Here's a tip: Don't play Super Mario Bros. 3 on a laptop, on a handheld or in its remade "All-Star" iteration. For the ideal experience, grab yourself an awkward, unwieldy controller that's slightly too big for your hands (an Xbox one will do), fire up an emulator with a good scanline filter, and play it on a huge screen in all its chunky 8-bit glory (provided of course you don't happen to have an NES and a CRT TV nearby).

Why? Because then you'll start get a feel for what's so incredible about it: that it's a breathtakingly beautiful, iconic pop art masterpiece in form of a children's toy. Try to imagine the wealth of outlandish schoolyard rumours about hidden secrets in the game, half of which are probably true, and your parents disapprovingly shaking their heads at the colorful flashing images and beep-boop soundscape, breathing down your neck like oversized smoke-puffing turtle dragons, telling you that you have ten more minutes before you really need to get ready for church or whatever, all while you make Mario run, slide and jump for his life, frantically trying to make it to the final stage without a save feature.

Mario 3 is the Sgt. Pepper of my generation, and I say this without any childhood nostalgia. After all, I never experienced the scenario described above (having been a Sega kid who was busy playing Sonic the Hedgehog, the equivalent of listening to the Stones instead).

This is a PSA:

Do NOT play the PSP rerelease of this game.

Play the fan-translated PS1 version of the game instead.

The original version has:

-A fun and experimental semi-automatic battle system that only requires player input to set-up commands, and pause to edit them. This allows for fast action, natural discovery of teamwork fusion attacks, and player experimentation with the card/negotiation system.

-actual challenge that ramps up as you play and makes the player think about their compositions and actions.

-loading screens only during loading saves and loading up the game

-a far superior UI aesthetic and generally more unified vision with regard to visuals, music, and battle voice lines

-is amazing

The PSP version has:

-a butchered version of the combat system that forces the player to repeatedly input the same commands at the start of every turn for no reason whatsoever

-absolutely no challenge, even on hard mode.

-loading before every fight

-slowed down battle animations

-script censorship

-if you see reviews calling this game a slog to play, it's cause they played this one
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I personally played the psp version twice, not knowing at all about these differences. I played the ps1 version once and it was like a whole new game. I don't know how they fucked up the psp version so bad with the combat and balancing, but I've heard the psp version of the sequel is much better (although the fan translation is yet to come out).

The one downside of playing the ps1 version of this game is that the fan translation has a little bit of that old 2000's era language in it in places and can feel like a bit of a relic (uses the word "gay" as a kind of insult for the sake of a translated pun(?) in a few places, among other stuff, but overall wasn't the worst and otherwise felt well-done and accurately localized, the translator is a bit of a legend in the realm of fan-made localizations).

You'll enjoy this wild ride of a story if you like any of the following:
- Total Recall
- Terminator
- Source Code
- Godzilla
- Shutter Island
- Pacific Rim
- Groundhog Day
- The War of the Worlds
- 2001: A Space Odyssey
- Matrix
- Macross
- Mazinger Z
- Evangelion
- Sailor Moon
- Megazone 23
- Steins;Gate
- Remember11
- Virtue's Last Reward
And a shit-ton of other works I haven't played/watched/read that I'm now interested in.