Unpopular opinions about the Mario series

I find it funny that the best way to kneecap a character's (or anything) chances of winning is to completely remove the award. Like removing the Worst Enemy award so that Hammer Bro. won't be winning it, or removing Most Disappointing Game because Paper Mario: Sticker Star keeps winning.

Thank you for reading.
 
Yeah, I agree that's pretty funny. Like, I heard that they also had to remove the Worst Character Award in the Fail Awards since Pink Gold Peach kept winning it from the year she was introduced onward. So to keep the same character/enemy/game/whatever from always winning the same award in a landslide "victory" each year, they had to completely shelve that particular category.
 
Why is Paper Mario Sticker Star so hated on? I've never actually played it nor seen gameplay of it outside of Snifit or Whiffit but I have heard that it is a slow game with an unfun battle system.
 
LuigiFan24 said:
Why is Paper Mario Sticker Star so hated on? I've never actually played it nor seen gameplay of it outside of Snifit or Whiffit but I have heard that it is a slow game with an unfun battle system.
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The one thing I can say is the lack of Luigi, though. I wouldn't play it because of that alone lol.
 
LuigiFan24 said:
The one thing I can say is the lack of Luigi, though. I wouldn't play it because of that alone lol.
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The closest you'll get to Luigi in Sticker Star is finding him through five silent cameo's, and if you manage to get all of those cameo's, he'll appear in the game's ending credits, leading the parade as he did in Paper Mario 64 (and to a lesser extent, Paper Mario: The Thousand Year Door).
 
