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.
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.