Make Mario good. Make Mario bad.
Nintendo is finally capitalizing on the idea of making your own Mario game, a concept that the Internet has fallen in love with ever since the crazy-hard Mario ROM hacks went viral many years ago. It’s about time and well worth the wait. In Super Mario Maker, you can make your own Mario levels. It’s an incredible idea, and unfathomable that it took this long for it to come to fruition.
You can share your created levels with friends and thousands of other Mario creators online. Entertain them, or make them suffer. The power is in your hands (or your stylus) to make the greatest Mario game ever, or maybe the worst. You know the saying, “With great power comes great responsibility,” and with Super Mario Maker, it’s up to you make something that can live up to the great legacy that is Super Mario. Are you up to it?
The Story
King Bowser, the evil giant turtle monster, has kidnapped the dear princess of the Mushroom Kingdom, and it’s once again up to the acrobatic plumber Mario to save her by jumping through thousands of deadly obstacle courses to reach a castle that the princess may or may not be in.
That’s a pretty generous vision of the non-existent story of Super Mario Maker. It’s a Mario game, and more to that, it’s a level creation suite. If you want to get creative (and you should, because that’s what the game is all about), you can consider yourself playing either the role of hero or villain. Take control of Mario and save the princess, or fight against him on King Bowser’s side by creating the most punishing levels you can think up. Either way, the story isn’t the focus of Super Mario Maker. The story is what you create.
The Gameplay
At its base, if you’re not interested in creating your own levels, Super Mario Maker is a very basic Mario game. There are 60 sample courses from Nintendo themselves that you can play through in a mode called “10-Mario Challenge.” You have 10 lives to get through a line of 8 pre-made courses, just like any ordinary Mario game. The levels aren’t as robust as the standard Mario game, as they’re meant to provide inspiration for creating your own levels. It shouldn’t take long to consume these 60 levels, and that’s where the user-created content comes in.
There’s the “100-Mario Challenge.” This time you’re given 100 lives to get through 8 to 16 user-created levels randomly pulled from the Super Mario Maker’s Internet database. This is likely where the meat of the game will come from if you’re not interested in making your own levels. Since these levels are pulled from random people, the quality of the levels can, and likely will, vary greatly. Many levels will barely contain any sense of actual “design.” Levels with seemingly randomly placed objects and courses flooded with hordes of enemies will be commonplace.
Levels can range from “too easy” to “frustratingly difficult.” You’re probably going to need every one of those 100 lives to get through this mode. Luckily, you can choose to play through a selection of “Easy,” “Normal,” and “Expert” levels. Presumably, the difficulty is calculated from the percentage of players that were able to complete a certain level, so the data will become more accurate the longer the game has been out.
You can also choose to skip any level and be brought a new one in its place. Every once in a while, you’ll get a quality level that’s either super-creative, or just a darn good Mario level, and that’s splendid.
Playing Mario is only half the package. Making Mario is where the real action is. The game provides the tools for you to make your own levels, such as the ability to place blocks and obstacles for Mario to run and jump on; a selection of power-ups for Mario to use like Mushrooms and Fireflowers; and a gallery of enemies, from Goombas to Bowser himself, for Mario to fight or evade. You can create working warp pipes that can teleport Mario to a “sub-level” within your level. There’s even an array of sound and visual effects you can use to add some flair to your creation.
Unfortunately, you do not have access to all these tools from the beginning. You start with a very small toolset, and the game slowly hands out selections of items as you play the game. The intended process is for the game to unlock every item over a slow course of 9 days. However, you can speed up this process by spamming new items in the level editor, forcing locked items to arrive earlier. You can also change your Wii U’s clock settings to fast-forward a day to unlock the next day’s set of items. Either way, it’s a grueling, arbitrary process to unlock everything.
Even in the end, while the tools are many, it can seem limited, especially compared to a full Mario game, but the limitation actually encourages some very creative solutions.
You can make a standard Mario level: that’s get Mario from the beginning to the end, but you can pretty much do whatever you want in between. Some people are focused with sticking to the Mario formula, but there are also people out there brimming with creativity who want break all the rules. There are levels out there that people have made which punish your for collecting a mushroom power-up, which goes against Mario standards and practices! There are some levels that ask you to not even touch the controller, and the level plays itself. Some are trying to turn Mario into a puzzle game by having you use Mario items and enemies in very unconventional ways.
