The easiest trope in the save-the-princess type of video gaming could be the implied final boss battle followed the real final boss battle, followed by some half-assed cliffhanger that pretends to offer 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 is headed. Yes, there is a princess-in-another-castle moment at the end. But then it opens up into the real game, one honoring the task, creativity and joy for which the series is so loved.
Right now you've likely heard that the first eight worlds of Super Mario 3D Land aren't, in fact, the entire game. Let's proceed and confirm this. They still do a good job of maintaining that illusion, because of delightful layouts that make the best usage of the 3DS's unique capabilities of any game up to now 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 amount of star coins before unlocking boss battles or bonus levels, provide a reasonable heft to the very first tour of duty, which is saving Peach, of course.
It is because 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 next eight, where you will even play as Luigi, are borne of a demanding, tough love that can not be completed with such assistance, and will be satisfying, in their own way, to those that do on their own.
First, concerning 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 an even and you receive a power-up box that gives you a dazzling, 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 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 as much as 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 really is a shame to admit considering how repetitive many are.
Yet looking back, I'm 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 how 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 takes a little touch. The analog pad overcorrects a little too much for many directional jumps (especially those from a standing position in a 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 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 previous stage. In some cases (especially where I'm stuck now), only their capabilities can quickly bridge a complex jump or sequence of foes placed right at the edge of one.
You are able to acquire these materials via a visit to at least one of Toad's houses scattered throughout the first eight worlds. However, you're allowed just one 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 energy up you have equipped. And if you've already visited the Toad house or apartment with it, you're stuck going back once again to earlier stages finding what 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 various tools you need always feel just 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. You will find three per level, and you will need a the least 100 to play the ultimate stage of the first eight worlds. Fortunately, many can be located, and others are acquired by visiting special challenge boxes located mid-world, where defeating a couple of foes against an occasion pops out a star coin. These, too, unlock only one time each day, although the game's StreetPass capability recharges them in the event that you meet others who've 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 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 trying 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 use of its visual capabilities. You'll feel it when you're dragging down on the circle pad to perform Mario into see 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 portion of the 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 via a warp pipe back at the beginning of the hub world, but they're not simply remixes or speed-run levels. All are tougher, 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 because of 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 could be worth $40, especially on this platform.
Super Mario 3D Land is the first 3DS game that makes me want to choose it up and play it over most of the other console gaming options I have right now. It will be the only handheld game to achieve that for me.
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