Unpopular opinions about the Mario series

How do you feel about 64 DS?

Also don't bang on Wet Dry World, it's my favorite level in the game.
 
Xiahou Ba said:
How do you feel about 64 DS?

Also don't bang on Wet Dry World, it's my favorite level in the game.
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Lack of analog control doesn't bother me, I'm biased because I grew up with it though lol. I prefer its art style over the original, there's more graphism to it, but it still has that low poly crunch and just the right amount of it. I can vibe in DS's world more than I can N64's.

Well, it's dry enough that I forgot that it falls under the water level category, so it gets a pass lmao.
 
- The Brooklyn backstory should've been kept, with Yoshi's Island being explicitly non-canon in the vein of Muppet Babies or The Flintstone Kids.
- I was not impressed enough by the animated Mario film to see the whole thing. Most of the promotional material told me what I needed to know about how the movie's plot would go, and I was not impressed with Illumination's creative liberties.
- Super Mario Bros. Wonder should've kept the characters having individual platforming abilities. Part of the appeal of multiple playable characters is having different gameplay quirks that add to replay value.
- Mario Kart World's roster isn't that good.
 
Cornpopio said:
- The Brooklyn backstory should've been kept, with Yoshi's Island being explicitly non-canon in the vein of Muppet Babies or The Flintstone Kids.
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After seeing the Mario movie I think it's much more preferable to be the setup for Mario's childhood over the Yoshi's Island stuff. I want Mario and Luigi to have a fairly normal childhood, not be victim to kidnapping and being separated from parents. I still want to see Mario's family in games including RPGs where I actually would rather have them than RPG OCs.
 
Xiahou Dun said:
After seeing the Mario movie I think it's much more preferable to be the setup for Mario's childhood over the Yoshi's Island stuff. I want Mario and Luigi to have a fairly normal childhood, not be victim to kidnapping and being separated from parents. I still want to see Mario's family in games including RPGs where I actually would rather have them than RPG OCs.
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I've always considered the Brooklyn backstory to be the canon backstory for Mario and Luigi ever since DiC Entertainment first created it for The Super Mario Brothers Super Show back in 1989 while considering Yoshi's Island to be its own separate non-canon timeline akin to Muppet Babies or Flintstones Kids as Cornpopio expressed.
 
Not sure if this is unpopular, but shafting first Charles Martinet then Samantha Kelly when they've made it clear they wanted to keep voicing their characters as long as they could is truly disgraceful. Same goes for Deanna Mustard and inevitably Kenny James.

Even if this would still happen under Iwata or Reggie, I get the feeling they'd have been a lot fairer to the voice actors.
 
Cornpopio said:
Not sure if this is unpopular, but shafting first Charles Martinet then Samantha Kelly when they've made it clear they wanted to keep voicing their characters as long as they could is truly disgraceful. Same goes for Deanna Mustard and inevitably Kenny James.

Even if this would still happen under Iwata or Reggie, I get the feeling they'd have been a lot fairer to the voice actors.
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I don't really follow the whole drama surrounding Nintendo's treatment of their voice actors, but my guess is that Furakawa and Doug operate on a "better to be unethical than uneconomical" kind of policy compared to Iwata and Reggie, which is a huge shame, but sadly, we as Nintendo fans (Which is a very generous statement given how Nintendo has been shooting themselves in the foot over the last who-knows-how-many years regarding their public image) are powerless to do anything about it other than avoiding to give Nintendo money as much as we possibly can.
 
I've said this before and I'll say it again, Yoshi's Island SNES is a poorly designed platformer, and I don't quite care for it at all. I'll take Yoshi's New Island and Wooly World over it any day.
 
I 100% agree with you but I would love to hear you elaborate because I love being validated.
 
The obstacle design is mind-boggling, every enemy is more obnoxious than the last, its punishments are too steep in general. I hate the score system, having to nab every collectible in one run feels so redundant when you fail your first time, miss one red coin and you have to find everything all over again. You're practically stabbed in the heart for trying to seek more from it, there's no respect for your time.

Level elements don't feel like they properly iterate on each other within a given stage, the pacing of said stages are miserable like the difficulty curve. There's this distinct lack of polish through the entire playthrough, some of the hitboxes of these enemies make my blood boil. The sound design can be torturous, the ice levels... don't get me started on the squeaking... Don't get me started on Yoshi's jump sfx........ the soundtrack got on my nerves so unbelievably fast.

I would go as far to say because it's a SNES game from the 90s, the only reason it's so highly regarded in internet circles is because its player base was the first generation on the web and they got to sing their nostalgic praises for the thing, right before anyone else could get a word in!

The art style is endearing, that's all there is to it. Say skill issue or whatever but it's just not enjoyable.
 
