I played this all the time on vacation many years ago, but for some reason never got far enough to even get into Bowser's Castle. After grinding through this last night though, I think I understand why.

So Mario Pinball Land's premise is that of an adventure game with stages; you've got three lives to collect all the keys to unlock the gate by beating the necessary 4 bosses, collect enough Stars to unlock the central gate, and then successfully fight and defeat Bowser to beat the game. But it's really fucking hard and infuriating, and here are some reasons why:

- Unlike Pokemon Pinball, you can't just touch enemies to deal damage; there's a damage threshold based off of the ball's momentum. So falling into enemies or bumping them from the sides will rarely ever do damage unless you happen to be under an Invincibility Star's effect, and you have to heavily rely on flipper skillshots. But...

- Skillshots are really difficult to pull off in this game. It's a combination of the flippers being really tiny, the stages being quite large and cluttered in comparison to the flippers, and that angles beyond the central "cone" of around 45 degrees outward are almost unfathomable due to the size of the flippers and how quickly the ball tends to be moving nearby. In addition, a lot of targets are on some kind of timer (i.e. red coins timer, boss cycles, Monty Mole vulnerability state before popping back out to his previous location, etc) and the ball often has an elastic collision with the flipper, so it bounces off just enough for there to be a significant delay, forcing you to waste time as the ball comes back to the flippers' correct position for a trickshot (unless the ball happens to already be coming at you at the exact right position), usually giving enemies enough time to reset.

- Powerups exist in the game (and some can be bought with yellow/blue coins), but most are kind of useless. Red mushroom just makes you bigger and doesn't actually seem to do anything other than this, because the ball doesn't do any more damage to enemies and will still take knockback. Invincibility Stars are sometimes useful because they'll just insta kill, but you still have to get your trickshots off in one minute; also it sucks when trying to hit Monty Moles with it because they'll just disappear without you getting a 1-Up. The Yoshi Egg provides a multiball, but I found it often gets in the way because your balls can collide and destroy your momentum, thus stopping you from dealing any actual damage. The lightning bolt is useful and will instakill most enemies on screen... except for a lot of enemies and bosses that will just get knocked down and must be hit a second time. As such, the best item in the game is actually the double lightning bolt, which must be grinded for through a Question Mark roulette found after beating all the enemies on screen when the Star's been collected.

- Any defeated enemy progress towards a Star/Question Mark or a boss fight is automatically reset if you exit via a door on stage. If the Star/Question Mark appears from defeating them all and you go through a door, that's also a reset. And it's really, really easy to go through doors due to the angles involved.

- If the ball falls directly vertical towards the center of the flippers, the hole is actually just big enough to where the ball will not contact either of the tips of the flipper and just fall straight through. Not much you can do about this one unless you have the pipe up.

- Blue coins do exist in this game, and are usually collected via "combos" where you kill more than one enemy in quick succession, or dropped in limited quantities after beating a boss. You need them for the tent in the Fair stage, where you can use them as payment for special timed trials (such as one with hitting back Chain Chomps) where you could potentially win a Star. But they're really tough and intimidating in requiring a lot of precision/luck, and there's only so many blue coins you'll realistically get within a timeframe, so it's often just safer to buy the 1-Up for 25 blue coins instead.

