Usually when people talk about the Nintendo company being out of touch they are usually referring to the fact they keep shutting down mod creations and stopping smash melee online. While I think this is a fair complaint, I think people often hold a large degree of amnesia or ignorance when they reapply that to their game design and reiteration of popular IPs.

For example the reason they appear out of touch for the most part is actually because they want to make money. Making money may be funtionally out of touch but it's only because those interests don't rely in making the most stellar experience anyway. Puppeteering and using an IP character as abundantly as the mario characters is something that would only ever be accepted in gaming spaces where nostalgia is not just seen as acceptable but actually necessary to the identity of gaming. There's far less skepticism here than say, Avatar 2, on a larger level. The idea that one person can play metroid dread when another older man walks into the room smiles and boisters 'I remember when I played Metroid as a kid' is a fundamental fantasy to gaming's apocrypha. However it doesn't take much to recognize that usually when this same IP overdose is done in other media like Films and Anime its not always so warmly recieved or usually lasts as long. For example in anime you have similar reference points like Lupin or Astroboy, but the Astroboy anime only had 1 newer series after its long TV run and, while Lupin is gigantic, nothing about Lupin is particularly obsessed with coasting on its own tropes and aesthetic. There's lighter titles about ghibli made castle exploration like "The Castle of Cagliostro". And then more recently the darker and more sensual "The Woman Called Fujiko Mine" which is a stylized smokey tone. Then you've got "Goemon's Blood Spray" which is an openly bloody and nasty samurai film. Meanwhile mario has a bit of whismy going on on the side with the paper mario series where there's a bit more engagement with mario as a story and the relatively melancholic Mario Galaxy, but really by all other purposes mario doesn't really change its aesthetic, design choices, or tone much from game to game. Hell the closest we have to something actually haunting and dark is the Mad Father parody game (Mario) the Music Box which as you can probably guess, is a fan game. The reason for this is not actually that complex, the distribution of what is allowed with the IP is held much tighter. Lupin gets a much more involved treatment because they allow Lupin's world to fulfill any niche by giving it to any writer and director that has an interesting idea what to do with it, similar to say how the Batman comic work. You let the IP be wielded by anybody with an idea. Nintendo likes to keep a much more closed door approach, much to the series detriment. This is most clearly seen by the fact that the casting for the new mario movie is as 'safe' as possible. This is because Nintendo is both uninterested as a company in extending that hand, but also is probably the result of having less overall control of the market as they would like to pull off that more hands off treatment especially since game production can actually go wrong via excess glitches etc., while the worst that can happen with comic book production is that the end result just looks kinda ugly.

The best example of them coasting on their nostalgia to me is the New Super Mario Bros. series, which through contrast with this game you see exactly why. All the New Super Mario Bros. games look and play the exact same. Have the same meaningless outdated 'score' and 'timers' that call back to the very first games in the series, and the only marked improvement besides graphics over Super Mario World, and Super Mario Bros. 1 and 3 is that you can play with several people at once, which due to the fixed camera on 1 player just doesn't work as anything other than an extended novelty joke.

The New Super Mario Bros. series performs this blandness most through its slightly more 'jumpy' soundtrack, where on certain beats all the enemies on screen will do a small dance animation at the screen. But for me at least this slightly more jazzed version of the songs just leaves me feeling hollow. Part of the function of nostalgia is that criticizing these decisions as bland and pathetic at all borders on immature, because the games are 'made for kids' and supposed to just be light and fun. However the frustrating design of a lot of the levels in New Super Mario Bros Wii makes me think that is a weak reposte, since unlike those earlier games which are mostly able to be progressed by younger people, this game has a remarkably higher level of difficulty with large lava pits, a lot of run and jump sections, and vertical scroll sections with a bunch of obstacles involved. New Super Mario Bros. is just a gaudy coat of paint where its not entirely a remake of a game, but exists in this limbo state of a reiterative experience to that 2D Mario nostalgia because look, you can still find canons that warp you out of the world, isn't that cool?