LuigiFan24 said:
Why is Paper Mario Sticker Star so hated on? I've never actually played it nor seen gameplay of it outside of Snifit or Whiffit but I have heard that it is a slow game with an unfun battle system.
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Sticker Star defender here, but I think I've heard enough to know the answers
  • Lack of non Toad friendly NPCs, While prior Paper Mario games have a wealth of different species to meet, ranging from new ones, to old ones given ally status, to allied groups of normally enemy species, Sticker Star's allies are Toads, Toads, more Toads, and then one Wiggler.
  • Really just the story's small scope: We're confined to the Mushroom Kingdom, and the world themes are just traditional themes from Super Mario Bros. games. Especially New Super Mario Bros. games which (some parts of) the Mario fandom would grow to dislike more and more as they kept releasing. All Bowser does is cause havoc and kidnap Peach, things he does in more or less any video game. The story is to collect the all mystical shiny baubles, which is justification enough for a game, but this is only in service of fixing the thing that broke at the start, and while the story tries to explain what makes that thing important, many (including me) would argue that the attempt is not good enough to motivate the player through the game. The game has three "towns", and for the count to even reach three I have to strech the definition of "town" far more than actual RPG players. Its more like "1.5". In one sense, Mario isn't even exploring the world in this game, it's just a really big backyard that players have already been to twice before this game came out.
  • No Bowser: Bowser isn't a main character in the game. People like Bowser, and his over the top prideful and arrogant nature. Here, Bowser gets no dialogue. After the intro, where he powers up, his next appearance is at the end of the game, where he still has no dialogue and is only the end boss.
  • No customization: Without stats or equippable anythings, Sticker Star's battle system is just a back and forth of attacks with little in the way of customization or "builds". It may be a combat system, but if you want growth in the sense of the character getting stronger, Sticker Star doesn't provide that. Some people might even say Sticker Star has nothing in the way of strategy: this isn't a system where you can find an interesting niche set up or anything that feels personal to the player. (I think there's still "strategy" to the game, but it is true that there is less of it.)
  • Why battle anyway?: If getting better at fighting doesn't progress the player toward goals, why bother fighting to begin with? Experience points and levels serve to make players fight the optional minor enemies because without them the mandatory boss enemies will be impossible to defeat. Sticker Star has neither, so skipping every non-boss opponent is a valid means through the game. Some people say that shouldn't happen (I think they're wrong, they missed that Sticker Star values money highly and that is the main reward for fighting, but still.)
  • No Partners: This combines small scope and no customization. Without other characters to help in battle, the player is making fewer choices per turn. Without other characters outside of battle, the world feels smaller. All you get is Kersti, another fairy companion who has quips. They're a dime a dozen these days.
  • Inventory Mismanagement: Have you seen all those people who hate weapon durablity? Yeah its this. Since all of the attacks can only be used once, players have reason to not want to fight enemies, which will make them lose all their good attacks as they use them up in battles. People hate losing their hard earned stuff.
  • Overpowered Attacks: Things are universally overpowered for their size and their Action Commands being largely optional... but then they feel cheap to use. But since they're so good, using them on common enemies feels like a waste
  • (Poorly made) Point and Click Adventure:
    • Paperization, while conceptially very cute, is an absolute disaster of a puzzle solving mechanic. Mostly because whatever it does do is esentiallly a die roll, varying wildly depending on what setpiece the developers want to include. It's hard to determine when you need to paperize short of getting in the developer's heads. (This isn't helped by the game's text, whose best advice is to Paperize basically anytime you think you are stuck. Its not great advice, even if it is accurate.) Players could genuinely get stuck, with nothing in the game available to help them.
    • Often, the solution to puzzles is to use certain Things in Paperization, but the game's inventory mechanics discourage you from holding on to Things you don't intend to use and the game's battle system means that if you need to use a Thing in a puzzle, using it in a ballte before hand means you have to track down a second copy of the Thing to use. So players shouldn't use their Things in battle for any reason, and if they find a puzzle that requires a Thing that means backtracking all the way back to town to get the Thing. Mind that this means walking all the way back out of the level, because Sticker Star does not allow the player to quit out of uncompleted levels. And if a player uses the wrong Thing in a puzzle, the Thing is lost, meaning they wasted valuable time/in game money on obtaining the Thing. This discourages experimentation, which is kind of important to making the player want to sniff out the solution instead of being annoyed that they have to figure it out. Real point and click adventure games usually don't take away the player's items as the penalty for being wrong for a reason.
    • Boss fights double down on this already painful weakness. All of them have weaknesses to certain Stickers, usually always a kind of Thing. Unless the player is clairvoyant, they probably don't have that Thing in their possession. Without the weakness available, boss fights become endurance matches against particularly unfair opponents, and there's one boss who outright cannot be defeated without their weakness. I mean, the player could flee, but they still probably don't know what the weakness is and trying random Things to figure it out is both time consuming and inventory space consuming. If the player has the weakness, most bosses crumple at the slightest touch, perhaps making the battles too easy. In theory, the process of "figuring out the weakness" should counterbalance this, but odds are high players players who don't know the weakness don't have it on hand, so it isn't really a game of "figuring it out" to begin with.
      • After defeating a boss without using their weakness, Kersti reminds the player that they should have used the boss's weakness. For no reason... or rather, the developers wanted to encourage players to experiment but in practice it just made players feel bad.
  • Changing the style to be literal: Paper Mario: Sticker Star changes the series stylistically from "everyone looks like they are made of paper" to "everything is literally made of cardboard and paper, including the characters, but except the Things". These are very different styles, and some people did not like the swap.
(Yes, I am fully aware that I should just write a 'Shroom Sticker Star review section)
 
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Mario Galaxy is the first Mario game that actively tries to be beautiful.
 
I'm just gonna say this and I know people are gonna hate me for this. I really don't like when Nintendo remasters their games such as what's happening with super Mario Galaxy although it first started with the All-Stars game got released I was OK with something like the advanced series But when you remastered something like the galaxy series, it looks looks worse than before like it was made by a fan or like a 3DS quality.
 
Marioro said:
It's more so that they're pricey.
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I agree for no fucking reason and Nintendo is so fucking greedy at this point that I want to really protest by actually buying products from the thrift store and I'm currently hunting for that
 
Mario Kart Live Home Circuit should not cost as much as it does. It's pretty much an RC car with a camera and Switch software. The software itself is free.
 
