Super Mario Maker Review

Overview:

After Little Big Planet showed the potential User generated content holds, Nintendo finally decided to join the fray. And for starters they picked their most prominent franchise with the release of Super Mario Maker. Anyone can make it, everyone can play it. With this slogan Nintendo markets the game as the ultimate Mario experience. A Tool, where only your imagination is the limit and everything is possible. But is the game the ultimate Mario experience? Is it worth it's price tag? Or does it bite off more than it can chew?

Gameplay:

Super Mario Maker can be segmented into two parts. Build and Play. The game does so itself on the title screen and I'm not one to argue with that. So first let's take a look at the main part of the game. Building your own Mario courses.

The first thing you'll probably recognize is the missing tools. Because Nintendo once more decided that their customers need to be taken by the hand for everything. You'll start with only the bare bones of tools for level creation and after spending some time with them (roughly 10 minutes) you'll get notified that a new batch of tools will be ready soon. And with soon they mean the next day. Now Nintendo quickly applied a patch, which turned the one day waiting period into 30 Minutes, but for me this simply didn't work. However you can still use the oldest trick in the book and simply adjust the date setting of your Wii-U manually. This is a time consuming move, but still better than waiting a full week till you can start building decent levels.

But once you managed to bypass this restriction, you're finally free to build your own dream course. First of you can choose between four iconic graphic settings. The original Super Mario Brothers, Super Mario Bros. 3, Super Mario World and the New Super Mario Bros. Series. Each graphics setting looks just like it did in the original and even new additions like Baby Bowser in the older settings fit in perfectly. Each graphics setting also comes with the things that made I unique. For example Mario can only perform his wall jump in the New Super Mario Bros. setting and cannot pick up items in the original graphic style. This of course also means that some levels only will work in a specific graphic style.

The next thing to choose is the levels setting. Plains, Cave, Underwater, Ghost House, Airship and Castle offer different possibilities in designing your course.

The actual designing is very intuitive and you'll grasp it in a split second. Super Mario Maker is also one of the games, where the Wii-U Gamepad truly shines. Simply drag and drop enemies and blocks onto the screen. Create obstacles, ground and warp pipe in a matter of seconds. In other games the editor often was very convoluted and you needed a long time to actually master it, but in Super Mario Maker everyone can grasp the foundation in a matter of seconds. Everything is kept simple. You change objects by simply shaking them. This turns a green Koopa into a red one for example. Want to make something bigger? Just give it a Super Mushroom. Dragging enemies or objects into pipes, will make them spawn from that pipe and by doing the same thing with Mario you can create a Warp Pipe that takes him to a second screen.

Super Mario Maker also allows you to combine things, which you would have never dreamed of before. Bowser riding in a clown cart, with Wings and Hammer Bros on his head? Possible. Terrible to play against, but possible. In that regard Super Mario Maker truly holds his promise. The only limit is your imagination.

But that is not the case everywhere. Because Nintendo implemented some real limitations. Apart from the seven days waiting period there are also some other things that will halt you in your dream of creating your ultimate Mario Course. Some of these limitations are understandable, to make sure that the creations don't get too out of hand. There is, for example, a limit on how many blocks you can place in a level. This can be very frustrating if you want to fill a level with a ceiling and different plattforms, which shouldn't hang freely in the air. The other things I miss are checkpoints, the ability to create water sections (not underwater), more enemy variety, the possibility to make rising lava stages and more than two screens height for creating courses. All of this may seem trivial at first, but only when you really get into creating levels you feel this restrictions. And then they hurt even more.

As it is the level creation is intuitive and easy enough for everyone to understand, still it manages to provide enough depth for some truly great custom courses. It sill could have more depth however. But still the creation of your own Mario courses is a lot of fun and extremely addicting. It's at least as much fun as playing levels, if not more.