This is what I like about Super Mario Flashback, a fangame made with respect to all the bright and light 2D mario games and trying to cultivate on their various strengths while entering in something new. For example the wall jumps from "New" are here but the triple jumps from it, and those spin jumps are removed. Both decisions lead to cleaner platforming as those movement options were usually way too circumstantial to use properly anyway. SMF also makes some other compelling design arguments: What if instead of a timer and lives, we just replace it with an attack score feature that processes how many coins you picked up and how quickly you defeated the the level? Moving the gameplay closer to something like the frantic and optional improvement metrics of Bayonetta or Sonic Adventure. This reprocessing of coins and the elimination of the lives system actually just makes Nintendo who still insists on these outdated features look relatively embarrassing and out of touch in a design sense. Nobody has thought positively about a life system since the early 2000s, seeing it usually as an irritation to play that forces you to repeat sections you already know. We all pretty fundamentally know this, and yet despite Nintendo segmenting levels with checkpoints they still haven't found the courage to move beyond life systems. After all it would reinforce how absolutely meaningless picking up coins actually is. Since the detriment to losing all your lives has never been even remotely harsh enough to encourage that exploration.

Super Mario Flashback adding this score attack feature that grades you at the end for how well you did, thereby justifying the score and coins would have been enough, but matter of factly Flashback has one other trick up its sleeve to distinguish itself: An absolutely baller soundtrack. The reinterpretation of the Overworld song slots itself nicely into as a synthed out groovy remix of the original, using new chord progressions as specific moments to make it seem like an improv jazzfunk reinterpretation rather than simply a faithful remix. The result is something that sounds more like Persona music than strictly Mario music which works much better for its purposes. This is the first time my ears perked up when hearing a Mario song in years because, I'm sorry Odyssey's orchestral mess did nothing for me.

Much like New Super Mario Bros., Mario is quiet here besides letting out a small yelp when he gets hit. Mario has always been significantly more quiet in the 2D games, for the legitimate game design reason that in 3D those hoops and hollers serve a purpose of orienting and being aware of your jumps and decisions more clearly by using a mix of aural echolocation in that space and by distinguishing those aural noises from the surrounding sound effects nessecary for giving your player character even better of a hint whats going on. 2D Space doesn't need this and has never needed this. So in New, the biggest issue was that there was still constantly other noises, coins, lava, a loud soundtrack etc. it was hard to hear your character make the sounds nessecary for 2D control coordination. SMF makes sure to turn those taps and pats way up, which is satisfying as hell.

This shows that nostalgia is ok if its reinterpreted in ways that transform beyond the limitations of the original design expectations into something that merges older tropes with new experiments in form. Also the fact that Mario Flashback does away with the lives system means that it makes it more widely playable to more people by design, but it does lie slightly on the more involved side of player performance, for example having to time and weight a pulley platform, or jump on several flying Koopa's in succession along with its slightly longer level length.

The only reason its not full marks is not because I fundamentally hate mario game (though I don't like Mario as a main character, I can save that grievance for another time), but instead due to two factors: There's no 'boss' or castle to finish the experience off, which is a shame. Also, there's some choice sections in the secret level that due to the mechanics of portal use just read as frustrating. One bit which has no other obstacles is just a 'memorize the order' section that didn't need to exist, and 'guess' based jumping sections with falling goombas. This isn't a deal breaker or anything, but it reeks of Mario Maker style design choices that bring down an otherwise stellar fan game.

One other sidenote on movement is that Mario gets a 'boost run' after a bit, but I'm not really a fan of that mostly because there's really no way for me to know when the boost is going to hit besides getting really used to the timing, some sort of visual indicator for when he goes blastoff mode would have been nice. I imagine if the game was a lot longer I would just get used to it in the same way you learn drift boost timing in a Kart game, but that's my note on that.

Overall this game confirmed a suspicion I was holding on for a while, which is that Mario fangames and overhaul mods are doing far and away more interesting and inviting things with the Mario IP than Nintendo, and in just the way that SMF enhanced that for me to give these fanworks more attention, it also made me fully come to recognize just how flavorless the last 10 years of Nintendo from a game design perspective really have been.