I'm not much of a platformer player, really. I do enjoy them and I do my best with them, but a combination of lack of actual skill at games and a bit of a poor patience and easily frustrated mind make me not the ideal target for them. I've never even touched a Mega Man game, for example. I imagine they'd make me want to tear my head off. This is also why it took me over 20 years to actually beat the first three Mario bros. games, and i'm pretty sure in the case of 2, maybe three and definitely this one, 20 years to even play them. There's a chance that's sacrilegious to some people but that's just my experience. Once i'd actually beaten the first three, and more recently Mario Land as well, I could definitely say I enjoyed them. I mean, 2 a bit less than the others, Land maybe a bit more than the average opinion, but none of them blew me away. I fully get why they were so big, so influential, and still matter to Nintendo and Mario even now, but none of them whisked me away into them fully. None of them felt amazing, not until I played Super Mario World. There's a chance that it's a fondness for the SNES in general as many games i've ended up playing from it (Super Metroid, Earthbound, Link to the Past) have been games i've absolutely adored, but something about this game just clicked for me in a way none of the other Mario games that had been released to this point did. The music is stunning, perhaps better than Land which had been the best of the lot so far soundtrack wise, every track is memorable or just instinctively makes me want to whistle along. The levels are fun and breezy, a perfect mix of challenge and character, the latter of which combined with the world map and locations just felt like the first Mario game to really have a world to it. The power-ups are minimal but excellent, the fire flower has stuck around since the start for a reason and the cape was so fun to play with. The ghost houses are an excellent addition to play with the usual format of standard levels to castles, all of these little things that feel like they inform the series going forward in extremely positive ways. These might be very basic observations, i'm not exactly out here to try and flip the conversation on a 30+ year old game that everyone has heard of, it's just stunning to me that this game connected with me the way it did. I will now have to play every main series Mario game as I was toying with the idea, and this being so excellent has fully tipped the scales in favour of doing so. Super Nintendo wins again.