The simplest trope in the save-the-princess style of video gaming could be the implied final boss battle followed the real final boss battle, followed closely by some half-assed cliffhanger that pretends to give meaning to an additional playthrough of the original game. Super Mario 3D Land, one of the best holistically designed game titles 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. However it opens up into the real game, one honoring the process, creativity and joy for that your series is really loved.
Right now you've likely heard that the first eight worlds of Super Mario 3D Land aren't, in reality, the entire game. Let's go ahead and confirm this. They still perform a good job of maintaining that illusion, thanks to delightful layouts that make the best utilization of the 3DS's unique capabilities of any game to date released. Seamless camera rotations get you from sidescrolling elevation to isometric, top-down and traditional third-person platformer perspectives, all for purposeful reasons. Gatekeeping requirements, like getting a certain number of star coins before unlocking boss battles or bonus levels, give a reasonable heft to the first tour of duty, which will be saving Peach, of course.
It's in 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 initial eight worlds are not so much pandering to weaker players because 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 is going to be satisfying, in their particular way, to those who do on their own.
First, concerning the Super Tanooki suit.This is what most drives the early misunderstanding of Super Mario 3D Land as an easy game. Die enough in an amount and you receive a power-up box that offers you a glowing, 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 perhaps a bottomless pit. Do this enough and you will be offered some wings that fly you to the flagpole ending the round.
For 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 as much as someone who had identified 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 a couple of boss battles, which is really a shame to admit considering how repetitive many are.
Yet looking back, I'm 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 exactly to wall-jump, bounce high off tightropes and springboards, swim, float and hop off an airborne enemy to the safety of the following platform. None of the moves are unique to longtime players of the series, but employing them in Super Mario 3D Land requires a little touch. The analog pad overcorrects a little too much for some directional jumps (especially those from a standing position within an isometric view). A darkness underneath Mario (or silhouette of him if he's behind a wall) can help you make your landing point.
Though all worlds are ostensibly made 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 found a Tankooki suit or fire flower from a prior stage. Sometimes (especially where I'm 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 products through a visit to one of Toad's houses scattered throughout the first eight worlds. However, you're allowed only 1 visit per day. You can equip one item and keep another in reserve, providing for a strong tanooki/boomerang suit/fire flower platoon. If you die, you lose the ability up you've equipped. And if you've already visited the Toad house or apartment 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 short, the tools you'll need always feel like they're within various other part of the game, requiring one to go fetch them there before continuing.
Star coins represent the game's other grind mechanism. There are three per level, and you may need a the least 100 to play the ultimate stage of the initial eight worlds. Fortunately, many are easily located, and others are acquired by visiting special challenge boxes located mid-world, where defeating a couple of foes against a time pops out a celebrity coin. These, too, unlock only once per day, even though game's StreetPass capability recharges them if you meet others who have the game.
Super Mario 3D Land is best game incorporating the 3DS'unique visual capabilities into its design.
In spite 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 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 conclusion, 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 best and most deliberate usage of its visual capabilities. You'll feel it when you're dragging down on the circle pad to run Mario straight 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 remaining level and see where Toad tossed a star coin.
A lot 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 only remixes or speed-run levels. Each one is more challenging, to the level of dying by the dozens, which explains why returning and stocking up on that extra-life exploit became so key for me. Yet I do feel as though I was prepared for this by what I completed, despite assistance, in the upper world. Regardless, this is a game that finally lives up to Nintendo's promise that the handheld game could be worth $40, especially on this platform.
Super Mario 3D Land is the initial 3DS game which makes me want to choose it down and play it over most of 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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