After SUPER MARIO BROS. 2 was essentially nothing more than a nightmare-difficulty levelpack, they took it upon themselves to REALLY go big on this one, and damn. An H-bomb explosion of creativity and ideas blown across an absolutely epic adventure that feels like it has about twenty times the content of its predecessors. To this day, it is dazzling in its scope, but it also suffers from a bit of bloat and hit-or-miss stuff, as anything this big (for the time) must. Not all the new core design choices are good (short stages but a trillion of them, no mid-level checkpoints, weird continuing), but plenty are (world map, inventory, bonus games), and the mechanics from 1 and 2 have been tuned juuuust a little bit to the point where playing is now a breeze, but it still feels so recognizably Mario that you barely notice a change.

It's an eternally top-tier platformer and introduced about 90% of the stuff that we now think of as Mario mainstays, so it's legendary no matter what ... but it also invented the thing where the mushrooms run away from you when they come out of the block, so it's not seeing a perfect score from me, fuck that.