Why Super Mario Bros. 3 Was Overrated - and Why EVERYONE is wrong about Super Mario Galaxy

A while ago I mentioned that I thought Super Mario Bros. 3 was overrated and that Super Mario World was far superior. I thought I would take some time to clarify my comments, mainly because they were brief and dismissive, owing to the fact that they were a one-off in a post on an unrelated topic. That, and I want to stat an oh-so-timely discussion about Super Mario Galaxy, which came out about a year ago. So, let's start digging at some old wounds, shall we?

The only word fit to fully describe Super Mario Bros. 3 (which, for brevity, shall henceforth be known as Mario 3) is "extravagant." To understand what I mean by this, let's take a look at the history of the series. The original Super Mario Bros. was clean and simplistic, yet depth existed, not in the form of thousands of collectibles or side quests, but in the form of its basic gameplay mechanics and the pure joy of movement. The fact that it was instantly understandable and fun, and its complex yet intuitive gameplay is what made it such a huge hit, and why it continues to be appealing even today. When the sequel was finally going to come out, there were certain expectations about what the game would be like.

Of course, all those expectations were broken. As we all know, Mario 2 was different. Very different. Even though it had the same characters as the first game, it was barely recognizable as a Mario game. Instantly this turned a lot of people off, people who simply wanted more of the same thing. When it was finally printed in Nintendo Power, for in those pre-Internet times Nintendo Power was our only source for game-related news, the news spread quickly that this wasn't a Mario game at all, but some unrelated Japanese game that had Mario shoehorned in to appeal to American gamers. Thus, Mario 2 was seen as an impostor, a pretender to the throne, a subpar game hiding behind the mask of our beloved Super Mario. In truth, these statements are unfair, as Mario 2 was a good game, and definitely better than Mario 3. It amuses me how people who practically worship Shigeru Miyamoto decry this game for ripping off his work, when it was Miyamoto who designed it in the first place, and in fact had nothing to do with what fans consider the "true" sequel, the Japanese Super Mario Bros. 2. However, it also makes me sad, as this attitude is exactly what ruined Mario 3.

This attempt by Miyamoto to continue to innovate in games and take them in new directions was met by indifference by fans both American and Japanese, yet the Japanese took to the official Mario sequel. The Japanese Mario 2 was essentially the same game as the first, yet made arbitrarily harder, with new items and abilities. It played like Mario 1 with all the fun sucked out of it. Everything about the game was mean, from the ridiculous number of jumps that could only be made if your reaction time was about 1/30 of a second, mushrooms that would hurt you and were virtually indistinguishable from the good ones, and secret warp zones that actually sent you backwards in the game. Doki Doki Panic (the game that in America became Mario 2) was fun, and Mario 2 was soulless yet hardcore. At this time, gamers voted with their wallets that they preferred the latter.

Since the preferred Mario 2 was the same game with some extras, there was nowhere left to go with the third one except to release the same game with a fucking shitload of extras. Huge worlds, lots of crazy powerups, alternate routes through the level maps, the ability to collect powerups for use on a specific level, this game had a lot of extraneous shit. You can see this simply in a list of the powerups in the game. In addition to the classic mushroom, flower, and star this game had a leaf that turned you into a flying raccoon, a suit that lets you throw hammers into a useless upward arc, a suit that's basically the same as the leaf except you can turn into a statue, which serves no purpose whatsoever, a suit that made you hop around like a frog, making it extremely difficult to control, and a giant shoe that you could hop around in like a maniac, usually right into a pit. And to think people accuse New Super Mario Bros of having a lot of useless items.

I've heard it said that Super Mario World ruined Nintendo. This notion is wrong. World was an attempt to pare down the bullshit and return Mario to the state of being something fun, rather than being a "videogame." But the damage was already done, not just to Nintendo, but to the entire industry. From then on the focus has changed from creating interesting experiences to making things more "videogamey." There's a formula now, and it's depressing. It's all about stats, and scores, and learning curves, and it just needs to stop. Had Doki Doki Panic done well, the face of gaming might have been very different indeed, for the better.

In fact, between World and Mario 64, it seemed like maybe Nintendo was back on track again. Though World was still part of the same formula that would eventually suck the entire gaming industry dry of innovation, unlike the game that inspired it this was a game that believed that less was more. It replaced all those useless extra powerups with one, one which enabled flight with a wonderfully difficult and complex timing based mechanic that was entirely optional to the completion of the game. Mario 64 added the collection of stars, which was intended to expand the game and make it more open-ended, but really just ended up bogging down the experience with an unnecessary and tedious collection status. There was no logical reason to be collecting these things, other than that you needed them, and they ended up segmenting what should have been a cohesive experience. On the other hand, the game finally managed to recapture the original Super Mario Bros. in terms of fun and joy of movement. Sadly, only the tedious part would endure.

