Coin Companion
In a way, Super Mario 3D Land (2011) exudes as a class act in why historical familiarity of what lineage a recent work is actually building off of is useful context for assessment. What I mean is that Super Mario 3D World (2013, or 2023 depending on port) is clearly a direct continuation on the approach in this one but when I wrote my post on it I ignored the information I hadn't interfaced with to instead draw the point of influences from Super Mario Bros. 3 (1988) which thereby stressed the excess of coins, gambling machines, weak boss engagements, etc.
While I think that the reflection holds water just fine without playing this one, its become a situation where the most frustrating aspects of 3D World become less acceptable. For instance, the Bosses in 3D Land have hazard variations during the fights, flame pits etc. The 7th stage boss actually throws 2 separate boss encounters at the player at the same time. Once we get to 3D World this aspect is removed for seemingly no reason. On the other hand, most of the iterations I applauded 3D World for actually started here. For instance, the rather large post game as well as the 'pity help' Invincibility Leaf are both concepts that were externalized properly in 3D Land. Unfortunately the main takeaway here is it makes the ease of the flat plain boss encounters in 3D World downright unacceptable, you fight every boss in that game 3 separate times and there's nothing to make them more difficult than last time. It's even the same 2 Bowser Jr. kids! They could have literally just self plagiarized the layouts from Land point blank and it would have been more interesting so its frustrating and bizarre that they didn't to the point it makes me depreciate those games remarkably more.
I don't think I'm quite as guilty of malpractice as I make it sound because after pondering it for a while I think the 'bad' naming conventions may be a way for Nintendo to basically launder its own products and create the illusion of the improvement towards some sort of ubermench supergame when in reality they are recycling their old ideas with a new coat of paint. There's something to be said about how not tacking a number on the end actually does manifest them more as art than as disposable products. There's a mildly funny meme that goes 'If sex is so good where is sex 2' but becomes funnier when you recognize this is a format that is only popular in gaming. The sequel to the Iliad (8th Cent. BCE) is not 'Illiad 2' it's The Oddysey. Ditto for Shakespeare, etc. So in that way I think Nintendo and Sega walking away from numerological conventions is a good thing, but we can't pretend that the increase in title jank like New Super Luigi U (2013) operates as anything other than an artifice to confuse potential consumers into the historical lineage because it would unmask that the companies behind it are running out of quickly marketable ideas.
If I timed my word count properly, the Coin Companion should be about finished speaking now so its up to you if you want to loop it or keep it off assuming you didn't turn it off within the first 3 minutes. It's very annoying isn't it? Well, I choose it for the point of accuracy, because its what happens apparently in a Mario title like 3D Land if you take away a score counter and replace it with coins. The hyper inflation of coins is not only grating it also trivializes most of how you engage with the levels. For instance trying to get higher on the pole at the end or do the 5 red coin challenges only reward you with a 1 Up, thereby making them only intrinsically motivated goals because the inflation in play is such that by world 5 you will have raked up so many coins to have somewhere in the ball park of 40 - 60 lives regardless of your skill level. Lives were already perfunctory in Mario games past the point of the Game and Watch to NES era but here they become so inflated as to make almost nothing in the level aside from the exit meaningful. For the record this probably does explain why World reintroduced score but I still hold to the point that the real approach is to use star bits instead with the ability to feed those star lumas for levels. Along with the currently substantiated 3 coins that you pick up so that everything in a level moves towards new unlockable level (hell you even still have a touchpad in both games to point and feed them with). This may seem like a paltry reward, but as Land's own structure shows, unlocking new levels is supposed to be its own reward. Which is fair actually, it worked for Mario Galaxy (2010) so there's no reason in theory it wouldn't work elsewise as long as the player is enjoying the game and wants to see more.
If its not obvious by now, I did not enjoy the game and now that I've hit the post game content I don't want to see more. There's a few reasons for this I haven't mentioned yet. For one, the depth perception for landing jumps is far more awkward, not particularly helped by the fact the camera is pointed mostly down at the player so it makes it hard to see gaps forwards unless you walk. On top of this the main appeal of Land is supposed to be as a way to show off the 3D effects of the 3DS, which to be fair, its not nothing, its a pretty cool effect as long as you line your eyesight up with the device in a perfect perpedicular angle, but the Binoculars that you can stop and look through actively expose the weakness of the technology the moment you move around: if you aren't looking perpedicular the effect is garrishly disorienting. As if youre glasses fell off in the middle of a traffic stop with everything blurring up and looking hideous. More particularly, you can't play as Peach in this game, and shes made a sexist trope as per usual in this one. Worse than usual because in the picture letters between levels shes crossing her eyes a lot. She has so little autonomy in this one it borders on the expectations you'd get for those fetish porn mobile games. It's absurd, they have pink ribbons around the cage and in every cutscene all she yells is 'mario' and all Mario does is his strained wahoos and yipees that made me want to chop out his tongue and cook it as a delicatessen for Bowser.
