Super Mario Bros. 3

It's insane how much a leap forwards Mario 3 was for nintendo. Playing the other mario games released on that console just shows how much of a jump in quality this game was in literally every aspect. Graphically, everything got a shiny new upgrade. Musically, the soundtrack is literally iconic. The level design is simple yet entertaining, with some new themes like the iconic airship and big levels, and the boss fights are more interesting thanks to the introduction of Boom Boom and the Koopalings. Even cutscenes at the end of boss fights and some random kings. This game even was the first to include the overworld, and also was inventive enough to introduce enemy battles and mushroom houses. This game is most likely the pinnacle of NES games, and shows the maximum capabilities of what the system can offer.

My only complaint would be some of the levels have interesting design choices. One of note being a level where you're required to fly with a koopa shell to beat the level, and there's not a big indication that you're supposed to do that, and the actual jump is a little iffy for some reason. These are just some small quirks scattered about the game, and this is still one of my favorite Mario games and platformers in general when it comes to satisfying 2d platformer level design.

10

t’s not surprising to me that this was and is such a revolutionary game. The variety of levels, the controls and the design all fit on an NES cartridge is just mind boggling. Playing games of the era leading up to this game you can see how much of a leap SMB3 was. What is surprising to me is just how well it plays right now. It still is mesmerizing with secrets, tight controls and a perfect difficulty curve that was lost on later Mario games. I’m positive it’s the best game of the NES era, and sometimes I wonder if it’s also the best Mario game ever bar none.

Para mi el mejor Mario 2D, creativo con sus mundos, en sus niveles y hasta con sus jefes. Esta repleto de secretos que no serán muchos pero si variados y dignos de rejugarse, y de paso también es de los más rejugables. Una OST con varias de mis melodías favoritas están aquí.

La razón por la que pongo este por encima del World es que si bien Yoshi es espectacular, me encanta el sistema de trajes y la variedad de jefes que si bien la ciencia es la misma, sus técnicas te harán cambiar el uso de los patrones y la velocidad con que atacas a estos. Con un mundo 7 infernal y un mundo 8 raudo pero pesado. Varios mundos superan los 10 niveles. Y por supuesto Mario Puede Volar y usar el Mapache para camuflajeaese.

Obra maestra.

Super Mario Bros 3 can't quite capture SMB's infectious whimsy despite a more diverse catalogue of levels, area types, music, etc. Rather, this is the technical peak of 2D Mario, full of interesting and creative ideas that somehow managed to fit within the constraints of NES cartridges. Its new tanuki power is the ideal complement to their emphasis on momentum and to their more vertical levels, while the overworld map (the standout feature) offers new ways to tackle world progression. A smoother, 'fixed' version of Super Mario Bros, and perhaps the best demonstration of their platformer difficulty, although it'd still be easier to look elsewhere for a much better challenge.

Inarguable the best of the original trilogy and just a towering platformer in its own right. I really feel that SMB3 is the best of the franchise, past or present and in the 34 years since, hasn't been topped by Nintendo. Looking back though the game obviously has some chinks in its armor that reflect the game design of its day. Admittedly I got into this game rather late, as I was introduced to most of the mainline Mario series through the Game Boy Advanced remasters and having played that platforms SMW adaptation I always felt the storybook like overworld of this game to be a detriment, now with a more critical lens it really adds to this games charm (seriously though Super Mario Advance 4 is such a great port, sans the gimmicky e-reader feature.) Really is there a negative to this game I could give?

If you want to see a prime example of what experience with developing on a specific piece of hardware can have on a final product, just compare everything about this game to the original Super Mario Bros, it's actually insane. More than that, there's just a lot about this game that feels as if it transcends its limitations as a whole and feels genuinely ahead of its time in a variety of ways, along with obviously feeling like quite the leap forward in certain respects from its predecessors. You've got so many improvements to the formula that helped establish the Mario franchise conventions as a whole, an ambitious scope, boasting a whole 90 levels, and an overall polished aesthetic combined with some pretty forward thinking and forgiving mechanics to top it all off to make for an extremely well-rounded game with a lot to love, overall making it feel pretty clear why this is regularly considered one of the peaks of the console as a whole.

