Super Mario World-Building

When I finished Hyper Light Drifter, I tried to figure out why it was that the game had left me disappointed. The visuals are gorgeous and distinctive. It has tense and satisfying combat. The music is atmospheric and beautiful. Yet I came away from it feeling unfulfilled.

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It was the following week when I was playing Super Mario World that I understood why Hyper Light Drifter left me wanting. I’ve played World before, of course, but I’ve never undertaken the full journey, start to finish, looking for all the secret exits, like I’m doing now. Still, I thought I had a fairly complete picture in my head of the sorts of enemies and hazards I might encounter on my way. I know the goombas and koopas, the bullet bills and buzzy beetles. But when I arrived on Chocolate Island, I encountered an enemy I’d never seen before, who didn’t look like anything I’d expected to see in a Mario game.

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There was a moment of uncertainty on my part. How do I deal with this enemy? It’s so big, can I even stomp on it? Of course I had to try. What happened next delighted me. When I stomped the enemy, it became an adorably tiny version of itself, but it also started breathing fire, something it hadn’t done before. It was like a cute little dog who thinks its bark is really intimidating.

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Encountering this surprising and unusual new enemy in this new area—Chocolate Island—made me feel like I was actually on a journey across different realms on my way to Bowser’s kingdom, not unlike Tolkien’s fellowship traversing Middle-earth on their path to Mordor.  Of course, it’s not just the Dino-Rhinos; it’s the presence of secret exits all over the map, each one making me wonder what new path I might discover and where it might lead. And it’s the way in which finding a switch palace several areas earlier can give me a safe block to stand on in a hazardous part of Wendy’s castle, so my actions in one place have an impact on my experience in another. All of these things help make the world feel alive and interconnected to me.

Fundamentally, I think it’s about the world of a game pushing beyond your preconceptions of it. I think of how staggering it felt to me to discover the inverted castle in Symphony of the Night. I think of how pleasurable it was for my brain to reconceptualize its geographical understanding of Dark Souls’ world with the discovery of each new shortcut. And how Bloodborne pulled my whole sense of sanity out from under me as my journey into its deeper realms reduced all my initial expectations of that game to a feeble joke.

As good as Hyper Light Drifter is, it just never surprised me or did anything to really challenge or subvert my expectations, though the existence of the soccer field is a lovely detail that goes some way toward making its setting feel like a living place. Still, I went into it hoping for a world to explore and came away feeling like it was a (very good) video game. And sometimes I go into a video game and am surprised to discover a world.  

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Playing Super Mario World has also made me give more thought to my criticisms of Super Mario Maker from last year. In my post The Severely Limited Travels of Super Mario Maker, I wrote:

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.

Playing Super Mario World makes me realize how different the elements are that can make for a good Super Mario Maker stage vs. a good Super Mario World stage. There are a lot of levels that work really well in Super Mario World but that would seem unremarkable standing on their own in Maker. 

In Super Mario World, stages exist in the context of a journey. How they affect the pacing of that journey matters. A new type of hazard, or a new type of terrain, or a new enemy, doesn’t have to call a lot of attention to itself to make it a pleasant variant from what you’ve seen before and to make the new stage actually feel new. And stages can have meaningful secrets stashed away, encouraging you to explore.

In Super Mario Maker, stages don’t exist in context, and because there’s no larger world to impact, there are no meaningful secrets, no hidden exits or switch palaces. To succeed and rise above the rest, these stages need to make a strong impression on you in and of themselves. And it’s not that there’s anything wrong with that. But I think it’s like the difference between what makes a great single and what makes a great album track. A single needs to stand out and stand alone. It needs to get stuck in your head. An album track can be a more subtle part of a journey, working because of where it fits in the overall landscape, what came before and what comes after. And singles are great, but I like to get lost in albums.