The simplest trope in the save-the-princess type of video gaming may be the implied final boss battle followed the real final boss battle, accompanied by some half-assed cliffhanger that pretends to provide meaning to another playthrough of the initial game. Super Mario 3D Land, one of the finest holistically designed video games I've ever played, baits you into thinking that's where it's headed. Yes, there's 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 that the series is indeed loved.
By now you've likely heard that the initial eight worlds of Super Mario 3D Land aren't, in fact, the whole game. Let's go ahead and confirm this. They still execute a good job of maintaining that illusion, thanks to delightful layouts that make the most effective usage of the 3DS's unique capabilities of any game so far 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 finding a certain quantity of star coins before unlocking boss battles or bonus levels, give a reasonable heft to the initial tour of duty, which will be saving Peach, of course.
It's in that alleged final stage with Bowser, when the crutch of the Super Tanooki suit goes missing, that Super Mario 3D Land game reveals its nature. The first eight worlds are not so much pandering to weaker players because they are training up and encouraging them, because another eight, where you will even play as Luigi, are borne of a demanding, tough love that cannot be completed with such assistance, and will be satisfying, in their very own way, to those that do on their own.
First, concerning the Super Tanooki suit.This is exactly what most drives early misunderstanding of Super Mario 3D Land as an easy game. Die enough in an amount and you obtain a power-up box that gives you a gleaming, permanently invulnerable Tanooki suit, with tail-attack and air-walking, to hand-hold Mario to the end of the round. You are able to still die with it by falling into lava or a bottomless pit. Do that enough and you will end up offered some wings that fly you to the flagpole ending the round.
For small children, its utility is self-evident. For older gamers, its appearance will do to make Super Mario 3D Land feel condescending to them. I found it as a hand around someone who'd figured out the jumping puzzle but lacked the dexterity to execute it, and just wanted to obtain on with the show. I'll confess to using Super Tanooki on a few boss battles, which is a shame to admit considering how repetitive many are.
Yet looking back, I'm like the game's opening act was not necessarily a training round, but an apprenticeship showing me what the true Super Mario Bros. would require in a 3D environment. You'll need to find out how exactly to wall-jump, bounce high off tightropes and springboards, swim, float and hop off an airborne enemy to the safety of another platform. None of the moves are unique to longtime players of the series, but employing them in Super Mario 3D Land takes a bit of touch. The analog pad overcorrects a tad too much for many directional jumps (especially those from a standing position in an isometric view). A shadow underneath Mario (or silhouette of him if he's behind a wall) helps you line up your landing point.
Though all worlds are ostensibly made to be navigable with a standard-size Mario (unless the checkpoint is deliberately pointing you to a powerup) some are inordinately simpler if you've picked up a Tankooki suit or fire flower from a prior stage. In some instances (especially where I'm stuck now), only their capabilities can quickly bridge a specialized jump or sequence of foes placed right at the edge of one.
You can acquire these products via a visit to at least one of Toad's houses scattered throughout the first eight worlds. However, you're allowed only one visit per day. You can equip one item and keep another in reserve, providing for a powerful tanooki/boomerang suit/fire flower platoon. If you die, you lose the energy up you've equipped. And if you've already visited the Toad home with it, you're stuck going back once again to earlier stages finding the thing you need and grinding through that world to completion pick up the item. You can't pause and back out to the hub world and still keep it. In a nutshell, the equipment you need always feel just like they're within some other area of the game, requiring one to go fetch them there before continuing.
Star coins represent the game's other grind mechanism. You will find three per level, and you may need a the least 100 to play the last stage of the initial eight worlds. Fortunately, many can be located, and others are acquired by visiting special challenge boxes located mid-world, where defeating a set of foes against a time pops out a star coin. These, too, unlock only one time each day, even though game's StreetPass capability recharges them if you meet others who have the game.
Super Mario 3D Land is better game incorporating the 3DS'unique visual capabilities into its design.
Regardless of gimmicks and requirements like these the overall 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, especially when I was wanting to protect the star three coins I'd found (if you die, you lose any star coins found since the final checkpoint).
Super Mario 3D Land is easily the best Nintendo 3DS game to be released in the device's young lifespan, and certainly the one which makes the very best and most deliberate utilization 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 flee a series of disappearing platform tiles. The game's gyrometer has novel applications as well, from aiming a cannon for the perfectly placed landing atop the stage-ending flagpole, to using binoculars to scope out the remaining level and see where Toad tossed a star coin.
Significantly 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 through a warp pipe back at the start of the hub world, but they're not only remixes or speed-run levels. Each one is more challenging, to the level of dying by the dozens, which explains why heading back and stocking on that extra-life exploit became so key for me. Yet I actually do feel as though I was prepared because of this by what I completed, even with assistance, in top of the world. In any case, this is a game that finally lives as much as Nintendo's promise a handheld game can be worth $40, especially with this platform.
Super Mario 3D Land is the very first 3DS game which makes me want to select it up and play it over all of the other console gaming options I have right now. It may be the only handheld game to accomplish this for me.
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