Peach sexism would be heinous on its own, but it's even worse here because I realized in the course of play as Mario that trying to actually land jumps without a float mechanic to give control in the air is miserable. If you don't have the Tanuki suit on, you're going to fall off and die from an inability to assess how far your limited movement can take you. My guess is that if you aren't playing as Peach in 3D World its almost equally miserable, but at least in that one you can blow up the screen more to a whole TV to get a sense of your jump length and also there's enough camera variation and general spectacle to keep it at bay.
Now that I've bloated the length of this piece to the point only the regulars are going to read I'm going to unveil my true extremism: Peach supremacy. Mario has fallen off since 64, his long jump isn't nearly as good anymore, hes old and weak and unlikable. He should retire. Everything that makes the 3D games good is a sense of control which is why high level 64 play feels so satisfying. In Sunshine he 'crossdresses' via peach's float with the help of F.L.U.D.D. but then abandoned that once he realized the public wouldn't like him for it. Meanwhile he and Bowser maintain a sexist dowry over Peach which she openly flaunted against at the end of Odyssey. In every game where you play as Peach shes far more entertaining and satisfying on both a mechanical and story level. The sections in Paper Mario: Thousand Year Door were way more interesting for instance. Also, she's a go to character to play in Double Dash until you unlock Toadette, because the Heart power is sleeper good. If Nintendo is going to put off their announcements due to the death of the queen, they should just go full monarchist and respect their own queen and free her! I have retroactively decided every Mainline Mario title between Sunshine up to Bowser's Fury is bad if there is no Peach gaming and that every game where you play as Peach clears. I also will now agknowledge every Sunday as the Day of Peach. Now I must write another paragraph to hide this rampant monarchist support from the public in case they decide to just skip to the last paragraph to 'get the jist'.
All in all I think 3D Land exposed to me a latent point that is always worth keeping in mind: Game Companies are constantly borrowing their own ideas and pretending otherwise for the illusion of novelty. It's probably better to check the historicity of what has directly inspired a work before writing a large critique on one game over the others and, to that effect, is a tacit reason why going through a franchise in order of release might be a good idea. Therefore if I ever talk about Zelda or Metroid games you better believe I'm going to try and play them in chronological order so I have enough familiarity to say what has been added and what hasn't. Perhaps ditto with every franchise, we will see though.
In a way, Super Mario 3D Land (2011) exudes as a class act in why historical familiarity of what lineage a recent work is actually building off of is useful context for assessment. What I mean is that Super Mario 3D World (2013, or 2023 depending on port) is clearly a direct continuation on the approach in this one but when I wrote my post on it I ignored the information I hadn't interfaced with to instead draw the point of influences from Super Mario Bros. 3 (1988) which thereby stressed the excess of coins, gambling machines, weak boss engagements, etc.
While I think that the reflection holds water just fine without playing this one, its become a situation where the most frustrating aspects of 3D World become less acceptable. For instance, the Bosses in 3D Land have hazard variations during the fights, flame pits etc. The 7th stage boss actually throws 2 separate boss encounters at the player at the same time. Once we get to 3D World this aspect is removed for seemingly no reason. On the other hand, most of the iterations I applauded 3D World for actually started here. For instance, the rather large post game as well as the 'pity help' Invincibility Leaf are both concepts that were externalized properly in 3D Land. Unfortunately the main takeaway here is it makes the ease of the flat plain boss encounters in 3D World downright unacceptable, you fight every boss in that game 3 separate times and there's nothing to make them more difficult than last time. It's even the same 2 Bowser Jr. kids! They could have literally just self plagiarized the layouts from Land point blank and it would have been more interesting so its frustrating and bizarre that they didn't to the point it makes me depreciate those games remarkably more.
I don't think I'm quite as guilty of malpractice as I make it sound because after pondering it for a while I think the 'bad' naming conventions may be a way for Nintendo to basically launder its own products and create the illusion of the improvement towards some sort of ubermench supergame when in reality they are recycling their old ideas with a new coat of paint. There's something to be said about how not tacking a number on the end actually does manifest them more as art than as disposable products. There's a mildly funny meme that goes 'If sex is so good where is sex 2' but becomes funnier when you recognize this is a format that is only popular in gaming. The sequel to the Iliad (8th Cent. BCE) is not 'Illiad 2' it's The Oddysey. Ditto for Shakespeare, etc. So in that way I think Nintendo and Sega walking away from numerological conventions is a good thing, but we can't pretend that the increase in title jank like New Super Luigi U (2013) operates as anything other than an artifice to confuse potential consumers into the historical lineage because it would unmask that the companies behind it are running out of quickly marketable ideas.
