I have
quite a doozy of an unpopular Mario opinion.
...
I am... Not terribly fond of
Super Mario World. I find it to be
vastly overrated.
It pains me to say this, because it's part of the classic 2D Mario pantheon, and it's NOT a terrible game by any means. It is perfectly fine for the average player, which is a testament to its longevity and legacy. However, as someone deeply enmeshed in all aspects of Mario, I find it to be not up to fluff for
my standards. Especially when comparing other 2D Mario games adjacent to it. I actually consider a lot of what plagues Mario games in general, like the easy difficulty and blandness found in the New series, to be things that can all be traced back to this game. The seeds of all of that were planted in secret way back then in 1990, given how the trajectory at that time in the video game industry had begun to slowly shift due to a fear of alienating casual players.
For starters, namely just 3 key-points I'll elaborate on in great detail:
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It's not a good looker. The graphics and art style are pretty lackluster, relative to what were other contemporary SNES games at the time. I can get what they were going for in certain spots here and there, and I can even see small tidbits of what would eventually be fully realized in Super Mario World 2: Yoshi's Island, but man it is
rough. How is it that I can look at F-Zero and Pilotwings and go "Wow, okay this aged obviously, but wow, I get what they were going for with the Mode 7, this looks neat actually", but when I look at Super Mario World as a whole, I just shrug. Mario games are usually not known for being graphically impressive back in the day, but I can see what they were trying to do when I see the 8-bit art of Super Mario Bros., or the polygons of Super Mario 64, as a few examples. They made do with the limitations of the technology, and managed to hit their home run at the last minute. World however, gives off a real bad rushed vibe to it, like as if the developers were struggling to pin down a proper art style for the game while also taking advantage of the new hardware.
We
actually have evidence pointing to this as being the case thanks to the Nintendo Gigaleak of 2020 (Look at that weird pillow shading!). I am not a huge fan of the finalized Mario big sprite (Although the chibi Small Mario sprite salvages it for me somewhat), and various other things like the Koopalings and Bowser himself look like a complete mess with misaligned colors and shading. Oh yeah, and Luigi himself was just a recolor of the Mario sprite, at least until the All-Stars + World bundle rectified that. Yikes. And apart from that, the environments are not particularly well fleshed out or leave much to the imagination. Its various shades of grass fields with sparse geometric shapes in the background, which comes off as flatter than the flat color skies of Super Mario Bros. 3. You pretty much just have grass, caverns, forests, ghost houses, fortresses and various other alterations of grass. A far cry from the variety that SMB3 offered. I strongly believe that the development of this game was a considerable struggle for them, and going back to Yoshi's Island, when I see THAT game, and how gorgeous the sprite work is with the enemies, the backgrounds, everything, I get the sensation that they really,
really wanted to prove themselves in their artistry with a second chance using the Super FX chip. No one is going to deny that Yoshi's Island stomps World when it comes to visual splendor despite being half a decade apart. But World as a whole just doesn't really hold up visually when you consider everything I've said, and the comparison of other SNES games and, hell, other 2D games of that era. One can now understand why the original Sonic the Hedgehog almost ate this plumber's lunch back then. Sonic 1 has splendid backgrounds. Don't believe me? Just take a gander
here. Green Hill Zone alone annihilates anything seen in World. If World came out in 1989 or 1988, I would be a lot less harsher on it, but the tech catch-up here is just not where it needed to be.
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The difficulty is fairly low. The physics were altered to such an extent that you could easily readjust your flight path when leaping or making minute jumps from a standing position. I'd say this is actually not too bad of a change, and would liken it more to a QoL thing, but the thing that exacerbates this is the Cape Feather. With that feather, you can slow your descent when jumping, which makes certain jumps trivial and lacking in risk and reward. This is in stark contrast to the Super Leaf in 3, which had you mashing the A button to control your height velocity. In World, you just hold the button down without much fear and discomfort. With overpowered additions such as these, the fan community sees fit to at least up the ante with spin jump tech and shell throwing in kaizo hacks, but in the base game it's just straight up dumbed down difficulty for the sake of it, with nothing really being balanced around it for challenge, save for the special world stages, and believe me, those aren't anything special. We still haven't even gone over the ultimate caveat that the feather provides: Near omnipotent flight by simply rocking back and forth rhythmically on the D-Pad. You can skip entire levels in this manner, and once again, in stark contrast to 3, the leaf/Tanooki suit was limited by the power meter and finding space to run in (Aside from the P-Wing power-ups, which were rare and limited in quantities).
