The simplest trope in the save-the-princess type of video gaming is 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 first 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 it opens up into the real game, one honoring the task, creativity and joy for that your series is indeed loved.
By now you've likely heard that the very first eight worlds of Super Mario 3D Land aren't, in fact, the whole game. Let's proceed and confirm this. They still perform a good job of maintaining that illusion, as a result of delightful layouts that produce the best use 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 finding a certain quantity of star coins before unlocking boss battles or bonus levels, offer a reasonable heft to the initial tour of duty, which will be saving Peach, of course.
It's 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 first eight worlds are not so 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 not be completed with such assistance, and is likely to be satisfying, in their own way, to those that do on the own.
First, about the Super Tanooki suit.This is exactly what most drives the early misunderstanding of Super Mario 3D Land as an easy game. Die enough in a level and you get a power-up box that provides you a gleaming, permanently invulnerable Tanooki suit, with tail-attack and air-walking, to hand-hold Mario to the finish of the round. You can still die with it by falling into lava or even a bottomless pit. Do that enough and you will end up offered a set of wings that fly you to the flagpole ending the round.
For small children, its utility is self-evident. For older gamers, its appearance is sufficient to make Super Mario 3D Land feel condescending to them. I found it as a hand as much as someone who had found out the jumping puzzle but lacked the dexterity to execute it, and just wanted to have on with the show. I'll confess to using Super Tanooki on several boss battles, which really is a shame to admit considering how repetitive many are.
Yet looking back, Personally i think just like the game's opening act wasn't 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 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 requires a little bit of touch. The analog pad overcorrects a touch too much for some 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) can help you fall into line 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 picked up a Tankooki suit or fire flower from a prior stage. In some cases (especially where I am stuck now), only their capabilities can quickly bridge a complex jump or sequence of foes placed right at the edge of one.
You can acquire these products via a visit to 1 of Toad's houses scattered through 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 power up you've equipped. And if you've already visited the Toad house 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. Simply speaking, the tools you'll need always feel like they're present in some other part 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 minimum of 100 to play the last stage of the very first eight worlds. Fortunately, many are often 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 star coin. These, too, unlock only once per day, although the game's StreetPass capability recharges them in the event that you meet others who have the game.
Super Mario 3D Land is most beneficial 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, especially when I was attempting 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 best Nintendo 3DS game to be released in the device's young lifespan, and certainly the one which makes the most effective and most deliberate utilization of its visual capabilities. You'll feel it when you're dragging down on the circle pad to perform Mario into your face to escape a series of 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 rest of the level and see where Toad tossed a celebrity 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 in the beginning of the hub world, but they're not merely remixes or speed-run levels. Each is more difficult, to the stage of dying by the dozens, which is why heading back and stocking up 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 top of the world. In any case, this is a game that finally lives up to Nintendo's promise that the handheld game may be worth $40, especially on this platform.
Super Mario 3D Land is the first 3DS game which makes me want to pick it up and play it over all of the other console gaming options I have right now. It will be the only handheld game to do that for me.
