I got this game for Christmas in 2017, and honestly I did get a lot of enjoyment out of it. Obviously the fact that you couldn't share your levels online kinda defeats the whole purpose of the game and makes it inferior to the Wii U version, so I'm not gonna defend that. But the often overlooked part about this game is that it has a full, fleshed out story mode with levels designed by Nintendo. Judging it in that aspect, it's almost as good as a normal 2D Mario game with the added bonus that you get to fiddle around and make your own levels. For what it is it's not a bad game, and since I didn't have a Wii U growing up, this was the next best thing.

I played this in early 2024 well after the Wii U and 3DS online services have died, so I got as little as possible out of this. I can't play courses made by others, I can't share my own courses but with people I know irl who won't look at me weird when I hand them a 3DS in 2024 and onward. I didn't hate the 100 courses Nintendo made for me, but the way they're dressed up doesn't help the situation. You will hear the same short song over and over with slight variation and it almost made me feel like I was in a Mario purgatory. Endless Marioing forever. Little time between levels to breathe. It's probably the weirdest way I've experienced a Mario campaign. The levels range from being typical Mario to being like weird puzzles you have to solve. There's some neat ones, but like most 2D Mario games, I couldn't call out a specific one and recommend it. You have quite a few options for Mario on 3DS, and I guess this is a fine one.

...Weirdo. We're not staunch haters of this game--in fact, in an era of Netpass, this game actually has MORE value than it did when it first released! And we quite enjoyed the Super Mario challenge and remember grabbing all the medals--it's our favorite of the single-player campaigns that the Mario Makers have had. But also, uh, is having the best single-player campaign of the Mario Makers what you WANT in a Mario Maker??? ...The blunt answer is "no".

We're glad this game exists and it did what it did, but we're not going to pretend it's some must-play title. Not one bit.

I mean...It's still Mario Maker....Just...Without being able to look for specific levels...And you can't play 3DS levels on the home console version...

Yeah, it's just a shittier version of the same game, but I never cared too much. The core Mario Maker experience is still there, and you can still create your own levels...It just serves no other point outside of that.

I'm sure if I had ever bought a WiiU with the WiiU version of this game, I would've never touched this version at all. Oh well.

This is really neat to see running on the 3DS, especially New Super Mario Bros U, but it's far from an ideal version. Of course now that the online servers are scheduled to go down in April, it doesn't matter anyway, but at the time not being able to upload stages, or even look up stages if I remember correctly defeated a lot of the point of Super Mario Maker. There's some neat singleplayer modes here, for what they're worth, and you could still play random user-made levels, but in general this was a really bizarre release that never made much sense