Salmancer said:
Sticker Star defender here, but I think I've heard enough to know the answers
  • Lack of non Toad friendly NPCs, While prior Paper Mario games have a wealth of different species to meet, ranging from new ones, to old ones given ally status, to allied groups of normally enemy species, Sticker Star's allies are Toads, Toads, more Toads, and then one Wiggler.
  • Really just the story's small scope: We're confined to the Mushroom Kingdom, and the world themes are just traditional themes from Super Mario Bros. games. Especially New Super Mario Bros. games which (some parts of) the Mario fandom would grow to dislike more and more as they kept releasing. All Bowser does is cause havoc and kidnap Peach, things he does in more or less any video game. The story is to collect the all mystical shiny baubles, which is justification enough for a game, but this is only in service of fixing the thing that broke at the start, and while the story tries to explain what makes that thing important, many (including me) would argue that the attempt is not good enough to motivate the player through the game. The game has three "towns", and for the count to even reach three I have to strech the definition of "town" far more than actual RPG players. Its more like "1.5". In one sense, Mario isn't even exploring the world in this game, it's just a really big backyard that players have already been to twice before this game came out.
  • No Bowser: Bowser isn't a main character in the game. People like Bowser, and his over the top prideful and arrogant nature. Here, Bowser gets no dialogue. After the intro, where he powers up, his next appearance is at the end of the game, where he still has no dialogue and is only the end boss.
  • No customization: Without stats or equippable anythings, Sticker Star's battle system is just a back and forth of attacks with little in the way of customization or "builds". It may be a combat system, but if you want growth in the sense of the character getting stronger, Sticker Star doesn't provide that. Some people might even say Sticker Star has nothing in the way of strategy: this isn't a system where you can find an interesting niche set up or anything that feels personal to the player. (I think there's still "strategy" to the game, but it is true that there is less of it.)
  • Why battle anyway?: If getting better at fighting doesn't progress the player toward goals, why bother fighting to begin with? Experience points and levels serve to make players fight the optional minor enemies because without them the mandatory boss enemies will be impossible to defeat. Sticker Star has neither, so skipping every non-boss opponent is a valid means through the game. Some people say that shouldn't happen (I think they're wrong, they missed that Sticker Star values money highly and that is the main reward for fighting, but still.)
  • No Partners: This combines small scope and no customization. Without other characters to help in battle, the player is making fewer choices per turn. Without other characters outside of battle, the world feels smaller. All you get is Kersti, another fairy companion who has quips. They're a dime a dozen these days.
  • Inventory Mismanagement: Have you seen all those people who hate weapon durablity? Yeah its this. Since all of the attacks can only be used once, players have reason to not want to fight enemies, which will make them lose all their good attacks as they use them up in battles. People hate losing their hard earned stuff.
  • Overpowered Attacks: Things are universally overpowered for their size and their Action Commands being largely optional... but then they feel cheap to use. But since they're so good, using them on common enemies feels like a waste
  • (Poorly made) Point and Click Adventure:
    • Paperization, while conceptially very cute, is an absolute disaster of a puzzle solving mechanic. Mostly because whatever it does do is esentiallly a die roll, varying wildly depending on what setpiece the developers want to include. It's hard to determine when you need to paperize short of getting in the developer's heads. (This isn't helped by the game's text, whose best advice is to Paperize basically anytime you think you are stuck. Its not great advice, even if it is accurate.) Players could genuinely get stuck, with nothing in the game available to help them.
    • Often, the solution to puzzles is to use certain Things in Paperization, but the game's inventory mechanics discourage you from holding on to Things you don't intend to use and the game's battle system means that if you need to use a Thing in a puzzle, using it in a ballte before hand means you have to track down a second copy of the Thing to use. So players shouldn't use their Things in battle for any reason, and if they find a puzzle that requires a Thing that means backtracking all the way back to town to get the Thing. Mind that this means walking all the way back out of the level, because Sticker Star does not allow the player to quit out of uncompleted levels. And if a player uses the wrong Thing in a puzzle, the Thing is lost, meaning they wasted valuable time/in game money on obtaining the Thing. This discourages experimentation, which is kind of important to making the player want to sniff out the solution instead of being annoyed that they have to figure it out. Real point and click adventure games usually don't take away the player's items as the penalty for being wrong for a reason.
    • Boss fights double down on this already painful weakness. All of them have weaknesses to certain Stickers, usually always a kind of Thing. Unless the player is clairvoyant, they probably don't have that Thing in their possession. Without the weakness available, boss fights become endurance matches against particularly unfair opponents, and there's one boss who outright cannot be defeated without their weakness. I mean, the player could flee, but they still probably don't know what the weakness is and trying random Things to figure it out is both time consuming and inventory space consuming. If the player has the weakness, most bosses crumple at the slightest touch, perhaps making the battles too easy. In theory, the process of "figuring out the weakness" should counterbalance this, but odds are high players players who don't know the weakness don't have it on hand, so it isn't really a game of "figuring it out" to begin with.
      • After defeating a boss without using their weakness, Kersti reminds the player that they should have used the boss's weakness. For no reason... or rather, the developers wanted to encourage players to experiment but in practice it just made players feel bad.
  • Changing the style to be literal: Paper Mario: Sticker Star changes the series stylistically from "everyone looks like they are made of paper" to "everything is literally made of cardboard and paper, including the characters, but except the Things". These are very different styles, and some people did not like the swap.
(Yes, I am fully aware that I should just write a 'Shroom Sticker Star review section)
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Other than the lack of Luigi (but that's just me 😏) , Sticker Star doesn't seem like a terrible game. It honestly seems fine.
 
