Super Mario 3D Land

Although my initial impression felt like the callback-heavy aesthetic and the linear level design were undercooked, Super Mario 3D Land now reads to me as compact and focused. 3D Mario traditionally struggles with providing proper applications for the nuances of its movement mechanics from second-to-second, which 3D Land solves simply by keeping its platforms tight and giving them dynamic properties. Early levels have more continuous topographies with explorable elements similar to the Galaxy games, but by the halfway point the paradigm shifts to providing momentary safe zones in between obstacle gauntlets. Each gauntlet combines a dynamic platform type with an enemy type by plopping a few clusters down in a wide arrangement to give players flexible routes without allowing them to trivialize the whole thing (as soon as the difficulty curve deems that acceptable, anyway). That’s meaty enough to form a whole game around, and 3D Land pushes that to its absolute limit; even with the project’s smaller scope, they shoved nearly 100 full levels into it!

Most would categorize this particular entry squarely into the Mario games built in the “four step” mold, which really came into its own around the first couple New Super Mario Bros. games, along with Galaxy 2. in fact, certain gimmicks, such as the red-blue platforms that alternate on jump, 3D Land cribs directly from Galaxy 2, although changing the trigger for the platform flip from the air spin move to every jump action clearly reflects a shift towards making each gauntlet unceasingly dangerous. When playing Wonder last year the technique grated on me due to that game’s emphasis on singular “twists” in the obstacle escalation structure, to the extent that it often turned the regular obstacle sections into gristle. 3D Land still follows the formula, but it has a better grasp on how to continually develop and twist concepts due to an adherence to the above dynamic platform/enemy combo concept. Each enemy controls space in some way, whether through their movement (which you can escalate on speed, size, route complexity, etc.) or their projectiles, which scale on the same basic ideas. The dynamic platforms form the actual safe space at any given point, and these can likewise vary in controllability by the player and escalate on speed and size. With both, there’s always some sort of space interaction that affects what’s safe for the player to traverse.

The Rocky Wrenches in 8-3 throw wrenches that you can bounce off of over these rotating platforms. [src]

For instance, if a level has rotating platforms with Rocky Wrench enemies, the player needs to balance moving on the platforms to stay upright while also tracking which platforms have been made unsafe (or useful as a jump point) by wrenches moving over them. Beyond that, you can note in this level that the designer juggles two ideas: the rotation / wrench interaction, and then longer platforms that rotate perpetually and may become completely unsafe at points. Strict obstacle escalation (or even Game Maker’s Toolkit’s description of the four steps) can lose the forest of potential obstacle permutations for the trees of fleshing out one particular idea, and for a 3D game with flexibility in routes and difficulty,¹ one might as well twist over and over again. Hence the design here: the limited palette retains focus, but the sections vary in application considerably, with unique platform constructions in most areas and sparing use of the Rockys. In the context of the four steps, it makes practical sense to design this way, as the introduction only “works” once, and for this particular game the flagpole segments tend to lapse into easiest possible solutions more often than not. Hyperfocusing on individual level structures also ignores how gimmicks are applied throughout the entirety of a game, which has added importance in 3D Land due its second campaign, which remixes nearly every level from the first half of the game.

I felt arbitrarily insulted by this structural decision on my first pass and retired the game early; on this playthrough I was looking forward to it quite a bit. The benefit of having short, twist-laden levels is that you can blip through the main campaign and get into the more challenging stuff more quickly, which I much prefer to doling harder content out occasionally within a longer entry-level campaign. However, the main campaign here has noticeably more care, both in general level layouts and gimmick pacing. The switchboard demonstrates a lot of the game’s strengths admirably: it’s a controllable platform with its own inertia, where the player has no choice but to make it move as long as they’re touching it. In the main campaign, the switchboard shows up briefly in 1-3² and then takes center-stage in 1-4 as the primary gimmick. When it reappears suddenly in the Boo mansion level 8-4, it’s a complete left-field injection that breaks up two dull auto-scroller platform sections. In the second campaign, 1-4 is remixed not once but twice: as s2-3 with lava and fuzzies added to the fray³ and as s5-3 with jet engines and various flying enemies. When s6-5 comes along and remixes 8-4 by lazily drops floating thistle flowers in the middle of sped-up auto-scroller paths, its sudden switchboard twist is expected and comes on the heels of two prior uses in the last few worlds. It’s tiresome, as the game loses steam the fifth or sixth time you’ve come across a particular gimmick, especially for those that already appear numerous times in the first campaign or when remixed multiple times.

The second campaign adds moments like these, where collectables or paths are obscured by pillars that can only be destroyed by manipulating a Big Cosmic Clone into colliding with it. [src]

The second campaign (or the “special worlds”) does have a handful of unique levels of its own, but the quality of the rest depends heavily on how far they stretched the gimmick initially and how much effort they put into changing platform layouts and enemy encounters. Again, the base conceit is strong enough to yield good results from just slapping two new things together and seeing how they intersect in space, and some like s8-2 go the extra mile in escalating the original concept (compare to 8-3 with the rocky wrenches that I analyzed earlier). When the designers were out of juice, however, they resorted into higher-level means of adding challenge. The Cosmic Clones from Galaxy 2 reappear in specific levels to track Mario/Luigi’s actions and deal contact damage, while other levels start with only 30 seconds on the timer, making the player scramble for timer pickups strewn throughout the level. Interestingly, these concepts escalate over time as well: the big Cosmic Clone not only has a larger hitbox but also can destroy interactables, while some short timer stages only have item pickups inside of certain enemies, starting with Goombas and eventually leading to Hammer Bros. When these intersect, they result in some wonky level concepts, such as s8-1, which has the player run backwards through s1-2 (a remix of the regular 1-2) on a short timer while getting chased by a Cosmic Clone. This gives the special worlds the sensation of an official romhack, with all of the absurdity and uneven quality that implies.