Honestly pretty good port of Super Mario Bros 3, and was fun to revisit with all it's GBA-ness: the constant voice samples, the crunchy audio, Mario Bros is there, it's fun to see this on an official modern Nintendo service. I came here to check out the notorious e-reader levels, but ended up just playing through the game because Super Mario Bros 3 is neat. But I ended up coming out of it a lot more mixed on SMB3. I remembered this game being harder than 2 (USA) or World, but I didn't remember levels feeling so...sloppy. Some of them are weirdly short, or have obstacles and enemies just placed on top of a mostly flat level, there are way too many maze levels, levels can be weirdly cruel in a way that feels off. The power-ups, while a lot of them cool in design and concept, often either only exist to skip entire levels or feel like they're not utilized in levels enough to make them that exciting. It's stuff like the Hammer Bros suit not being able to break bricks, or Kuribo's Shoe being in only one short level. It feels like the team was solely focused on making a Bigger game with More Stuff, but ended up losing sight of making levels that feel as well crafted as 1 or 2.

At the same time, I forgot how much multiplayer in this game rules. Many games have borrowed SMB3's world map, but very few actually realize that it's modeled after a board game for a reason. Players 1 and 2 take turns capturing levels, while also having the ability to challenge a player's space at any time. They can race to bonus games and power-ups and use items found from roaming enemies to get ahead of the other player on the map. SMB3 not having a save feature in its original release probably makes getting through a whole game like this a lot more challenging, but later versions adding a save file allows it to be the most exciting of the side-scrollers to go through with a friend, even rivaling the New Super Mario Bros series despite not having simultaneous play.

But what about the e-reader levels? Well, I didn't like them! They lean in even more into SMB3's difficulty and have even more mazes, and while even with my frustrations I was still able to finish the main game, I couldn't get more than 20 levels into this mode. Some levels manage to have fun gimmicks, and there's somewhat of a thrill seeing an official Mario game break away from the level design formula Nintendo has insisted on for decades now, but these levels weren't fun to me. Nowadays, with save-states, the NES SMB3 is probably still my favorite of any version, as the All-Stars/Advance version removes everything unique about that game's use of color and art-style, so this version kind of has no use to me, but I appreciate Nintendo seeing that this is still worth bringing over, and I hope they do so for the rest of the Super Mario Advance series. They have their idiosyncrasies, they get weird in a lot of places, the original version will always be there so why not? This is the end of the review now, I can't think of an ending sentence, goodbye.