It's picross. That's the long and the short of it.

The Mario theming didn't seem to play into it very much, I did 5 of Mario's levels and I don't think any of the pictures were Mario-related.

I do think there could be some quality of life things, like when you've cleared a row it could auto-mark the rest as X and highlight the letters in red so you didn't need to do that yourself every single time because that just slows it down for me. Obviously that wouldn't work in the Wario stages, but I think it'd be fine for the Mario ones.

My plan is to hopefully complete this slowly over time because trying to play it as a normal games gets too repetitive.