Well, really nothing's wrong with them per se. I've long been a defender of this sub-series. NSMB Wii is a superbly designed platformer, and since it's about 60% the same game as NSMB U, so is that one. NSMB2's quirky score attack gimmick goes a long way to shoring up its more perfunctory levels. And NSMB DS... well, three out of four ain't bad. These games are critically praised. They sell like twenty million copies guaranteed. People buy a console to play New Super Mario Bros. games.
But still. Even though there's nothing wrong, there's something wrong here. It's been evident since 2006. There is a certain je ne sais quoi that they lack. They don't dazzle the way other 2D platformers can and do. To an extent, some gameplay properties contribute to this. Mario's ponderous acceleration makes these into games about gaining and keeping momentum as you move through the level, which is great when you're doing well, but it means that stopping feels worse than it could; dying feels even more discouraging, because the UI ensures it could be over a dozen seconds before you're back in the saddle. But other games have overcome worse setbacks to attain better results.
I think it's a matter of aesthetics. Playing the Super Mario Maker games is really what drove this home to me. The NSMB theme is nobody's favorite - you use it because you want wall kicks or something, not because you have a particular look in mind. And when you put it next to the superficially similar 3D World them, it's night and day.
The visuals are hard to critique, however. For the house that Miyamoto built, form always follows function, and the functionality of these graphics is top-notch. They're readable to a fault. Edges are crisp where they matter (and in Mario, they do matter - this ain't Donkey Kong Country). With very few exceptions, every bounding box has a corresponding pixel. The way enemies are shaped tells you what you need to do to them and the way they move tells you where you need to do it. If there were flaws I could point to and say Aha, this is where important information is conveyed poorly, this would be easy. But that's not the problem.
The music is easier, though. It's not so much laid-back as sedated. Part of it is that the synths have such an even volume. Other synthesized Mario themes, like those from the contemporary 3D Land, have much more dynamic dynamics, and if you were to give it to live performers as with Galaxy, they'd spice things up as a necessity to keep themselves from zoning out. Worse, the percussion layer, in addition to sharing that lack of dynamics variation, is also mixed very quietly. Ever listen to just the drums for the theme from SMB1, played on the NES' "noise" channel? Even that very simple beat is powerfully jaunty, producing a rhythm that really drives forward - and it's all based on the fact that some notes are louder and some are softer. The songs' acoustic homogeneity deprives the game of an energetic rhythm. It's not the melody and it's not tempo: compare and contrast.
All these factors give NSMB a dull, heavy quality, when Mario games are best when they feel light. And it's especially noticeable in contrast to the 3D Mario games. Even the weakest and most vanilla of them, Super Mario 3D Land, which ought to suffer from the same problems, is much more pleasing. 3D Land is still a pretty slow-moving game. Its soundtrack is still synthesized, and its graphics are no less utilitarian. And yet...! Well, I know why the music is better, at least, but still.
And on top of that the 3D games have experimented with wonderfully elegant gameplay mechanics that never got backported to 2D, even though we know they'd totally work in 2D (because they've been in the 2D segments of 3D games). A developer with less virtuosity could make an entire franchise out of, say Red-Blue Panels or the Cloud Suit, just to pick two arbitrary examples, but they've never appeared in NSMB, nor, to my recollection, has anything else on a similar tier of game-changingness. They keep it very bread-and-butter instead: risky ways to increase altitude, cyclically moving hitboxes, and the occasional risk-reward scenario of getting to a checkpoint with the Mini Mushroom to unlock a secret exit.
2D Mario games occupy a special position, though. What other series is likely to be the first action game played by a literal baby? Maybe the idea is that players ease into the concept and then graduate to more stimulating fare, which the 3D half of the house provides alongside other stellar 2D platformers that don't have Mario in.
I dunno. I just don't know. But I wanted to write this down somewhere.
But still. Even though there's nothing wrong, there's something wrong here. It's been evident since 2006. There is a certain je ne sais quoi that they lack. They don't dazzle the way other 2D platformers can and do. To an extent, some gameplay properties contribute to this. Mario's ponderous acceleration makes these into games about gaining and keeping momentum as you move through the level, which is great when you're doing well, but it means that stopping feels worse than it could; dying feels even more discouraging, because the UI ensures it could be over a dozen seconds before you're back in the saddle. But other games have overcome worse setbacks to attain better results.
I think it's a matter of aesthetics. Playing the Super Mario Maker games is really what drove this home to me. The NSMB theme is nobody's favorite - you use it because you want wall kicks or something, not because you have a particular look in mind. And when you put it next to the superficially similar 3D World them, it's night and day.
The visuals are hard to critique, however. For the house that Miyamoto built, form always follows function, and the functionality of these graphics is top-notch. They're readable to a fault. Edges are crisp where they matter (and in Mario, they do matter - this ain't Donkey Kong Country). With very few exceptions, every bounding box has a corresponding pixel. The way enemies are shaped tells you what you need to do to them and the way they move tells you where you need to do it. If there were flaws I could point to and say Aha, this is where important information is conveyed poorly, this would be easy. But that's not the problem.
The music is easier, though. It's not so much laid-back as sedated. Part of it is that the synths have such an even volume. Other synthesized Mario themes, like those from the contemporary 3D Land, have much more dynamic dynamics, and if you were to give it to live performers as with Galaxy, they'd spice things up as a necessity to keep themselves from zoning out. Worse, the percussion layer, in addition to sharing that lack of dynamics variation, is also mixed very quietly. Ever listen to just the drums for the theme from SMB1, played on the NES' "noise" channel? Even that very simple beat is powerfully jaunty, producing a rhythm that really drives forward - and it's all based on the fact that some notes are louder and some are softer. The songs' acoustic homogeneity deprives the game of an energetic rhythm. It's not the melody and it's not tempo: compare and contrast.
All these factors give NSMB a dull, heavy quality, when Mario games are best when they feel light. And it's especially noticeable in contrast to the 3D Mario games. Even the weakest and most vanilla of them, Super Mario 3D Land, which ought to suffer from the same problems, is much more pleasing. 3D Land is still a pretty slow-moving game. Its soundtrack is still synthesized, and its graphics are no less utilitarian. And yet...! Well, I know why the music is better, at least, but still.
And on top of that the 3D games have experimented with wonderfully elegant gameplay mechanics that never got backported to 2D, even though we know they'd totally work in 2D (because they've been in the 2D segments of 3D games). A developer with less virtuosity could make an entire franchise out of, say Red-Blue Panels or the Cloud Suit, just to pick two arbitrary examples, but they've never appeared in NSMB, nor, to my recollection, has anything else on a similar tier of game-changingness. They keep it very bread-and-butter instead: risky ways to increase altitude, cyclically moving hitboxes, and the occasional risk-reward scenario of getting to a checkpoint with the Mini Mushroom to unlock a secret exit.
2D Mario games occupy a special position, though. What other series is likely to be the first action game played by a literal baby? Maybe the idea is that players ease into the concept and then graduate to more stimulating fare, which the 3D half of the house provides alongside other stellar 2D platformers that don't have Mario in.
I dunno. I just don't know. But I wanted to write this down somewhere.
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