This is one of those games that is nearly perfect in every way. Throughout the entire playtime of the game I was constantly shocked, impressed, and surprised at all of the ways that this game innovated on the standard Mario formula to create something truly unique.

The visuals and audio quality are top notch, finally moving past the bland NSMB style into something more lively and animated, leaning more into its two dimensional cartoon roots. Expressive animations and facial expressions, a slick, fun UI, and beautiful environment designs and backgrounds make this game have one of the most well executed visual styles I have ever seen in a video game. The music as well is much of what you'd expect, but it uses a different suite of instruments than any game before to evolve Mario's sound to his new location.

I thought the unique Wonder Flower effects for many levels were a welcome way to shake up the formula, and many could have entire worlds of a game dedicated to expanding on their concepts. Similarly, the badges (although being more hit or miss), brought tons of depth to the gameplay, and could similarly carry an entire segment of a game on their backs alone. Levels are well paced, perfectly designed for multiplayer and single player, and almost all of them left me feeling good after playing them.

The post-game levels did get a bit challenging for my taste, especially the last of the bunch, taking me around 2 hours to finally nail, but I know this is a level of challenge many people enjoy. The rest of the game had perfect levels of difficulty in my opinion, even the much more challenging special world stages felt perfectly paced.

Expanding the playable character cast was also an amazing addition, and the newly introduced power-ups shake up the monotony of the previous NSMB games. I loved that when other players were Yoshis that you could ride on their back, and that Nabbit is available as an easy mode option, while having enough characters to not force one player to have to play easy mode (like New Super Luigi U, or NSMBU Deluxe).

Gosh, what else to say about this game? Other than play it, of course. This game is genuinely near perfect, and everything about it makes me smile, it's such a good-time and well designed game all around. Full marks.

This is one of the most perfectly designed games of all time. Visuals, soundtrack, gameplay design, everything is perfect. If you haven't played this game before, please rectify your mistake.

The gameplay loop is extremely addicting and does a great job of having each tool you get helping to counter a new threat. The game behaves logically, and mostly without any reading necessary due to the design of each of the plants implying what they do.

I could talk about the creativity behind this concept, but I believe it is evident. The premise is simple but captivating, the character designs and environment designs are perfect, and the soundtrack is among the best in all of gaming.

Post-game, this has some of the most compelling content I could possibly imagine. The mini-games that are so fun and entertaining that I could play a whole game full of them, and the puzzle/survival modes extend the life even further in ways that aren't simply replaying the adventure mode.

Truly, a masterclass in game design, and something that I wish the modern studio that holds PopCap's name could ever hope to replicate. Do yourself a favor and play this game if you haven't already.

This game has me very mixed on how I feel about it, and it's largely down to how difficult it was to get the 100% completion vs. how difficult it was to beat the game.

On its own, this game has great visuals, plays like a dream, has fun character archetypes, well balanced characters, and lots of fun concepts throughout. This game had a lot of heart put into it and I respect it a great deal. Some of the fights felt overwhelmingly challenging compared to other parts of the game, but that was limited to one or two encounters overall.

The real issue with this game for me comes down to some of the requirements in game to get 100%. Some of the levels have extremely low "par" turn counts to get the perfect rating, leading to hours of restarting levels and having to use guides to figure out how to begin with not getting my team wiped in one turn. The post-game ultimate challenges were all pains in the neck, every last one of them, and it made going for the last 10% of completion take nearly the length of the rest of the game.

If you plan on just playing the story and a few post-game things, then this score should be read as much higher, likely an 8, but if you're going for 100%, just know you'll be in for a good bit of tedium on top of what is ultimately still quite a good game.