The easiest trope in the save-the-princess style of video gaming could be the implied final boss battle followed the real final boss battle, accompanied by some half-assed cliffhanger that pretends to provide meaning to an additional playthrough of the original game. Super Mario 3D Land, one of the greatest holistically designed game titles I've ever played, baits you into thinking that's where it is headed. Yes, there is a princess-in-another-castle moment at the end. However it opens up into the real game, one honoring the challenge, creativity and joy for which the series is really loved.
By now you've likely heard that the initial eight worlds of Super Mario 3D Land are not, actually, the entire game. Let's go ahead and confirm this. They still execute a good job of maintaining that illusion, thanks to delightful layouts that produce the best utilization of the 3DS's unique capabilities of any game to date 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 getting a certain quantity of star coins before unlocking boss battles or bonus levels, give a reasonable heft to the very first tour of duty, which can 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 really much pandering to weaker players since they are training up and encouraging them, because the following eight, where you will even play as Luigi, are borne of a demanding, tough love that can't be completed with such assistance, and will soon be satisfying, in their particular way, to those who do on their own.
First, about the Super Tanooki suit.This is what most drives the first misunderstanding of Super Mario 3D Land being an easy game. Die enough in a level and you receive a power-up box that offers you a gleaming, permanently invulnerable Tanooki suit, with tail-attack and air-walking, to hand-hold Mario to the conclusion of the round. You can still die with it by falling into lava or perhaps a bottomless pit. Do that enough and you will end up offered a couple of 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 up to someone who had identified 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 really a shame to admit considering how repetitive many are.
Yet looking back, I feel such as 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 find out 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 takes a little touch. The analog pad overcorrects a tad too much for some directional jumps (especially those from a position position in a isometric view). A shadow underneath Mario (or silhouette of him if he's behind a wall) can help you fall into line your landing point.
Though all worlds are ostensibly designed to be navigable by way of 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 prior stage. In some cases (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 by way of a visit to 1 of Toad's houses scattered through the entire first eight worlds. However, you're allowed just 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. If you die, you lose the power up you have equipped. And if you've already visited the Toad house or apartment with it, you're stuck going back to earlier stages finding things you need and grinding throughout that world to completion grab the item. You can't pause and back out to the hub world and still keep it. In a nutshell, the equipment you will need always feel like they're found in various other the main game, requiring you to go fetch them there before continuing.
Star coins represent the game's other grind mechanism. You will find three per level, and you will need a the least 100 to play the last stage of the very first eight worlds. Fortunately, many are typically located, and others are acquired by visiting special challenge boxes located mid-world, where defeating some foes against a time pops out a celebrity coin. These, too, unlock just once daily, although the 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.
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 makes use of 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, 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 very best Nintendo 3DS game to be released in the device's young lifespan, and certainly one that 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 that person to escape 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 rest of the 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 at the start of the hub world, but they are not alone remixes or speed-run levels. All are more challenging, to the point of dying by the dozens, which is why returning and stocking up on that extra-life exploit became so key for me. Yet I do feel as though I was prepared with this by what I completed, despite assistance, in the top of world. In any case, this is a game that finally lives as much as 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 pick it up and play it over most of the other console gaming options I have right now. It could be the only handheld game to achieve that for me.
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