The simplest trope in the save-the-princess type of video gaming may be the implied final boss battle followed the real final boss battle, followed closely by some half-assed cliffhanger that pretends to provide meaning to an additional playthrough of the first game. Super Mario 3D Land, one of the finest holistically designed game titles I've ever played, baits you into thinking that's where it is headed. Yes, there's a princess-in-another-castle moment at the end. However it opens up into the real game, one honoring the task, creativity and joy for which the series is indeed loved.
By now you've likely heard that the first eight worlds of Super Mario 3D Land are not, in fact, the whole game. Let's proceed and confirm this. They still perform a good job of maintaining that illusion, as a result of delightful layouts that produce the best use of the 3DS's unique capabilities of any game to date released. Seamless camera rotations take you from sidescrolling elevation to isometric, top-down and traditional third-person platformer perspectives, all for purposeful reasons. Gatekeeping requirements, like getting a certain number of star coins before unlocking boss battles or bonus levels, provide a reasonable heft to the very first tour of duty, that will be saving Peach, of course.
It's because alleged final stage with Bowser, when the crutch of the Super Tanooki suit goes missing, that Super Mario 3D Land game reveals its nature. The initial eight worlds are not really much pandering to weaker players as they are training up and encouraging them, because another eight, where you will even play as Luigi, are borne of a demanding, tough love that can not be completed with such assistance, and is likely to be satisfying, in their own way, to those who do on the own.
First, about the Super Tanooki suit.This is exactly what most drives the early misunderstanding of Super Mario 3D Land as an easy game. Die enough in an even and you get a power-up box that offers you a shining, permanently invulnerable Tanooki suit, with tail-attack and air-walking, to hand-hold Mario to the finish of the round. You can still die with it by falling into lava or even a bottomless pit. Accomplish that enough and you will be offered some wings that fly you to the flagpole ending the round.
For small children, its utility is self-evident. For older gamers, its appearance is enough to make Super Mario 3D Land feel condescending to them. I saw it as a hand up to someone who had found out the jumping puzzle but lacked the dexterity to execute it, and just wanted to get on with the show. I'll confess to using Super Tanooki on a few boss battles, which is a shame to admit considering how repetitive many are.
Yet looking back, I feel like the game's opening act was not necessarily a training round, but an apprenticeship showing me what the true Super Mario Bros. would require in a 3D environment. You'll need to know how to wall-jump, bounce high off tightropes and springboards, swim, float and hop off an airborne enemy to the safety of the following platform. None of the moves are unique to longtime players of the series, but employing them in Super Mario 3D Land takes a bit of touch. The analog pad overcorrects a little too much for a few directional jumps (especially those from a standing position within an isometric view). A shadow underneath Mario (or silhouette of him if he's behind a wall) helps you line up your landing point.
Though all worlds are ostensibly made to be navigable by a standard-size Mario (unless the checkpoint is deliberately pointing you to a powerup) some are inordinately simpler if you've acquired a Tankooki suit or fire flower from a previous stage. In some cases (especially where I'm stuck now), only their capabilities can quickly bridge a specialized jump or sequence of foes placed right at the edge of one.
You can acquire these things by way of a visit to at least one of Toad's houses scattered through the entire first eight worlds. However, you're allowed only 1 visit per day. You are able to equip one item and keep another in reserve, providing for a powerful tanooki/boomerang suit/fire flower platoon. In the event that you die, you lose the energy up you've equipped. And if you've already visited the Toad house or apartment with it, you're stuck going back again to earlier stages finding the thing you need and grinding during that world to completion pick up the item. You can't pause and back out to the hub world and still keep it. In short, the tools you need always feel like they're present in some other the main game, requiring you to go fetch them there before continuing.
Star coins represent the game's other grind mechanism. You can find three per level, and you will need a minimum of 100 to play the final stage of the initial eight worlds. Fortunately, many are easily located, and others are acquired by visiting special challenge boxes located mid-world, where defeating a set of foes against a time pops out a celebrity coin. These, too, unlock just once per day, even though game's StreetPass capability recharges them if you meet others who've the game.
Super Mario 3D Land is most beneficial game incorporating the 3DS'unique visual capabilities into its design.
Regardless of gimmicks and requirements like these the game really shines by doing what the series has always done best: Pose a hearty challenge that utilizes the entire screen. Jumping puzzles, especially timed ones, always carry an oh-hell-what's-next sense of breakneck pacing. The surreal trips through haunted mansions were, appropriately enough, suspenseful to the finish, specially when I was trying to protect the star three coins I'd found (if you die, you lose any star coins found since the final checkpoint).
Super Mario 3D Land is easily the most effective Nintendo 3DS game to be released in the device's young lifespan, and certainly the one which makes the best and most deliberate use of its visual capabilities. You'll feel it when you're dragging down on the circle pad to run Mario directly into that person to escape some disappearing platform tiles. The game's gyrometer has novel applications as well, from aiming a cannon for the perfectly placed landing atop the stage-ending flagpole, to using binoculars to scope out the remaining portion of the level and see where Toad tossed a celebrity coin.
A lot more than this, with the 2nd stage of special levels, Super Mario 3D Land basically doubles its first-play value by surprise. Canonically, you reach them via a warp pipe back at the start of the hub world, but they're not alone remixes or speed-run levels. Each one is tougher, to the level of dying by the dozens, which is why heading back and stocking through to that extra-life exploit became so key for me. Yet I actually do feel as though I was prepared with this by what I completed, even with assistance, in the top of world. Whatever the case, this is a game that finally lives up to Nintendo's promise a handheld game can be worth $40, especially on this platform.
Super Mario 3D Land is the initial 3DS game which makes me want to pick it down and play it over most of the other console gaming options I have right now. It will be the only handheld game to achieve that for me.
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