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Here is mine if you want a recap lol

Xiahou Ba said:
So in my opinion:

  • Level design is a mess, the game will throw multiple kinds of shit at you but none of them will stick out because it tries to do everything at once and introduce too many ideas. For example, the game's first Gusty level has only the first section actually be about Gusties, does virtually nothing with it except spam them at you, while you spend the rest of the level underground (the same level also has a very pointless, short, Superstar Mario segment they threw in because hey remember that power-up?). In comparison, I prefer the more modern approach where they introduce Gusty in one level but it makes for a more focused time taking advantage of their mechanics than throw in like, fucking random Baseball Boys segments on top of it.
  • Everything about the collection system is terrible and awful, one of the most miserable games to go for 100% in, it's already laid out in KCC's post but it's such a huge reason I hate the game, especially since extra levels are locked behind it (whether those levels are worth playing or not, idk, the rest of the game isn't worth playing).
  • I spent a level almost getting 100% only to get ambushed by a Bandit at the very end of it, forcing me to farm Red Eggs to replenish my star count (no I don't have the extra stars bonus item). This was not fun.
  • Red coins are awful and everything about them suck, it's not fun to scour every single nook and cranny and pixel and collect every single fucking coin of the level to find them, especially since the levels tend to be big (another reason I prefer New Island is because the more linear level design heavily works in favor of this collection system so you don't have to do tedious back and forth scouring the levels).
  • Repeatedly pausing to check your collectibles is not fun.
  • Terrible Super FX "3D" graphics that look like shit and play and platform like shit that aged terribly. People love to give flak for the mismatched YIDS sprites but none of it compare to the horrible looking corkscrews and Bacura-like flip panels straight from fucking Xevious.
  • The minigame huts, where all minigames are terrible and waste your time.
  • The bonus challenges, where all of them are terrible and waste your time.
  • The vehicle sections, where they are clunky and they play terrible.
  • Oh, Yoshi's New Island has only one autoscrolling level.

Would prefer you don't go piece by piece in my post telling me why I'm wrong and why it's bad that I don't enjoy this platformer, just explaining why I personally don't like it.

The only thing I like about this game is that it looks pretty, that's it. And yeah it's technically Baby Luigi's debut but he's barely in it, Double Dash is where he really debuts in tbh.

I didn't even mention Baby Mario in my post because his crying isn't even that big of a deal lol, especially compared to the tons of obnoxious elements I've mentioned above that makes up for it.
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Flygon64 said:
the soundtrack got on my nerves so unbelievably fast
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nobody brings up the dreadful jungle music because it's like the same set of irritating notes that play on a loop for like 5 seconds for the entire song
 
Lord Tatanga said:
I don't really follow the whole drama surrounding Nintendo's treatment of their voice actors, but my guess is that Furakawa and Doug operate on a "better to be unethical than uneconomical" kind of policy compared to Iwata and Reggie, which is a huge shame, but sadly, we as Nintendo fans (Which is a very generous statement given how Nintendo has been shooting themselves in the foot over the last who-knows-how-many years regarding their public image) are powerless to do anything about it other than avoiding to give Nintendo money as much as we possibly can.
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If they really had to replace them so soon. The least they could've done is allowed the actors to handpick their successors.
 
Cornpopio said:
If they really had to replace them so soon. The least they could've done is allowed the actors to handpick their successors.
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Looking at the situation from a realistic perspective, I'm afraid that voice actors themselves don't really get a say in who gets to take over their duties, no matter how unfortunate that may sound. Yes, it sucks to be thrown under the bus by Nintendo the way Charles Martinet, Deanna Mustard and now Samantha Kelly (And Takashi Nagasako, from what I've been hearing through back channels) were, but there's sadly nothing they could do about it, nor much that we can do about it. The best thing we (and the aforementioned voice actors) can do is move on from this all, no matter how difficult that may be.
 
I know some people might like her but for me baby Rosalina is just stupid first off her inclusion in the Mario Kart games lore wise makes NO sense and he's just another copy cat of baby peach and baby daisy and finally they wasted the chance to have HD Dry bowser in Mario Kart world rather than this copy cat! But still at least it's better thank pink gold peach
 
Boo1268 said:
I know some people might like her but for me baby Rosalina is just stupid first off her inclusion in the Mario Kart games lore wise makes NO sense and he's just another copy cat of baby peach and baby daisy and finally they wasted the chance to have HD Dry bowser in Mario Kart world rather than this copy cat! But still at least it's better thank pink gold peach
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There's a lot of characters from Mario spin-off games that I find unnecessary to have in the series at all, such as Baby Daisy, Baby Rosalina, Metal Mario, Gold Mario, Pink Gold Peach et cetera.. Like, they have no reason to exist, yet they do for some unfathomable reason.
 