Mario Party 9 and 10 are underrated games. I've seen gameplay of them and they seem great!
 
LuigiFan24 said:
Mario Party 9 and 10 are underrated games. I've seen gameplay of them and they seem great!
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As someone who's played all but two of the Mario Party games and who spent months on a video script ranking every minigame from 14 of those games, I'll defend them from the "Mario Party 9 and 10 are some of the worst games ever made" crowd all day but I can provide a somewhat big list of reasons why they're not good as Mario Party games.

MP9:
-The car is awful. Not only does it remove any semblance of strategy because you have no control over where you are at the start of your turn, but it incentivizes speeding to the end because bigger rolls means a better chance of something that will put you in the lead.
-A side effect of the car is that party mode games end in like 15 minutes sometimes, maybe 30 minutes if you're playing with other people. That's pretty pathetic when I could boot up any game that came before it and play for multiple hours. I have the option to do 10-turners if I want but that's not literally every single game.
-ND Cube is really obsessed with side modes. This is a problem that's never really gone away, but at least in those cases they actually had the time to develop the board play before they went to the side modes. For 9 though, if the only reason I ever feel like going back to it is to play Garden Battle, what's the point of calling it a Mario Party game?
-This game was released during peak Toadification of Mario games and it shows because this was the first game to introduce Toads as hosts alongside Toad as a playable character. This has never changed, with the exception of adding Kamek as a side host, and people continue to not like it for a reason.
-9 has a reputation of being the first "bad" Mario Party and for ruining the series. I would disagree with that because I'm not a 90s kid and I don't think the series peaked with 1 and 2 but it is a reason it gets so much hate.

MP10:
-No one liked the car from 9 and yet that's what they chose to bring back of all things, which also comes with all the problems it had in 9.
-Mario Party 10 reeks of being rushed. It has less content than either 9 or Island Tour (which came out on a handheld so there's no excuse for that) in both boards and minigames, and Bowser Party is only playable on three of the five boards.
-Bowser Party is a cool idea but it's really just a glorified side mode. Its execution was also pretty bad since it's so stacked in favor of Bowser. Like, if you get any roll that isn't enough to catch you up to the car as Bowser, you can just do it again and I think that's stupid.
-To add to the rushed vibe, this was the first mainline Mario Party, if not the first Mario Party at all, to not have any kind of story mode. If you're a single player like me, it can really help to have a mode designed for single players but that just didn't exist in MP10.
-All the board themes feel so uninspired and NSMBified. Gone are the days of fun places like Faire Square and Neon Heights; now we have standard spooky forest board, standard underwater board, and standard Bowser board.
-amiibo Party is just...bad. It's already physically paywalled behind amiibo but when you can open it, you're greeted with an extremely uninspired bastardization of traditional Mario Party board play where everyone is either amiibo figures or cardboard standees and you're just playing on a square. It also makes you scan your amiibo far too often for it to be fun as its own thing.
-Mario in the mid 2010s struggled with a lack of personality and dear god, MP10 is no less guilty of that. I may hate Mario Party 1 and think it's aged extremely badly but at least you got some fun menus to make your experience that little bit better. Even in Mario Party 9, you could watch the characters wandering around in the background. But in 10, you open the main menu and you're greeted with static rectangles and a bland background with nothing going on.
-There is one (1) song that I find memorable from the MP10 soundtrack and I think it's used in like, two minigames. Even the instructions screen music is just dull compared to what came before it.
-This is a lot pettier but why did they try to make Spike a thing? I think it's funny when they try to make the most random characters a thing (looking at you, Pom Pom in Super Mario Party) but it's just a strange choice. And even crazier, it kind of worked?

