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Rating: ★★⯪☆☆

Playtime: 23 Hours, 39 Minutes

Played on: Nintendo 3DS

Duration: 1/2/2021 - 7/17/2025

TLDR

A good but gimped stage builder attached to a mid collection of levels that range from unique, to boring, to frustrating, with frustrating but unique challenges. The game doesn't serve much of a purpose without the deprecated online functionality and lives in the shadow of its predecessor and sequel.

REVIEW

So this game has effectively two perspectives to analyze from: you've got the actual creation tools, y'know the stage builder and all, and you've got the experience of the 'Super Mario Challenge', which is this game's single player campaign mode. There are a lot of people who would get a game like this exclusively for the creation side, and there's people who would get it exclusively for the single player side. I fall in both of these camps, and I attempted to explore both of them for this retrospective, so I'll evaluate both separately and come together at the end to get an overall feel for the game.

Disclaimer: since the Nintendo 3DS and WiiU servers are offline, and have been offline for some time, the online aspects of this game will not be evaluated. I was able to run the pretendo network server to attempt playing the 100 Mario challenge, but the stages are not representative of the kind of stages that you would have gotten when playing if this game still had its official servers, and therefore I feel it's the most fair to look at this game from the perspective of what it would play like if you bought it and popped it into an unmodded system today.

THE BUILDING MODE

Super Mario Maker for 3DS | Nintendo

Super Mario Maker for 3DS is a pretty one for one port of the WiiU counterpart. Every feature in the editor is here, and plays identically. This means that overall, it's a pretty darn good course builder, with a ton of features and polish, unique interactions between game mechanics, and a lot of uniqueness. If you've ever played this game you know exactly what I'm talking about. Slap wings onto any enemy that you'd like to change the way they move, shake various items to change their state and the way that you can interact with them (green to red Koopa Troopas for instance), and switch between 4 different game themes each with 8 different level aesthetics, looking either identical or improved from how they originally looked (and with certain themes like the airship backported to the original Super Mario Bros.) It's a beautifully polished experience overall, and it's one of those things where it's hard to express the true level of creativity and freedom that you have with a tool like this. As a kid, I spent hours and hours designing levels in the WiiU version, and I relived a bit of that here making a few test levels with the mechanics and subjecting my wife to playing them.

That's not to say that I'm without my gripes here - far from it. It maintains all of the *issues* that the WiiU version has, such as certain odd limitations like the terrain at the start and end not merging with the terrain in the middle, the undo option only going back by one edit, and the constant shaking of items taking a while if you have bulk actions to do. I also would have liked to see a tool that allows you to draw a rectangle full of any solid tile to reduce the time spent just filling terrain in. A few new issues also crop up with the 3DS version, such as the super, SUPER crunched editing UI. Because of the screen's small resolution, the menu takes up a way bigger chunk of the screen and it makes the entire experience of building levels feel claustrophobic. You were also never given the option to upload your courses to Course World, even when the servers worked on the 3DS, you could only share them using Streetpass (which isn't a bad feature but shouldn't have been the only way to do this)

So overall, the course builder is full featured and robust, but with a few odd quirks here or there, and some small flaws that feel nearly dealbreaking. It's a complicated scenario trying to evaluate this here for sure, but overall, especially if I was a kid, I think I'd be more than happy with what's on offer here.

THE SUPER MARIO CHALLENGE

Super Mario Maker for 3DS | Nintendo

The Super Mario Challenge is the 3DS version's defining feature, a full single player campaign of Mario Maker stages designed by Nintendo, with two optional bonus missions each. This seems like a great value add for the game to offset some of the missing features of the WiiU version. Unfortunately, I just really don't think the experience here is worth too much.

Firstly, I cannot overstate how much I hated to mission medals. The NSMB series figured this out a long time ago - 2D Mario optional content is star coins or some variation thereof. It works so well for those games, it incentivizes you to explore a bit more in the stages, interact with their gimmick and all, but they are not particularly difficult or punishing. In this game, you instead get the opportunity to earn two medals for doing missions in stages that can be anything from "collect all coins in the stage" to "defeat all enemies in the stage" and "beat the stage without touching the ground", plus all sorts of bits and bobs in between. At first thought, this might sound really fun actually, and in a handful of cases it is. I mentioned the "beat the stage without touching the ground" medal earlier - and I had a ton of fun with that one and it was a great challenge. However, many of these end up becoming puzzles with the game mechanics (which I suppose make it feel more like a fan-made Mario Maker stage fwiw) that are nearly impossible to figure out without some sort of guide. In my opinion, that's just not super fun, and in a lot of cases where this doesn't happen, the mission is just bonkers hard for no apparent reason instead. Many of these ended up taking an hour a piece to unlock, and I didn't feel like I gained too much from doing it. Also - the second medal's challenge doesn't reveal itself until you've already obtained the first one, almost always forcing two run throughs of each stage (thankfully though if you do earn the second one incidentally it will still unlock on your first run which happened a few times to me).

The level design on these is also just... not always great. Now, there's a lot that are solid and feel Nintendo designed, but there's a ton here that feel more like a fan-made Mario Maker course, lots of mazes, puzzles, obtuse jumps and super long/short stages sprinkled in throughout the mix. It's just not a cohesive experience.

There's also NINETEEN WORLDS of this, with some worlds having 4 stages, BUT SOME HAVING EIGHT. There's just way too much of this here and it isn't cohesive in the slightest. They try and theme the courses in relation to the course maker items you just unlocked (more on that in a bit), but this is inconsistent and seems half-done. No attempt at cohesion or theming is made here, no world map, nothing to tie it together, it's just a bunch of courses plopped in a list, and most of them aren't great.

Only after you clear ALL ONE HUNDRED courses do you unlock the final course building elements. I don't remember how they get unlocked in the WiiU version, but this feels overly drawn out, especially if you're a kid and just want a chance to build stages with everything from the get-go. I'd rather have seen unique courses focusing on each element you can unlock directly tied to each element as an OPTIONAL tutorial for how to use that item in the menu.

BOTH

Super Mario Maker for 3DS | Nintendo

As for the things that both the course maker and Super Mario Challenge share, the music is reused but good, and the visuals are nicely done with the exception of NSMBU's art style just looking terrible (in general but in this case specifically) on the 3DS. New Super Mario Bros. 2 was RIGHT THERE ON THE 3DS and looked so much better. The game controls like a dream if nothing else, and again is very technically solid all around which both parts share, so it's not an awful package by any means.

It's a tough recommendation - I'm sure the campaign in Super Mario Maker 2 is much better, and I definitely know the builder in WiiU is stronger, but I can image the builder in 2 is weaker due to the lack of a stylus-based touch screen. For a certain kind of person, this may be the ideal Mario Maker experience, but it's a hard sell for a game that is outclassed in every way by the other games in the franchise. Overall, I'd say it's impressive and well done, but just doesn't really warrant playing.

Until next time - Mikey