Super Mario Sunshine was, to reuse a phrase that should now have become all too familiar, Mario 64 with all the fun removed. You still had the quest of collecting all 120 thing-a-ma-doos, but without the wonderful physics or sense of presence of the previous game. People rightfully hated the game, but oddly enough praised the sections of the game where the water pack was removed and the player transported to a platforming world made of simplistic blocks. There are two problems with this. One, the water pack was the central mechanic of the game, so it's pretty fucked up that removing it makes the game better. Two, these parts of the game sucked. These sections were described by most people as "challenging," but what they really were was unfair. You would never miss these jumps because you messed up the timing or misjudged the angle. You would miss them because of the terrible camera and floaty physics. This was why the water pack was invaluable in that game, you needed that hover to compensate for these design deficiencies. However, despite the fact that the game was completely broken, there were some clever things going on with the use of water in that game. This became a sign of the Miyamoto to come for the next while, interesting ideas with poor execution. This can probably be owed to the fact that Miyamoto is now simply an idea man, giving birth to wonderful concepts and then stepping aside as others see them through to completion.

Which brings us to Super Mario Galaxy. No matter what you think of this game, you are wrong. Think it's a worthy successor to Mario 64? You are wrong. Think it's a poorly designed game? You are wrong. Think it's a decent game that was over hyped? You are wrong. Think it's exemplary of what has been going wrong with Nintendo for a while now? Guess what? You are wrong. Because here is what Galaxy really is, and I have never seen anyone ever point this out:

Super Mario Galaxy is the best Sonic the Hedgehog game ever made.

Take a moment to let that sink in. It's a heady idea to be sure, and one that is not free of irony. But think about it for a bit and it will begin to make sense.

Galaxy is a game where you never stop moving. Sure, you CAN stop, but then again so could Sonic. Yet for some reason you don't. In both games, some unseen force compels you to continue moving, to continue driving forward. This presence has never been felt in any previous Mario game, each one taking place at a fairly relaxed pace, despite the fact that the majority of them have time limits. In Galaxy, the impulse to keep moving is helped along by the fact that you always know where to go. If this were a Mario game, this would be called hand-holding, but viewed as a Sonic game, this is simply streamlining. Still not convinced this game is a Sonic game? Alright, try this on for size: Mario's main form of attack in the game is a spinning move that briefly makes him both invincible and deadly. Sound familiar?

Now that we've established Galaxy as Sonic game, on to the second part of my claim, that it is in fact the BEST Sonic game. The problem with the Sonic the Hedgehog games is that they are not just game, but also tech demo. For the Genesis to prove its superiority over Nintendo's systems, they had to demonstrate that their games could render at ludicrous speeds. So they made Sonic fast. Really fast. Too fast, in fact. Sonic's incredible speed is a hindrance to the level design of the games. Because the player cannot see the obstacles ahead, all of the levels either have to be nothing but a pretty roller coaster, or they have to throw up a vertical wall to slow the player down for a more slow paced platforming section. It's once you've started to memorize the layouts of these harder platforming sections that the true joy of the game comes out, moving at a brisk pace through dangerous terrain. Anyone who has ever truly loved a Sonic game will understand that it's not really about speed, it's about momentum.

Galaxy cuts the speed in order to preserve all that wonderful momentum while still letting you retain a sense of control and accomplishment. They've even managed to include the "wow" factor of the old experience of going through loops and spirals at full speed, in the form of the star cannons that launch you from planetoid to planetoid. When the idea of Super Mario Galaxy rocketed from Miyamoto's brain down to earth, whoever picked it up must have been someone who truly understood and loved Sonic the Hedgehog.

So, this concludes my brief history of the Mario games. The series rose, started to fall with Mario 3, and finally transformed into Sonic the Hedgehog. Meanwhile, the Sonic games transformed into utter shit. Growing up in the 1990s, one had to take sides either with Mario or Sonic, for the two were representative of their consoles, constantly at war. It's hard to say who won out, Sega for crafting such an incredible concept, or Nintendo for finally realizing it so fully. Either way, Mario and Sonic are now one and the same, and perhaps the fighting can finally stop.