Game Review: Super Mario Land
2020-May-11, Monday 14:44![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
dorchadas
People talk online about how Super Mario Bros. 2 took the Mario series in a bizarre direction after the template set in Super Mario Bros. before Nintendo brought it back in Super Mario Bros. 3, but they don't really talk about how things immediately went sideways again. After Super Mario Bros. 3 had fireballs and stomping on enemies again and got rid of the life bar, Super Mario Land made things weird again. Superballs instead of fireballs? Exploding koopanokobons? Side-scrolling shooter stages? "Princess Daisy"? What is happening?
What is happening is that since this was a Game Boy game, it was worked on by Yokoi Gunpei instead of Miyamoto Shigeru, so Super Mario Land is a window into an alternate world where the team that designed Metroid and Game & Watch was the originator of the world's most famous video game character. If that had happened, maybe Mario would have starred in a series of best-selling danmaku games? Maybe the traditional Mario stage would have been a riff off a real-world location rather than being totally fantastical. Maybe Miyamoto would have designed Metroid.
A world as different from our own as Sarasaland is from the Mushroom Kingdom.
Click click boom.
Back in my review of Trip World, I wrote about how great the graphics were and how when I think of Game Boy games, I think of a much more minimalist design like Super Mario Land. And honestly, part of my impetus for playing through this game was seeing an article about a fan-made SNES remake of Super Mario Land, thinking about playing through that, and then realizing that I wouldn't appreciate the difference unless I played through the original game. Metroid: Zero Mission was great because I beat the original Metroid multiple times and knew what all the differences were, and without that point of reference, SNES Super Mario Land wouldn't have hit me at all. So, I went back to the beginning.
My conclusion is that Super Mario Land is very weird.
The developers did a great job of fitting Mario onto the screen and leaving enough room to have platforming action without feeling cramped--there's no Metroid II giant sprite problems here--but the sprite redesign for most of the enemies makes them look like they come from an alternate universe. Goombas are tiny blobs, their eyes barely visible as they shuffle along. Koopas are mostly head and explode when stomped on rather than their shells careening along the ground. Piranha plants are thin, more like carnivorous lilies than the chubby Venus fly traps of the previous game. The backgrounds are mostly clean lines, either black or white, with a bit of grey but no shading. And there are no fireballs.
I keep bringing it up because it's probably the biggest "you're not in the Mushroom Kingdom anymore" moment in Super Mario Land. Mario picks up a fire flower, you press the B button, and the "fireball" flies out, bounces off the ground, and shoots off into the sky. On an interior level like World 1-3, the superball bounces repeatedly off the walls and ceiling before finally vanishing. It can collect coins. It can kill bosses. If it weren't so hard to control and had a fun sound like the "pwut" sound fireballs make, I might like it more than fire flowers. There are some interesting physics puzzles you could make with a bouncing superball hitting switches or collecting certain coins.
Jiangshi, that classic Mario enemy.
Beyond the mutated goombas and koopas, most of the enemies are totally new to the Mario series and, what's more, they never appear again. The new enemies introduced in SMB2, the shyguys and ninji and Birdo, reappeared in later Mario games and became part of the greater Mario universe, such as it is. I don't think that anything that was introduced in this game ever showed up again. The jiangshi--called pyonpi, from the onomonopoeia for jumping (pyonpyon) and the Japanese pronunciation of jiangshi, kyonshī--certainly never make another appearance, and most of the unique-to-Super Mario Land enemies also suffer the same fate. There are winged and running moai heads in the Easter Island-themed Easton Kingdom, all the jumping fish are fish skeletons, there are robots who throw their heads at Mario in the oceanic Muda Kingdom, and that's ignoring all of the enemies that appear in the side-scrolling shooter stages. The overall atmosphere for me was just confusion, since I had no way of using my previous experience of Mario games to predict what was going to happen. This does fit the pattern of Mario games playing it straight, getting weird, and then going back to form, as the series would do after this game with Super Mario World, but it was still jarring.
