed through in moments with one, especially since they were almost always readily available in toad huts.

This is a Mario game with a whole lot of charm, with great 3D effects, a beautiful world, great use of familiar Mario elements and a few inspired bits of level design, especially when it came to levels with Boos and large rotating platforms. But it just wasn’t quite as playable as it ought to have been when the second half of the game, the game actually aimed at people who like a challenge, opened up and made things that little bit more difficult.