All that being said, I really think ND Cube knows how to make a good minigame. They have their fair share of stinkers but I think 9 and 10 genuinely have some of the series' best minigames. 9 has Tumble Temple and Goomba Bowling, and 10 has Flash Forward and Soar to Score. 9 also has a pretty decent soundtrack and I really do think they wasted the Bowser Jr. boss music on that really anticlimactic final midboss minigame. Other highlights include (and apologies that I can't remember their names right now) the one from the second half of all the other midbosses, Speeding Bullets, and the minigame instructions music. The problem isn't that they're bad games in a vacuum, it's that they're bad Mario Party games.

E: And if you don't believe me that the car was a bad mechanic, I can prove it was by the fact that they've released two original, much better received Mario Party games without the car. Super Mario Party had pretty mixed reception but one of the most common opinions I saw was that it was a step in the right direction to get rid of the car and move back toward traditional Mario Party. Then Jamboree came out last year and pretty quickly became like, my third favorite game in the series.
 
Kam said:
As someone who's played all but two of the Mario Party games and who spent months on a video script ranking every minigame from 14 of those games, I'll defend them from the "Mario Party 9 and 10 are some of the worst games ever made" crowd all day but I can provide a somewhat big list of reasons why they're not good as Mario Party games.

MP9:
-The car is awful. Not only does it remove any semblance of strategy because you have no control over where you are at the start of your turn, but it incentivizes speeding to the end because bigger rolls means a better chance of something that will put you in the lead.
-A side effect of the car is that party mode games end in like 15 minutes sometimes, maybe 30 minutes if you're playing with other people. That's pretty pathetic when I could boot up any game that came before it and play for multiple hours. I have the option to do 10-turners if I want but that's not literally every single game.
-ND Cube is really obsessed with side modes. This is a problem that's never really gone away, but at least in those cases they actually had the time to develop the board play before they went to the side modes. For 9 though, if the only reason I ever feel like going back to it is to play Garden Battle, what's the point of calling it a Mario Party game?
-This game was released during peak Toadification of Mario games and it shows because this was the first game to introduce Toads as hosts alongside Toad as a playable character. This has never changed, with the exception of adding Kamek as a side host, and people continue to not like it for a reason.
-9 has a reputation of being the first "bad" Mario Party and for ruining the series. I would disagree with that because I'm not a 90s kid and I don't think the series peaked with 1 and 2 but it is a reason it gets so much hate.

MP10:
-No one liked the car from 9 and yet that's what they chose to bring back of all things, which also comes with all the problems it had in 9.
-Mario Party 10 reeks of being rushed. It has less content than either 9 or Island Tour (which came out on a handheld so there's no excuse for that) in both boards and minigames, and Bowser Party is only playable on three of the five boards.
-Bowser Party is a cool idea but it's really just a glorified side mode. Its execution was also pretty bad since it's so stacked in favor of Bowser. Like, if you get any roll that isn't enough to catch you up to the car as Bowser, you can just do it again and I think that's stupid.
-To add to the rushed vibe, this was the first mainline Mario Party, if not the first Mario Party at all, to not have any kind of story mode. If you're a single player like me, it can really help to have a mode designed for single players but that just didn't exist in MP10.
-All the board themes feel so uninspired and NSMBified. Gone are the days of fun places like Faire Square and Neon Heights; now we have standard spooky forest board, standard underwater board, and standard Bowser board.
-amiibo Party is just...bad. It's already physically paywalled behind amiibo but when you can open it, you're greeted with an extremely uninspired bastardization of traditional Mario Party board play where everyone is either amiibo figures or cardboard standees and you're just playing on a square. It also makes you scan your amiibo far too often for it to be fun as its own thing.
-Mario in the mid 2010s struggled with a lack of personality and dear god, MP10 is no less guilty of that. I may hate Mario Party 1 and think it's aged extremely badly but at least you got some fun menus to make your experience that little bit better. Even in Mario Party 9, you could watch the characters wandering around in the background. But in 10, you open the main menu and you're greeted with static rectangles and a bland background with nothing going on.
-There is one (1) song that I find memorable from the MP10 soundtrack and I think it's used in like, two minigames. Even the instructions screen music is just dull compared to what came before it.
-This is a lot pettier but why did they try to make Spike a thing? I think it's funny when they try to make the most random characters a thing (looking at you, Pom Pom in Super Mario Party) but it's just a strange choice. And even crazier, it kind of worked?