And if you're done with your own custom Mario course, then you can share it with the world. You just need to complete your own level once to ensure that no impossible challenges are created. After that it's ready to be played by people from all over the world. Each player can upload up to ten levels at first. However this number increases when you gather a lot of stars, which are way of rating levels. When playing a level from another person you can give it a star, even if you didn't finish. This way gifted level builder can share even more ideas with the world. It's a simple but effective system that works perfectly.

Well then now that we covered the Build aspect of Super Mario Maker, what about the actual gameplay? There is not all to much to say honestly. It's classic Mario Gameplay with perfect controls. Each graphical setting just plays like the real game it comes from. Physics, controls, moveset are perfectly recreated. If you have played a 2D Mario before than you will feel at home from the first button touch.

The content provided with the base game is really sparse, but one could argue that this isn't surprising with a game that relies on it's community this much. Still it's a bit disappointing. The 10 Mario challenge sends you against a set of 8 courses, which you have to beat with only 10 lives. After that the next set of courses unlocks, till you finally get the courses that where shown at the Nintendo World Championship 2015. This pretty much is all there is on Content that is on the disk. After that you'll have to play the levels provided by the community.

They can be tackled in two different ways. Firstly you can just play them regularly. For this the game provides you with different search options. You can either search specific levels via a 16 digit code or do a more broader search for newest levels, levels that got the most stars, etc.
The 100 Mario challenge pits you against 16 random courses from other players. It functions like the 10 Mario challenge, but it comes in three different difficulty settings and if you encounter a particularly unfair course you can swap it with another random course.

All in all Super Mario Maker is at barebones as it gets. Apart from the user created levels there is nothing that will keep you entertained, gameplay wise. However the build aspect is extremely addicting because of how simple it is to use.

Presentation:

Presentation wise this game is top notch. The four graphical styles are recreated faithfully and perfectly. Super Mario World levels look, like they came straight out of the original and that is the biggest compliment you can give. Even Enemies, that never appeared in that specific game, are recreated faithfully to fit the style. Also the switch from one graphical setting to another works seamlessly. Couple all that with a smooth 60fps framerate and your Eyes are in for a perfect nostalgia trip.

The same can be said on the audio front, although not as thorough. The soundtrack of the game includes some iconic and nostalgic Mario tunes, but far less than I had hoped, and nothing new. It's just the same soundtrack you have heard (and loved) countless of times. This would be ok, if you could at least choose with song to play with your level. This is not possible. The background music is tied to the background of the level. So if you make a castle level, it will always have the same background music. This is another wasted opportunity in a game that completely thrives on the ideas of it's community.

Conclusion:

Super Mario Maker is (nearly) everything Nintendo promised it would be. It's neither the ultimate level creating tool, nor the ultimate Mario experience, but it comes very close. It's a game that is completely dependent on the creativity of it's community, because the package you'll buy comes with nearly no content, except for the tools to make your own. It is a level creator after all. But it's a damn good one. All the tools are extremely easy to use and intuitive. There are a lot of possibilitiest. And the Gameplay is classic Mario.

Still there are several things missing, which dipped my enjoyment of the game a little. Things like the standard music and no checkpoints feel like missed opportunities to make this the definitive Mario experience. Still the possibilities are extremely diverse and playing levels from other people all around the world is a lot of fun. (And sometimes very nerv wracking if it's one of the Kaizo courses)

All in all Super Mario Maker is a great tool to make your own Mario courses, but it has some flaws, which become obvious after you delve deeper into it's content. There is also barely any content to play on the disc, because the game entirely depends on its buyers to provide courses. With all of this the pricetag of the game seems a bit too high.

Conclusion (One Sentence):

Super Mario Maker is a great tool for creating your own Mario courses, that lacks some important features, but overall is the perfect way for anyone to go wild and create the level of your dreams.

Authors note: As I mentioned in an earlier post I won't end my reviews with a score anymore, which probably destroys my chances of getting on Metacritic with it, but whatever.

Source of all pictures: Nintendo