If I timed my word count properly, the Coin Companion should be about finished speaking now so its up to you if you want to loop it or keep it off assuming you didn't turn it off within the first 3 minutes. It's very annoying isn't it? Well, I choose it for the point of accuracy, because its what happens apparently in a Mario title like 3D Land if you take away a score counter and replace it with coins. The hyper inflation of coins is not only grating it also trivializes most of how you engage with the levels. For instance trying to get higher on the pole at the end or do the 5 red coin challenges only reward you with a 1 Up, thereby making them only intrinsically motivated goals because the inflation in play is such that by world 5 you will have raked up so many coins to have somewhere in the ball park of 40 - 60 lives regardless of your skill level. Lives were already perfunctory in Mario games past the point of the Game and Watch to NES era but here they become so inflated as to make almost nothing in the level aside from the exit meaningful. For the record this probably does explain why World reintroduced score but I still hold to the point that the real approach is to use star bits instead with the ability to feed those star lumas for levels. Along with the currently substantiated 3 coins that you pick up so that everything in a level moves towards new unlockable level (hell you even still have a touchpad in both games to point and feed them with). This may seem like a paltry reward, but as Land's own structure shows, unlocking new levels is supposed to be its own reward. Which is fair actually, it worked for Mario Galaxy (2010) so there's no reason in theory it wouldn't work elsewise as long as the player is enjoying the game and wants to see more.
If its not obvious by now, I did not enjoy the game and now that I've hit the post game content I don't want to see more. There's a few reasons for this I haven't mentioned yet. For one, the depth perception for landing jumps is far more awkward, not particularly helped by the fact the camera is pointed mostly down at the player so it makes it hard to see gaps forwards unless you walk. On top of this the main appeal of Land is supposed to be as a way to show off the 3D effects of the 3DS, which to be fair, its not nothing, its a pretty cool effect as long as you line your eyesight up with the device in a perfect perpedicular angle, but the Binoculars that you can stop and look through actively expose the weakness of the technology the moment you move around: if you aren't looking perpedicular the effect is garrishly disorienting. As if youre glasses fell off in the middle of a traffic stop with everything blurring up and looking hideous. More particularly, you can't play as Peach in this game, and shes made a sexist trope as per usual in this one. Worse than usual because in the picture letters between levels shes crossing her eyes a lot. She has so little autonomy in this one it borders on the expectations you'd get for those fetish porn mobile games. It's absurd, they have pink ribbons around the cage and in every cutscene all she yells is 'mario' and all Mario does is his strained wahoos and yipees that made me want to chop out his tongue and cook it as a delicatessen for Bowser.
Peach sexism would be heinous on its own, but it's even worse here because I realized in the course of play as Mario that trying to actually land jumps without a float mechanic to give control in the air is miserable. If you don't have the Tanuki suit on, you're going to fall off and die from an inability to assess how far your limited movement can take you. My guess is that if you aren't playing as Peach in 3D World its almost equally miserable, but at least in that one you can blow up the screen more to a whole TV to get a sense of your jump length and also there's enough camera variation and general spectacle to keep it at bay.
Now that I've bloated the length of this piece to the point only the regulars are going to read I'm going to unveil my true extremism: Peach supremacy. Mario has fallen off since 64, his long jump isn't nearly as good anymore, hes old and weak and unlikable. He should retire. Everything that makes the 3D games good is a sense of control which is why high level 64 play feels so satisfying. In Sunshine he 'crossdresses' via peach's float with the help of F.L.U.D.D. but then abandoned that once he realized the public wouldn't like him for it. Meanwhile he and Bowser maintain a sexist dowry over Peach which she openly flaunted against at the end of Odyssey. In every game where you play as Peach shes far more entertaining and satisfying on both a mechanical and story level. The sections in Paper Mario: Thousand Year Door were way more interesting for instance. Also, she's a go to character to play in Double Dash until you unlock Toadette, because the Heart power is sleeper good. If Nintendo is going to put off their announcements due to the death of the queen, they should just go full monarchist and respect their own queen and free her! I have retroactively decided every Mainline Mario title between Sunshine up to Bowser's Fury is bad if there is no Peach gaming and that every game where you play as Peach clears. I also will now agknowledge every Sunday as the Day of Peach. Now I must write another paragraph to hide this rampant monarchist support from the public in case they decide to just skip to the last paragraph to 'get the jist'.
All in all I think 3D Land exposed to me a latent point that is always worth keeping in mind: Game Companies are constantly borrowing their own ideas and pretending otherwise for the illusion of novelty. It's probably better to check the historicity of what has directly inspired a work before writing a large critique on one game over the others and, to that effect, is a tacit reason why going through a franchise in order of release might be a good idea. Therefore if I ever talk about Zelda or Metroid games you better believe I'm going to try and play them in chronological order so I have enough familiarity to say what has been added and what hasn't. Perhaps ditto with every franchise, we will see though.
Erato_Heti
1 year ago