A short review for a short game, Super Mario Land is more interesting as a historical artifact in being a launch title for that good ol' original Game Boy and being the first portable Mario game than as a fun gameplay experience. The biggest thing that sticks out about it is the wackiness on display that makes it feel like a successor to Super Mario Bros. 2 USA (in fact when I was younger I constantly thought Daisy came from SMB2 rather than SML due to that!), with alien UFOs as stage transportation, flying Moai Statue heads as attacks and Mario having actual shmup sections! It's a kind of playfulness outside the norm, in this case being before the norm was established in 1989, that gives it an endearing quality of its own, and there's some things that would be fun to revisit like the shmups.
The playful creativity is brought down by the game itself, which feels undeniably crunched to fit in with a still burgeoning Game Boy, with extremely simple level design and enemy placement. Combined with the much shortened length from something like Super Mario Bros. 1, Super Mario Land feels more like the start of a game than a complete showing. It isn't helped by some questionable physics and MORE questionable hitbox detection. It's no Castlevania: The Adventure, but difficulty judging sprite hitboxes and with the run button were the main reason I died in an otherwise very easy game. It's very easy to overshoot when running due to Mario's overly tuned acceleration, but Mario's actual air mobility is limited and momentum is barely preserved, so if you try to weave back you're liable to fall like a rock. I also repeatedly ran into the issue of the game not registering my jump input if I tried to jump TOO soon after starting a run, which was annoying.
On the plus side, the game's very generous lives system thanks to a pretty easy minigame means too much game overing isn't an issue. The game's checkpoint system is bizarrely flawed, but it isn't frustrating since it is flawed in the player's favor: Multiple times I died and then the game put me on a checkpoint further in the game, causing me to end up "skipping" small parts. The graphics are super simple, although I kinda dig Mario's sprite along with some like the adorable 8-bit jumping spider, but the soundtrack is actually kinda fire. Pretty bouncy tunes.
Overall, though, Super Mario Land is a mildly enjoyable and obviously flawed look into the past of the series, it's genuinely fascinating to see what Gunpei Yokoi and company thought was critical to keep or not keep in such a limited form of a Mario game. Mushrooms and Goombas? Critical. But fire flowers and how Koopas work? Exchangable. It's super short, an hour or less if you don't game over, so check it out if it looks vaguely interesting and don't sweat it if it doesn't.
The playful creativity is brought down by the game itself, which feels undeniably crunched to fit in with a still burgeoning Game Boy, with extremely simple level design and enemy placement. Combined with the much shortened length from something like Super Mario Bros. 1, Super Mario Land feels more like the start of a game than a complete showing. It isn't helped by some questionable physics and MORE questionable hitbox detection. It's no Castlevania: The Adventure, but difficulty judging sprite hitboxes and with the run button were the main reason I died in an otherwise very easy game. It's very easy to overshoot when running due to Mario's overly tuned acceleration, but Mario's actual air mobility is limited and momentum is barely preserved, so if you try to weave back you're liable to fall like a rock. I also repeatedly ran into the issue of the game not registering my jump input if I tried to jump TOO soon after starting a run, which was annoying.
On the plus side, the game's very generous lives system thanks to a pretty easy minigame means too much game overing isn't an issue. The game's checkpoint system is bizarrely flawed, but it isn't frustrating since it is flawed in the player's favor: Multiple times I died and then the game put me on a checkpoint further in the game, causing me to end up "skipping" small parts. The graphics are super simple, although I kinda dig Mario's sprite along with some like the adorable 8-bit jumping spider, but the soundtrack is actually kinda fire. Pretty bouncy tunes.
Overall, though, Super Mario Land is a mildly enjoyable and obviously flawed look into the past of the series, it's genuinely fascinating to see what Gunpei Yokoi and company thought was critical to keep or not keep in such a limited form of a Mario game. Mushrooms and Goombas? Critical. But fire flowers and how Koopas work? Exchangable. It's super short, an hour or less if you don't game over, so check it out if it looks vaguely interesting and don't sweat it if it doesn't.