To add to that comment about the high level count that this game, it's also remarkable just how much time went into making each stage feel entirely distinct, not only from an aesthetic perspective, but mechanically as well. The virtues of Super Mario Land introducing completely new concepts even moments before the final boss feel turned up to 11 here. Almost every stage has its own unique idea, whether it's something as simple as having a heavily sloped level terrain, to more involved ideas like having to guide moving blocks through a labyrinth of pipes or staying on top of rail platforms in order to avoid falling into the fish infested waters below. Once again, even the final stages offer new challenges, and ones that radically change things up as well. This lends itself to a strong feeling of variety and freshness that never truly leaves at any point, every stage has something new to offer, and while they're not always great ideas, it doesn't even matter too much because you won't have to deal with them for very long until you've made it through. With this said however, SMB3's relentless creativity in certain respects makes the total lack of inspiration in areas feel that much more noticeable, particularly in terms of boss battles. While each world ends with its own unique boss, it feels like all but the final one boil down to a very similar solution, usually dodging a projectile attack and then jumping on its head, moving back a bit, jumping on their heads the moment their invincibility wears off, and then repeating this pattern one more time to defeat them. This essentially means that despite the fact that you're technically fighting different enemies, they all mechanically feel so indistinct from one another that it might as well not matter at all. With that said, it's still nowhere near as egregious as with Boom Boom, the miniboss of every stage, who feels as if he changes in such negligible ways that you're essentially just fighting him over 15 times in the game with the exact same strategy. This lack of variety unfortunately kills some of the drive that the usually exciting stages attempt to establish, as you end up knowing that the culmination of your efforts will often just lead to yet another underwhelming fight that feels no different from any other.

I'd also argue that the game loses a lot of steam in its final 2 worlds, with world 7's labyrinthine design detracting from the strong sense of momentum that feel consistently reinforced throughout the runtime of the game, especially with some of the more cryptic ideas near the end. The fact that the game expects you to find a a hidden switch on top of a bunch of bricks in one of the castle stages here feels particularly ridiculous to me, as adding this sort of obscurity into a game focusing largely around its tight, responsive and creative platforming ends up going entirely against the core loop of everything else. While this would have already been problematic in a slower, more methodical game, the stark juxtaposition this section (along with a few others) has ends up making this solution a more difficult thing to understand, and ultimately undermines so much of the experience when such things become possibilities. The game also relies a bit too heavily on autoscrollers, especially in the final world where the vast majority of the stages are these ones. While I admire world 8 and the atmosphere it conjures, with pieces of scrolling level geometry along with enemies being cleverly constructed to resemble tanks and airships being thrown your way, I feel like there are too many of them and they all take too long to get through for how mundane the levels themselves feel to play beyond this admittedly incredible atmosphere. Having the last quarter of the game fall so flat ultimately contributes to a game that felt amazing to play but very hard to actually finish.

With this said however, there are still some other very positive things I have to say about this game and the way it approaches difficulty and rewards for the most part. Rather than focusing exclusively on rewarding the player with extra lives for all their accomplishments, Super Mario Bros 3 seems to understand how functionally useless these are as a means beyond extending the gameplay time. That's not to say that they removed them from the game or anything, but instead, this also gives you other rewards for some of the more substantial challenges that you'll undertake. The game rewards you by allowing you to store a bunch of powerups for later stages if something feels too difficult to overcome in your weakest form when you enter a stage, a mechanic that feels uncharacteristically forgiving for an NES title, but an incredibly welcome addition nonetheless. Some of these special items even allow you to fly through or outright skip a stage entirely, at the cost of still not being able to walk through it on the world map, essentially making you commit to a path once you've used this. This helps alleviate some of the aforementioned issues with some of these levels being obnoxious to play through, as you can just decide to skip them with little to no consequence and continue on your way, though this ends up falling a bit flat if you die too much and use up all of these additional resources, leaving you in a state where every level more or less becomes mandatory. This idea also made having to replay certain sections upon a game over feel far less tedious, as the option to entirely skip a level if you really hated it and didn't want to play through again was an option, and allows the player to tailor their experience towards gameplay elements that they enjoy, while being able to avoid the more undesirable traits to them.

I've also got to give props to the way Mario controls in this game, as while it's not perfect, feeling a tad heavy and carrying momentum a bit too far for my tastes, he still controls leaps and bounds above the previous games, really being the first time where he feels truly fun and satisfying to control rather than just being serviceable at best. It's also admirable how so many stages in this are full of cleverly hidden secrets that add that much more depth to each stage, knowing that you're likely to find something of interest if you look around enough, even if it sometimes is nothing but a hidden stockpile of coins, it still adds a lot. I can't quite say I outright love this game due to some egregious examples of recycled content in a game that clearly proved that it had ideas to spare in other areas, along with falling flat in its final stretch, but still, I like this a lot more than I did a couple of years ago. This is the game that really began to solidify the Mario identity that would stick for decades, and is really the true point in which the series started rapidly expanding and iterating off an incredibly strong base point as a direct result of this. Whether or not I actually always like playing this game, I also cannot deny that this is an incredible achievement that I believe could further grow on me when I inevitably come back to play through this one yet again.