The most jarring part was the controls, though. I'm used to a little bit of momentum on Mario, where he'll continue moving horizontally after the height of his jump, but Super Mario Land doesn't have that. Even the mushrooms, when they burst out of their boxes, arc through the air and then fall straight down rather than moving to the side, and there were multiple jumps I missed and then died because Mario was just a little short of the platform I was aiming toward. The falling blocks fell almost as soon as I stepped on them, so I kept feeling like the jump button wasn't being responsive when the solution was actually to press it the instant that I landed. Fortunately, almost all falling platforms were only used to reach bonus stages, so I didn't run into a situation where I fell into a pit over and over due to bad timing. Fortunately.
The music is great, though. The themes don't sound anything like other Mario music, with even the star invincibility theme being replaced by the Can Can, but it has its own charm. The Muda Kingdom theme especially is a standout. The music was done by Tanaka Hirokazu, composer of the Metroid OST, instead of Kondō Kōji, and it just adds to the otherworldy aura. But in a good way. If the rest of the game were less janky and jarring and more like the Muda Kingdom Theme, I would have liked the game better.
Ikarkoopa.
Amongst all these oddities, the strangest part was definitely the side-scrolling shooter stages. Mario gets into a submarine or a plane, fires missiles at enemies, and engages bosses in a duel. The final battle against Tatanga, the alien who kidnapped Daisy and started the whole mess, is a Life Force-style aerial dogfight, but without powerups or anything interesting other than spamming the B button. At least the on-foot battles require dodging the boss to get to the button behind them, like the original Super Mario Bros.
I'm sure I would have liked this game more if I had a Game Boy back in the day, but playing it now was a bit jarring. I wonder if the SNES remake edits the jump physics to be more like the other Mario games, because that was my major problem with Super Mario Land. The reason Mario games are so good is because they're just fun to control. The original Super Mario Bros. proved that scrolling platformers could be responsive and fun, Super Mario 64 proved that 3D platformers weren't always garbage, and Super Mario Galaxy justified the WiiMote. Super Mario Land doesn't have that same elegance, and it's much poorer for it.
I do wish the Muda Kingdom would come back, though.
What is happening is that since this was a Game Boy game, it was worked on by Yokoi Gunpei instead of Miyamoto Shigeru, so Super Mario Land is a window into an alternate world where the team that designed Metroid and Game & Watch was the originator of the world's most famous video game character. If that had happened, maybe Mario would have starred in a series of best-selling danmaku games? Maybe the traditional Mario stage would have been a riff off a real-world location rather than being totally fantastical. Maybe Miyamoto would have designed Metroid.
A world as different from our own as Sarasaland is from the Mushroom Kingdom.
Click click boom.
Back in my review of Trip World, I wrote about how great the graphics were and how when I think of Game Boy games, I think of a much more minimalist design like Super Mario Land. And honestly, part of my impetus for playing through this game was seeing an article about a fan-made SNES remake of Super Mario Land, thinking about playing through that, and then realizing that I wouldn't appreciate the difference unless I played through the original game. Metroid: Zero Mission was great because I beat the original Metroid multiple times and knew what all the differences were, and without that point of reference, SNES Super Mario Land wouldn't have hit me at all. So, I went back to the beginning.
My conclusion is that Super Mario Land is very weird.
The developers did a great job of fitting Mario onto the screen and leaving enough room to have platforming action without feeling cramped--there's no Metroid II giant sprite problems here--but the sprite redesign for most of the enemies makes them look like they come from an alternate universe. Goombas are tiny blobs, their eyes barely visible as they shuffle along. Koopas are mostly head and explode when stomped on rather than their shells careening along the ground. Piranha plants are thin, more like carnivorous lilies than the chubby Venus fly traps of the previous game. The backgrounds are mostly clean lines, either black or white, with a bit of grey but no shading. And there are no fireballs.
I keep bringing it up because it's probably the biggest "you're not in the Mushroom Kingdom anymore" moment in Super Mario Land. Mario picks up a fire flower, you press the B button, and the "fireball" flies out, bounces off the ground, and shoots off into the sky. On an interior level like World 1-3, the superball bounces repeatedly off the walls and ceiling before finally vanishing. It can collect coins. It can kill bosses. If it weren't so hard to control and had a fun sound like the "pwut" sound fireballs make, I might like it more than fire flowers. There are some interesting physics puzzles you could make with a bouncing superball hitting switches or collecting certain coins.
