The Severely Limited Travels of Super Mario Maker
Nintendo’s new creation tool is great, but it’s missing one essential thing: the sense of a journey.
I think of Mario as gaming’s greatest traveler. He cuts across genres and hardware generations like a hot knife through butter.

In 1985, he broke free of the single-screen action of arcade games like Donkey Kong and Mario Bros., and though he was hardly the first to show us that the borders of the television didn’t have to equal the borders of a game’s world, he did it better than anyone who had come before. Thirty years after its release, Super Mario Bros. is arguably still the most important and influential game of all time, and maybe it always will be.

What made it so exciting to me was the way that it felt like an epic journey, a true hero’s quest. Like the Shire where Frodo and company begin their trek in The Lord of the Rings, World 1-1 is a pleasant place to start. You get accustomed to the controls, you discover what the mushrooms do, you learn that you can stomp on goombas and go down certain pipes into hidden places below. Then you venture into the subterranean darkness of World 1-2, leap across the dangerously high platforms of World 1-3, and breach the enemy stronghold in 1-4 where you must face the menacing lizard king himself.

By today’s standards, the Bowser of Super Mario Bros. is hardly an imposing boss, but the simple dramatic device of hearing his roars and seeing his fireballs long before you’re close enough to lay eyes on the monster still makes him loom larger than life in my imagination.
Of course, beating this Bowser–actually just a minion in disguise–isn’t the end of your quest. It’s just the beginning. Seven more worlds lie ahead of you, each more treacherous than the last. In 1985, Super Mario Bros. felt vast, the geography of the Mushroom Kingdom as expansive and magical in my mind as that of King Arthur’s England or Tolkien’s Middle-earth.
(Link, a more traditional hero of legend, would burst onto Nintendo’s console in 1986. But part of what made Mario so fascinating to me at first was his outsider status, the way he was an ordinary guy thrust into extraordinary circumstances. Formerly a carpenter in Donkey Kong and a plumber in Mario Bros., he seemed a wonderfully unlikely candidate for a quest to defeat a fire-breathing monster and rescue a princess, and that made it feel like such magic could happen to just about any of us.)
When Super Mario Bros. 3 hit the States in 1990, it wasn’t just the delightful visual style, new power-ups and abilities that made it a huge leap forward for the series. It was the awesome airship levels.

Ahem. Actually, it was the way that the game took the sense of a journey that was implicit in the original Super Mario Bros. and made it more explicit by having a world map you navigated between stages, and by giving each realm a distinct identity. No longer was there just one monotonous, undefined Mushroom Kingdom. Now there was Desert Land, and Ice Land, and oh my god, Giant Land.

Since then, all the great Mario platformers, 2D and 3D alike, have given us more than just imaginative, expertly designed levels, though they’ve certainly given us that. They’ve also given us the feeling of being on a journey in which things start easier and get harder, in which ideas introduced early are elaborated on or twisted around further down the road. I loved rediscovering the joys of the world maps when I replayed Super Mario Bros. 3 last year, like the way Water Land has a boat you can take on a pleasant little sailing trip out to a nearby island.

Now, we have Super Mario Maker, Nintendo’s intuitive, fun-to-use creation tool that lets players design their own 2D Mario stages. I love Super Mario Maker. I’ve heard some criticisms of the game. One friend suggested that it might not be so universally adored and praised if it weren’t for people’s love and nostalgia for Nintendo, and I have to concede that he’s right, it might not be. But I also think that Nintendo and Mario are so intrinsic to what this game is that it’s impossible to separate them. One might as well say that people probably wouldn’t be as excited about The Force Awakens if it weren’t a Star Wars movie.
Many people have criticized the game’s unlock system, in which you start with a very basic set of enemies and objects to use in your levels, and gradually, over a period of several days, are introduced to new visual styles, enemies, objects, and tools. Perhaps Mario Maker is a bit too restrictive at first, and the way that you can spam your levels with coins or other items to nudge the game into giving you stuff faster is silly. But I like the way that the game encourages you to take it slowly.

The design has forced me to focus on the fundamentals in my early designs, and to understand how important the placement of even a single block can be to the flow and success of an entire level. I look forward to seeing what new items and enemies I get access to each day, and figuring out ways to use them alongside the elements I’ve already spent some time getting a handle on. This introduction of new stuff over a period of days, coupled with the terrific tutorial videos in the game’s digital manual, make my early time with the game feel like a mini-course in level design. If I’d had access to everything from the get-go, I might not have taken the time to get a feel for the basics, and I think the levels I design will end up being better as a result of the gradual pace.
But there’s one huge thing that I think is missing from Super Mario Maker: the sense of a journey. You can share levels with other players, but those levels exist in isolation. Someone plays the level, and finishes it, and that’s it. You can’t create even a rudimentary world map to string, say, four or eight stages together, which I’d love to do. I want players to be able to design not just stages, but journeys for me to go on; the road to Bowser’s castle, the pleasant pathways and underground tunnels and flying fortresses that stand between me and King Koopa. I want to experiment with difficulty curves and figure out when and where to introduce new elements so that the places I create have a sense of identity.

Because levels exist in isolation, it’s also impossible to implement meaningful meta-challenges in your Mario Maker stage designs. Part of the brilliance of so many Mario games is that players of almost any skill level can have a meaningful experience with them. Defeating Bowser is something that most players, with a little dedication, can accomplish. But for those players who want a tougher challenge, there’s the option to snag hard-to-get collectibles (like some of the trickier green stars of Super Mario 3D World) to open up levels that really put your skills to the test. You can’t place items like these in your levels in Mario Maker, and even if you could, they’d be pointless. Coins work as little indicators of where players should try jumping, but the act of collecting them and even of collecting 1-ups is rendered almost meaningless by the way stages exist independently of each other.
There are a few ways to play stages in sequence in Mario Maker. One is the 10 Mario Challenge, in which you have ten lives to make it through eight sample courses. These courses aren’t user-created, and they usually showcase some interesting design principle that might spark your own ideas, so this mode is well worth playing. The other way, the 100 Mario Challenge, has you taking on user-created courses, and it’s a pretty miserable experience. Most of the stages aren’t very good, and some of them are awful. You can always skip ones that are atrocious, but even when the courses are decent, the effect is one of a disorientingly random hodgepodge, with no flow whatsoever to the designs or difficulty as you move from one stage to the next. It’s a sampler platter of (mostly bad) Mario levels, not a cohesive journey.
So it’s here that Mario Maker falls short for me, as both a game and a creation tool. I want to make more than stages; I want to make multi-stage quests for other players to go on, and I want to see what other players can do when creating journeys for me that have a beginning, a middle, and an end. Journeys that have secrets hidden away that actually mean something. Because if my time with heroes like Frodo and King Arthur and Mario has taught me anything, it’s that it’s not about the destination, but the way there.

Notes
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fluffy-critter reblogged this from carolynpetit and added: This is the big thing that bugs me about Mario Maker. Also the fact that most of the power ups are gimmicky shout outs...
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feitclub reblogged this from carolynpetit and added:
I don’t have Super Mario Maker yet (curse you, back-to-back business trips!) but I completely understand the sentiment...
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kaorei-endgame reblogged this from carolynpetit and added:
Good insight into that specific hole in Mario Maker a lot of people have commented on, and why it’s a ‘problem!’ It’s...
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kailaria1001 said: Couldn’t agree more. If I had a WiiU and this game, the most I could do is put limits on myself within the challenge of creating the level such that you can at most get three 1-UPs: Non-trivial end goal, 100 coins, and an optional challenge.
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