All that being said, I really think ND Cube knows how to make a good minigame. They have their fair share of stinkers but I think 9 and 10 genuinely have some of the series' best minigames. 9 has Tumble Temple and Goomba Bowling, and 10 has Flash Forward and Soar to Score. 9 also has a pretty decent soundtrack and I really do think they wasted the Bowser Jr. boss music on that really anticlimactic final midboss minigame. Other highlights include (and apologies that I can't remember their names right now) the one from the second half of all the other midbosses, Speeding Bullets, and the minigame instructions music. The problem isn't that they're bad games in a vacuum, it's that they're bad Mario Party games.

E: And if you don't believe me that the car was a bad mechanic, I can prove it was by the fact that they've released two original, much better received Mario Party games without the car. Super Mario Party had pretty mixed reception but one of the most common opinions I saw was that it was a step in the right direction to get rid of the car and move back toward traditional Mario Party. Then Jamboree came out last year and pretty quickly became like, my third favorite game in the series.
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I can understand the whole lack of original boards for some people but for me, as a fan of NSMB series I like the simple vibe. Also, this may just be me, but Mario Party 10 has my favorite music, graphics, and minigames out of all the Mario Party series. I have to say the worst Mario Party game is likely Mario Party Advance. But knowing Nintendo, I have a feeling that might be coming to Game Boy Advance - Nintendo Classics in the future.
 
I like the Wii U
 
monstrasm said:
I like the Wii U
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Me too! It's probably my second favorite console after the Switch. I don't own one (I want to) but my friend owns one and I think the Wii U had a lot of charm. Also, while a lot of it's great first party games did get ported to switch, the ones that should have are Mario Party 10, Paper Mario Color Splash, and Yoshi's Woolly World.
 
Cryptid Odyssey said:
Creating Mario Maker levels with the Wii-U game pad felt really natural and fun. I hope that mouse controls are able to bring that back in any sequels or updates to Mario Maker 2
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Yeah I'm surprised Nintendo hasn't announced a Switch 2 edition for SMM2 or even a 3rd game. I was sort of expecting that for the 40th anniversary lol.
 
3D World requiring you to beat the game 5 times for 5 stamps feels like when Galaxy's post game content was playing the whole game again but with a Luigi skin.
 
Marioro said:
3D World requiring you to beat the game 5 times for 5 stamps feels like when Galaxy's post game content was playing the whole game again but with a Luigi skin.
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"And if that ain't replay value, my name ain't Rex Viper RIIIIGS!!!"
 
Marioro said:
3D World requiring you to beat the game 5 times for 5 stamps feels like when Galaxy's post game content was playing the whole game again but with a Luigi skin.
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As a diehard Luigi fan, I'm looking forward to playing Galaxy as Luigi after beating it as Mario.
 
The New Super Mario Bros games are overhated and deserve much more credit for honoring the legacy of the old 2D Mario games and bringing the spirit of those games back to life for contemporary generations.
 
Skuchi037 said:
The New Super Mario Bros games are overhated and deserve much more credit for honoring the legacy of the old 2D Mario games and bringing the spirit of those games back to life for contemporary generations.
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I agree! I'm a huge fan of th NSMB series and would love to see it return! I've played Wii and U Deluxe and I've seen gameplay of DS and 2. All four are amazing! 🤩
 
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