Jiangshi, that classic Mario enemy.
Beyond the mutated goombas and koopas, most of the enemies are totally new to the Mario series and, what's more, they never appear again. The new enemies introduced in SMB2, the shyguys and ninji and Birdo, reappeared in later Mario games and became part of the greater Mario universe, such as it is. I don't think that anything that was introduced in this game ever showed up again. The jiangshi--called pyonpi, from the onomonopoeia for jumping (pyonpyon) and the Japanese pronunciation of jiangshi, kyonshī--certainly never make another appearance, and most of the unique-to-Super Mario Land enemies also suffer the same fate. There are winged and running moai heads in the Easter Island-themed Easton Kingdom, all the jumping fish are fish skeletons, there are robots who throw their heads at Mario in the oceanic Muda Kingdom, and that's ignoring all of the enemies that appear in the side-scrolling shooter stages. The overall atmosphere for me was just confusion, since I had no way of using my previous experience of Mario games to predict what was going to happen. This does fit the pattern of Mario games playing it straight, getting weird, and then going back to form, as the series would do after this game with Super Mario World, but it was still jarring.
The most jarring part was the controls, though. I'm used to a little bit of momentum on Mario, where he'll continue moving horizontally after the height of his jump, but Super Mario Land doesn't have that. Even the mushrooms, when they burst out of their boxes, arc through the air and then fall straight down rather than moving to the side, and there were multiple jumps I missed and then died because Mario was just a little short of the platform I was aiming toward. The falling blocks fell almost as soon as I stepped on them, so I kept feeling like the jump button wasn't being responsive when the solution was actually to press it the instant that I landed. Fortunately, almost all falling platforms were only used to reach bonus stages, so I didn't run into a situation where I fell into a pit over and over due to bad timing. Fortunately.
The music is great, though. The themes don't sound anything like other Mario music, with even the star invincibility theme being replaced by the Can Can, but it has its own charm. The Muda Kingdom theme especially is a standout. The music was done by Tanaka Hirokazu, composer of the Metroid OST, instead of Kondō Kōji, and it just adds to the otherworldy aura. But in a good way. If the rest of the game were less janky and jarring and more like the Muda Kingdom Theme, I would have liked the game better.
Ikarkoopa.
Amongst all these oddities, the strangest part was definitely the side-scrolling shooter stages. Mario gets into a submarine or a plane, fires missiles at enemies, and engages bosses in a duel. The final battle against Tatanga, the alien who kidnapped Daisy and started the whole mess, is a Life Force-style aerial dogfight, but without powerups or anything interesting other than spamming the B button. At least the on-foot battles require dodging the boss to get to the button behind them, like the original Super Mario Bros.
I'm sure I would have liked this game more if I had a Game Boy back in the day, but playing it now was a bit jarring. I wonder if the SNES remake edits the jump physics to be more like the other Mario games, because that was my major problem with Super Mario Land. The reason Mario games are so good is because they're just fun to control. The original Super Mario Bros. proved that scrolling platformers could be responsive and fun, Super Mario 64 proved that 3D platformers weren't always garbage, and Super Mario Galaxy justified the WiiMote. Super Mario Land doesn't have that same elegance, and it's much poorer for it.
I do wish the Muda Kingdom would come back, though.
no subject
Date: 2020-May-11, Monday 23:59 (UTC)The "superball" powerup is in mario maker 2, and people do use it to set up puzzles where you have to bounce it around to kill monsters or collect items. Here's a video showing some of the interactions between superball and other mario objects in Mario Maker 2.
Fun things about the superball powerup in mario maker 2: it turns mario black greyscale, and it changes the music. :)
no subject
Date: 2020-May-12, Tuesday 15:06 (UTC)I especially liked how the Birabuto Theme remix they use was just a little off. That's kind of how I felt playing this game, sometimes.