And once you’re done with your created level, you can upload it to Super Mario Maker’s online database (called the “Course World”) and share it with everyone online. Initially, you’re only allowed to upload 10 levels, but the more people “star” (the equivalent of a “like”) your level, the upload limit increases. So you better make some good levels and get those stars!
The Presentation
There have been many different Mario games over the years, ranging from the original Super Mario Bros. on the Nintendo Entertainment System to the New Super Mario Bros. games on the Wii and Wii U. Super Mario Maker celebrates nearly all of them by letting you choose from different graphical styles to make your levels with.
You can choose from levels themed after Super Mario Bros., Super Mario Bros. 3, Super Mario World, and New Super Mario Bros. Not only do the visuals change, but the music and sound effects do, too, to reflect the style. Most level creation items are universal between styles (and they even redrew some objects that were not originally available in those games), but some items are exclusive to certain styles. Like, you can only use Mario’s dinosaur friend Yoshi in Super Mario World and New Super Mario Bros. Mario also controls differently between the games. The original Mario can’t pick up or hold objects, and New Super Mario Bros. Mario gets additional movement options, such as a triple jump and wall jumps, so picking a style actually has a gameplay function. Within each level style, you can choose further themes, such as a castle theme, a grassland theme, an underground theme, or a haunted ghost house.
Probably the most important presentation that the game has is how it presents user-created levels in the Course World. Unfortunately, it’s the weakest part of the game. The Course World provides three categories of levels. The “Featured” category seems like an attempt to show off levels that have been on the server for a while, but haven’t gotten much attention. “Up and Coming” seems to be a list of newly created levels that have barely received any feedback at all. “Star Ranking” shows off a list of levels presented in order of the number of stars they have received. It sounds like it would be useful, but in practice, it’s really just a bunch of “gimmick” levels from the same people over and over that were lucky enough to either get the game early or already have an online following. The levels here don’t seem to be ranked for quality, but rather popularity.
If other players stumble upon your own level, they can play it, download it for editing, give you stars, and also leave comments on your level via the Miiverse. These comments will also appear in you level as you play them. You will occasionally receive notifications in-game when someone plays, stars, or comments on your level, which is always an exciting event.
And that’s basically it when it comes to finding levels through the Course World. You can search for specific levels, but it only allows you to search by “Course ID,” which is a long unique string of numbers and letters given to you for each level so you can post that online and share them externally. That’s basically what you have to do to find “good” Mario levels: search through online message boards, collect Course IDs, and type them into the Course World search manually to try them out for yourself. Luckily, if you do happen to find someone who makes good levels, you can follow that creator on the Course World and view every level they’ve submitted.
The game needs a better way to surface good, quality levels and bury the garbage ones, of which there are many. It seems like Nintendo still hasn’t figured out the Internet, and wants you to rely on your own resources to find the good stuff.
The Conclusion
Super Mario Maker is an incredible tool set with amazing potential. Theoretically, you’re given access to an infinite amount of Mario levels, and you could play this game until the servers go down, which is likely years from now. The sky’s the limit, as long as you have the dedication, patience, and imagination to put out something great.
And therein lies the problem. Like any avenue of design, level design is a skill that must be learned, and no one’s going to become a master Mario maker overnight. With more than a million user-created levels uploaded online, most of it is going to be trash in regards to design. The fact that you have to do your own investigative work to find quality work is a nuisance, but when you do find something great, it’s amazing. You can then use that one great level as inspiration to create your own masterpiece and share that with others who are also starving for quality content.
Super Mario Maker ultimately is only as good as the community can make it, but the potential is certainly there for the game and its community to last a very long time.
I give Super Mario Maker a 5 out of 5.
The Facts
Developer: Nintendo
Publisher: Nintendo
Platforms: Wii U
Genre: Level Editor, Platformer
ESRB Rating: E for Everyone
Price: $59.99
By Alfredo Dizon, eParisExtra