Super Mario World feels weirdly disappointing to me as a follow up from Super Mario Bros 3. Whereas SMB3 will take an idea, iterate on it, and try and push it in a bunch of different directions sometimes to the verge of breaking point, SMW hops from one idea to another so quickly that it doesn't really give you room to breathe. It makes the whole thing less satisfying, I want to see what these ideas are capable of but the game is so desperate to move onto the next idea as quickly as possible. Maybe this makes for a more varied experience on some level, except there's less of a chance for the ideas to leave an impression on you due to this lack of iteration turning the game into kind of a blur as a result.
It sounds like a nitpick, but I'm also frustrated with the step backwards regarding bonuses. The lives system found in many of these older platformers is a deeply antiquated system in myriad ways that I don't really want to go into (I'd be here a while), and a sad result of this system is many games leant heavily into treating extra lives as an exciting reward. SMB3 got that extra lives aren't actually rewarding really and so instead gave your piles of power-ups and strange items you could store for later use, something that was genuinely pretty cool and a ton of fun! That's largely gone here though sadly, with all the minigames you find just ticking your total lives ever higher.
It's hard to argue against Super Mario World being a more sophisticated game than what came before it, and it has a more consistent aesthetic too. It's certainly a very solid game, one that's easy enough to have fun with and would clearly have seemed incredible at the time of its release. From today's perspective though, compared to Super Mario Bros 3 I guess I just find it lacking in quite as much soul. Decades after its release I played SMB3 for the first time and could feel the energy bursting through it, this constant feeling of innovation, trying to see how far it could push its ideas, that feeling is baked into its very being. Super Mario World may be more polished (and has certainly aged better), but paradoxically as a result it somehow makes me feel so much less.
It sounds like a nitpick, but I'm also frustrated with the step backwards regarding bonuses. The lives system found in many of these older platformers is a deeply antiquated system in myriad ways that I don't really want to go into (I'd be here a while), and a sad result of this system is many games leant heavily into treating extra lives as an exciting reward. SMB3 got that extra lives aren't actually rewarding really and so instead gave your piles of power-ups and strange items you could store for later use, something that was genuinely pretty cool and a ton of fun! That's largely gone here though sadly, with all the minigames you find just ticking your total lives ever higher.
It's hard to argue against Super Mario World being a more sophisticated game than what came before it, and it has a more consistent aesthetic too. It's certainly a very solid game, one that's easy enough to have fun with and would clearly have seemed incredible at the time of its release. From today's perspective though, compared to Super Mario Bros 3 I guess I just find it lacking in quite as much soul. Decades after its release I played SMB3 for the first time and could feel the energy bursting through it, this constant feeling of innovation, trying to see how far it could push its ideas, that feeling is baked into its very being. Super Mario World may be more polished (and has certainly aged better), but paradoxically as a result it somehow makes me feel so much less.
3 Comments
I think SMW's aesthetic holds up better; visually the game is something that could be released today more or less, whereas the same cannot be said about SMB3 even though that game does look charming. I also think SMB3 has more 'rough edges' at points in its design that can be associated with its age, but I suppose SMW does still have moments of this too. Even how the bonuses are handled in SMB3 isn't exactly polished, the game is bad at explaining what some of the weirder rewards do and on some level it all feels a bit messy, but it's also just much more compelling and fun to me despite this.
Alright. Thanks for the pretty quick reply! Comparing SMW and SMB3 is something that feels interesting to me, since Super Mario Bros. 3 to me feels like a game quite a bit ahead of its time, and despite being so popular it feels like nobody took some elements from them. Also thanks for the good review!
FrozenRoy
3 years ago