The easiest trope in the save-the-princess model 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 a second playthrough of the initial game. Super Mario 3D Land, one of the greatest holistically designed video games 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 task, creativity and joy for which the series is indeed loved.
Right now you've likely heard that the first eight worlds of Super Mario 3D Land aren't, in reality, the whole game. Let's go ahead and confirm this. They still do a good job of maintaining that illusion, as a result of delightful layouts which 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 locating a certain quantity of star coins before unlocking boss battles or bonus levels, give a reasonable heft to the first tour of duty, which is 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 very first eight worlds are not so much pandering to weaker players as they are training up and encouraging them, because the following eight, where you will also play as Luigi, are borne of a demanding, tough love that cannot be completed with such assistance, and will undoubtedly be satisfying, in their own way, to people who 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 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 conclusion of the round. You are able to still die with it by falling into lava or a bottomless pit. Accomplish that enough and you will end up offered some wings that fly you to the flagpole ending the round.
For young kids, 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 had found out the jumping puzzle but lacked the dexterity to execute it, and just wanted to have up with the show. I'll confess to using Super Tanooki on several boss battles, which is a shame to admit considering how repetitive many are.
Yet looking back, I feel such as 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 know how 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 needs a bit of touch. The analog pad overcorrects a little too much for many directional jumps (especially those from a position position within an isometric view). A darkness underneath Mario (or silhouette of him if he's behind a wall) can help you line up your landing point.
Though all worlds are ostensibly built to be navigable by a standard-size Mario (unless the checkpoint is deliberately pointing one to a powerup) some are inordinately simpler if you've found a Tankooki suit or fire flower from a prior stage. In some cases (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 things through a visit to one of Toad's houses scattered through the first eight worlds. However, you're allowed only 1 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 power up you have equipped. And if you've already visited the Toad home with it, you're stuck going back again to earlier stages finding things you need and grinding throughout that world to completion get the item. You can't pause and back out to the hub world and still keep it. In a nutshell, the tools you need always feel like they're present in various other area of the game, requiring one to go fetch them there before continuing.
Star coins represent the game's other grind mechanism. You can find three per level, and you will need a the least 100 to play the last stage of the initial eight worlds. Fortunately, many are often located, and others are acquired by visiting special challenge boxes located mid-world, where defeating some foes against an occasion pops out a star coin. These, too, unlock just once per day, even though the game's StreetPass capability recharges them if you meet others who've the game.
Super Mario 3D Land is best game incorporating the 3DS'unique visual capabilities into its design.
Notwithstanding gimmicks and requirements like these the overall game really shines by doing what the series has always done best: Pose a hearty challenge that employs 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, particularly when I was attempting 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 that makes the best and most deliberate utilization of its visual capabilities. You'll feel it when you're dragging down on the circle pad to operate Mario directly into your face to flee some 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 by way of a warp pipe back at the beginning of the hub world, but they're not only remixes or speed-run levels. Each one is tougher, 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 really do feel like I was prepared with this by what I completed, despite having assistance, in the top of world. Whatever the case, this is a game that finally lives up to Nintendo's promise that a handheld game can be worth $40, especially with this platform.
Super Mario 3D Land is the very first 3DS game that produces me want to select it up and play it over most of the other console gaming options I've right now. It could be the only handheld game to achieve that for me.
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