Another thing that breaks the game and enables the feather is the item pocket system. When you get an extra item, it's stored away for later. Once you get hit, that item automatically drops down within your vicinity in the middle of the screen, which cheapens the risk of death and makes standard play a bit auto-pilot at times, because you will run into the power-up and instantly gain back your previous state. Later Mario games refined this mechanic to just be an extra boon to utilize (For example, New Super Mario Bros. does not automatically dispense items when getting hit, only when YOU choose to touch the bottom screen for it, and in Bowser's Fury you're even incentivized to stock up on various power-ups in order to switch to them on the fly and modify your playstyle to tackle different challenges that would neccesitate it). In World, it's all done in service of the player experiencing virtually no discomfort or challenge, and while this is great for younger and newer players, it doesn't teach them good habits when it comes to platforming in other Mario games. And the frequency in which you find power-ups in general is dialed up a notch as well. While we're mentioning the power-ups, I'd like to also say that 1-UPs are also liberally dispensed, which makes World an ultimately soft-challenge of a Mario game.
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The variation in the world itself is mediocre. Now what on Earth do I mean by this exactly? Well, this encompasses story and worldbuilding. Ostensibly, the game takes place with a Peachnapping in a place called Dinosaur Land, yet... I do not see much in the way of dinosaurs, let alone anything prehistoric as the DIC cartoon would have you believe. You are basically relegated to Rexes, Reznors, Dino-Rhinos and... Blarggs, I guess??? Aside from Yoshi as well, where exactly are all these "dinosaurs"? The few on display here are used sparingly. It's strange to me that it would take
a fan reimagination to properly populate the Dinosaur Land with a believable fauna. I think World would have greatly benefited in having more dino-esque enemies populating the stages, and would have contributed to a more overall stronger and cohesive identity that would lend itself to being memorable. Aside from the enemies and NPCs, we have these weird new Message Blocks dispensing tips at odd intervals, which is a lowkey way of the devs telling the player how to do certain actions or how to proceed. On the one hand, this might SEEM like a plus to worldbuilding, as you can explain in more detail various facets of the world and gameplay, but at the same time it's so disjointed as to be unusual. If people take issue with the Wonder Flowers in Super Mario Bros. Wonder yammering at you, then they'll need to reconcile the fact that this very same intrusion is present in World and in fact
began in World to begin with.
Want more mediocre variation? Well aside from what I covered with the lack of level themes, we also have a lack of power-ups. Sure, the ones in 3 can often just be super rare as to not really mean much of anything, but it wouldn't have killed World to have at least 1 new extra power-up. I mean, if a new 2D Mario came out today, there would be outrage if there was only 1 new power-up. Imagine if WONDER only had the ELEPHANT FRUIT as its sole content contribution. That's the level we're dealing with here. And before you point it out,
yes, you could count Yoshi himself as a power-up, but he serves more of a mascot role that you can temporarily control than anything you can plop out of thin air from the pocket system. Ah, I did also forget to mention in my previous key-point that Yoshi himself breaks the game to the same extent as the Cape Feather does. You can, in theory, ride Yoshi and get hit numerous times so long as you jump back up on him before he runs off, as well as ditch him for an extra bit of height (How callous and cruel of a player to do that! Am I right?). It says a lot when the Mario devs restrict usage of Yoshi while inside fortress levels, because there had to be at LEAST a modicum of challenge to the proceedings, but now that I say that, I wouldn't be surprised if it was also due to the color palette limitations. Either way...
But yeah, that's my whole spiel on World. Again, it really pains me to say this, because as a kid I enjoyed playing it, but growing up now and comparing it to other 2D Marios, even newer ones past the classic trilogy, it just doesn't hold up, and it really boggles my mind as to how it can be considered a legendary 10 out of 10 masterpiece, but seeing as how piss easy it is, I can see how it appealed to more players than the other games. It would seem World gets by on mere recognition of its status in pop culture than anything really having to do with the merits of gameplay on a deep level.
And believe it or not, that's about the only real unpopular opinion regarding Mario that I have.
Well... Besides also not being terribly fond of Super Mario Odyssey, but we'll leave that discussion for another day.