Let me reiterate the objective with the above context: you have to get at least 15 power stars by killing all enemies in a room (with progress that can be reset if you go through any doors) or red/blue coin trials (timed and intimidating), beat all four of the bosses without falling through the flippers and resetting progress, travel between stages with the cannons at the start of the stage where you could actually lose a life, and then beat Bowser in two phases (one where you attack him and a second where you have to bash Bowser-Ball against either of the two walls on the right/left, scoring three successful hits against one of the sides) without Mario dropping out at the bottom resetting the whole thing, and accomplish all of this within three lives with hopefully no mishaps of the ball falling straight through the flippers or you accidentally lifting one of the flippers while the ball goes under the flipper and over the pipe, with extra lives requiring significant amounts of grinding (100 yellow coins or 25 blue coins) or a ton of patience hitting Monty Mole in specific areas over and over again before he pops back to previous locations. And that's not even mentioning how goddamn hard it is to kill some of the enemies (some require two successive hits within a small timeframe before getting up again, one room requires specific trickshots off of a pyramid to hit flying Kondors, Bowser's Castle has some rooms with Fly Guys so you have to wait until they descend to hit them hard enough, there's actually a room in Snowyland where the goal is not to insta kill all the skating Shy Guys but you instead have to aim for specific Shy Guys so they're all the same color at once with no visual clues to hint you in on this immediately, etc), or coin/item grinding against enemies for specific powerups against enemies (or mini-shrooms to enter specific rooms), or how after inserting in the boss key in the starting room at Bowser's Castle, the stages generally get tougher with more hazards (such as the snowmen waking up in Snowyland and now throwing snowballs at you; they can't be permanently defeated within a room by the way, just stunned) if you decide to go back for stars you missed or the red coin stars that only appear after inserting the key.

I think this is supposed to be a kid's game by the way.

The graphics in this game are pretty amazing, yes, you may argue it looks "ugly" but the 3D effect for the GBA is very convincing and works wonders for a Pinball game, making it so you can actually hit the ball forwards and up, and this game even incorporates hitting the ball in the air to hit things which is a great idea and great use of this tech! Secondly, the IDEA of the way the progression works is a solid one, it takes the "open world filled with non linear missions" type structure straight from Mario 64, dropping you into worlds and challenging you to go and grab stars to unlock doors a literal translation of Mario 64 to pinball, fantastic idea!

Everything begins to fall apart in the execution however. Every single board, and I mean every, single, board. Is just a square, with some blocks, and some enemies. Thats it. And rather than actually take advantage of the GBA's power we are still limited to 1 board at a time, with screen transitions like this is a GB Pinball game. Every single level just feels identical, and every identical level isn't even fun to begin with! They are simply tedious. There is no interesting puzzles or gimmicks, it is always as simple as, youre in a rectangle space, heres some shit, go smack the ball into the shit, get the star, move on. But do not be mistaken into thinking this tedium is easy, because these tiny spread-out objects move, and you must hit all the specific objects, as if you hit the OTHER specific objects on the board you will trigger the wrong thing and have to start over, and usually to start over you must purposely go BACK a board and make your way BACK up again by hitting MORE tedious objects in the correct way. Even the bosses in this game are tedious as all hell, especially the final boss which is an absolute nightmare due to the previously mentioned specification order of hitting blocks and the way you must climb your way back up the board again to retry. The amount of precision needed to do even the most basic action in this game just makes it feel borderline unplayable at times.

It looks/sounds good and the physics are quite accurate to a pinball cabin, but the problem resides in how the stages themselves play...
The star challenges are some of the most tedious and time constrained stuff I've ever played because of the precision they demand from the player to hit objectives, all while:
a. The ball won't go exactly where you want it to most of the time.
b. The enemies are in constant movement and/or airborne, making more room for errors.
c. There's the chance you leave the room accidentally by losing or aiming Mario towards a normal/secret route.
d. All the above.
Also, in case you get the star to lie there in the center of the room you better touch it, because everytime you get out of the room where the star is, THE WHOLE ROOM RESETS INCLUDING THE DAMN STAR! WTF WERE THEY THINKING???
Oh, and the blue coin minigames are even worse, since each of them are on a time limit to complete to destroy all enemies, and with the whiffy nature of pinball you can guess where that goes.

TL;DR it's fun for the first 5 minutes, but going for story completion is SO not worth it, let alone a 100% completion.

I'm so torn on this game, at moments it can be a fun time, but most of the mechanics and the overall level structure is so unforgiving that you NEED to play with save-states in todays age. Whenever you enter a room and don't collect the star and accidently leave the room the star disappears and you have to do the task over from the start again. With how easy it is to easily leave rooms its nothing but a chore to get through. There needed to be more mechanics to help us traject where we want the ball to move because there simply isn't.
A fun concept, but maybe if more thought was put into it then it could've been something special. Ignore this one if you want.