The simplest trope in the save-the-princess model of video gaming may be the implied final boss battle followed the real final boss battle, followed closely by some half-assed cliffhanger that pretends to provide meaning to another playthrough of the first game. Super Mario 3D Land, one of the greatest holistically designed video gaming I've ever played, baits you into thinking that's where it's headed. Yes, there is a princess-in-another-castle moment at the end. But it opens up into the real game, one honoring the challenge, creativity and joy for which the series is really loved.
Right now you've likely heard that the very first eight worlds of Super Mario 3D Land aren't, in reality, the whole game. Let's go ahead and confirm this. They still execute a good job of maintaining that illusion, thanks to delightful layouts which make the most effective usage of the 3DS's unique capabilities of any game up to now released. Seamless camera rotations take you from sidescrolling elevation to isometric, top-down and traditional third-person platformer perspectives, all for purposeful reasons. Gatekeeping requirements, like locating a certain amount of star coins before unlocking boss battles or bonus levels, give a reasonable heft to the initial tour of duty, that will be saving Peach, of course.
It's for the reason that alleged final stage with Bowser, once the crutch of the Super Tanooki suit goes missing, that Super Mario 3D Land game reveals its nature. The first eight worlds are less pandering to weaker players since they are training up and encouraging them, because the following eight, where you may also play as Luigi, are borne of a demanding, tough love that cannot be completed with such assistance, and will soon be satisfying, in their particular way, to those that do on the own.
First, in regards to the Super Tanooki suit.This is exactly what most drives the first misunderstanding of Super Mario 3D Land being an easy game. Die enough in a level and you get a power-up box that gives you a sparkling, permanently invulnerable Tanooki suit, with tail-attack and air-walking, to hand-hold Mario to the end of the round. You can still die with it by falling into lava or even a bottomless pit. Accomplish that enough and you will end up offered a couple of wings that fly you to the flagpole ending the round.
For young children, its utility is self-evident. For older gamers, its appearance is sufficient to make Super Mario 3D Land feel condescending to them. I saw it as a hand around someone who had identified the jumping puzzle but lacked the dexterity to execute it, and just wanted to get up with the show. I'll confess to using Super Tanooki on a couple of boss battles, which is really a shame to admit considering how repetitive many are.
Yet looking back, I feel just like the game's opening act was not necessarily an exercise round, but an apprenticeship showing me what the true Super Mario Bros. would require in a 3D environment. You'll need to know just how to wall-jump, bounce high off tightropes and springboards, swim, float and hop off an airborne enemy to the safety of the next platform. None of the moves are unique to longtime players of the series, but employing them in Super Mario 3D Land needs a little bit of touch. The analog pad overcorrects a touch too much for many directional jumps (especially those from a position position in a isometric view). A darkness underneath Mario (or silhouette of him if he's behind a wall) helps you line up your landing point.
Though all worlds are ostensibly designed to be navigable with a standard-size Mario (unless the checkpoint is deliberately pointing one to a powerup) some are inordinately simpler if you've acquired a Tankooki suit or fire flower from a previous stage. In some instances (especially where I am stuck now), only their capabilities can quickly bridge a technical jump or sequence of foes placed right at the edge of one.
You can acquire these materials via a visit to one of Toad's houses scattered through the first eight worlds. However, you're allowed only one visit per day. You are able to equip one item and keep another in reserve, providing for a robust tanooki/boomerang suit/fire flower platoon. In the event that you die, you lose the ability up you have equipped. And if you've already visited the Toad house with it, you're stuck going back once again to earlier stages finding what you need and grinding through that world to completion grab the item. You can't pause and back out to the hub world and still keep it. Simply speaking, the tools you'll need always feel just like they're within some other area of the game, requiring you to go fetch them there before continuing.
Star coins represent the game's other grind mechanism. You can find three per level, and you'll need a minimum of 100 to play the ultimate stage of the first eight worlds. Fortunately, many are often located, and others are acquired by visiting special challenge boxes located mid-world, where defeating a set of foes against a period pops out a celebrity coin. These, too, unlock only once each day, even though game's StreetPass capability recharges them in the event that you meet others who have the game.
Super Mario 3D Land is better game incorporating the 3DS'unique visual capabilities into its design.
In spite of gimmicks and requirements like these the game really shines by doing what the series has always done best: Pose a hearty challenge that utilizes the whole screen. Jumping puzzles, especially timed ones, always carry an oh-hell-what's-next sense of breakneck pacing. The surreal trips through haunted mansions were, appropriately enough, suspenseful to the end, specially when I was wanting to protect the star three coins I'd found (if you die, you lose any star coins found since the past checkpoint).
Super Mario 3D Land is easily the most effective Nintendo 3DS game to be released in the device's young lifespan, and certainly the one which makes the most effective and most deliberate usage of its visual capabilities. You'll feel it when you're dragging down on the circle pad to run Mario directly into your face to escape some disappearing platform tiles. The game's gyrometer has novel applications as well, from aiming a cannon for your perfectly placed landing atop the stage-ending flagpole, to using binoculars to scope out the rest of the level and see where Toad tossed a star coin.
More than this, with the next stage of special levels, Super Mario 3D Land basically doubles its first-play value by surprise. Canonically, you reach them by way of a warp pipe back in the beginning of the hub world, but they are not merely remixes or speed-run levels. Each one is tougher, to the point of dying by the dozens, which is why heading back and stocking through to that extra-life exploit became so key for me. Yet I really do feel like I was prepared with this by what I completed, despite assistance, in top of the world. In any case, this is a game that finally lives up to Nintendo's promise a handheld game could be worth $40, especially on this platform.
Super Mario 3D Land is the first 3DS game that makes me want to select it up and play it over all the other console gaming options I've right now. It may be the only handheld game to do that for me.
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