Lord Tatanga said:
I don't really follow the whole drama surrounding Nintendo's treatment of their voice actors, but my guess is that Furakawa and Doug operate on a "better to be unethical than uneconomical" kind of policy compared to Iwata and Reggie, which is a huge shame, but sadly, we as Nintendo fans (Which is a very generous statement given how Nintendo has been shooting themselves in the foot over the last who-knows-how-many years regarding their public image) are powerless to do anything about it other than avoiding to give Nintendo money as much as we possibly can.
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I'd like to point out that Nintendo has been a soulless, unethical corporation for practically most of its video game history and things actually hadn't been much better back then. During Iwata's era, Nintendo had the horrific Content Creator program on YouTube and pursued extremely aggressive DMCA take-downs, trying to force people to join their creator program on top of an already restrictive policy, and this type of curation was an anomaly compared to other game publishers. Additionally, under Iwata and Reggie, Nintendo was probably the worst company when it came to conflict mineral mining, something they did clean up relatively recently (albeit by just avoiding those areas rather than actually adjusting their policies to comply with regulations). Nintendo supported the extremely notorious SOPA act all the way back in 2012. Abusive and aggressive copyright protections have always been the norm for this company, and they continue to do so today.

Lord Tatanga said:
There's a lot of characters from Mario spin-off games that I find unnecessary to have in the series at all, such as Baby Daisy, Baby Rosalina, Metal Mario, Gold Mario, Pink Gold Peach et cetera.. Like, they have no reason to exist, yet they do for some unfathomable reason.
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Baby Daisy and Baby Rosalina were added to appeal to little girls who play Mario Kart, while the metals are low effort characters to give middleweight characters heavy stats. You may not like them but they did have a purpose, and they have their fans.

Boo1268 said:
I know some people might like her but for me baby Rosalina is just stupid first off her inclusion in the Mario Kart games lore wise makes NO sense and he's just another copy cat of baby peach and baby daisy and finally they wasted the chance to have HD Dry bowser in Mario Kart world rather than this copy cat! But still at least it's better thank pink gold peach
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Very weird flex to say that you hate copy cats and then say you want a skeletal variant of Bowser playable instead.

Regardless Baby Rosalina is never a very popular character in these online communities so I'm not sure what this opinion is doing in the unpopular opinions thread.
 
Xiahou Ba said:
I'd like to point out that Nintendo has been a soulless, unethical corporation for practically most of its video game history and things actually hadn't been much better back then. During Iwata's era, Nintendo had the horrific Content Creator program on YouTube and pursued extremely aggressive DMCA take-downs, trying to force people to join their creator program on top of an already restrictive policy, and this type of curation was an anomaly compared to other game publishers. Additionally, under Iwata and Reggie, Nintendo was probably the worst company when it came to conflict mineral mining, something they did clean up relatively recently (albeit by just avoiding those areas rather than actually adjusting their policies to comply with regulations). Nintendo supported the extremely notorious SOPA act all the way back in 2012. Abusive and aggressive copyright protections have always been the norm for this company, and they continue to do so today.
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Xiahou Ba said:
Baby Daisy and Baby Rosalina were added to appeal to little girls who play Mario Kart, while the metals are low effort characters to give middleweight characters heavy stats. You may not like them but they did have a purpose, and they have their fans.
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Those are all very good points, which I haven't been aware of until you brought them up just now.
 
Lord Tatanga said:
Looking at the situation from a realistic perspective, I'm afraid that voice actors themselves don't really get a say in who gets to take over their duties, no matter how unfortunate that may sound. Yes, it sucks to be thrown under the bus by Nintendo the way Charles Martinet, Deanna Mustard and now Samantha Kelly (And Takashi Nagasako, from what I've been hearing through back channels) were, but there's sadly nothing they could do about it, nor much that we can do about it. The best thing we (and the aforementioned voice actors) can do is move on from this all, no matter how difficult that may be.
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Still I hope that Nintendo ditches Cup of Tea Productions (the voice acting agency they've been using lately) at some point soon. Because frankly the actors they're casting for the Mario cast are not doing that good a job at even trying to sound like their predecessors.
 
Xiahou Ba said:
I'd like to point out that Nintendo has been a soulless, unethical corporation for practically most of its video game history and things actually hadn't been much better back then. During Iwata's era, Nintendo had the horrific Content Creator program on YouTube and pursued extremely aggressive DMCA take-downs, trying to force people to join their creator program on top of an already restrictive policy, and this type of curation was an anomaly compared to other game publishers. Additionally, under Iwata and Reggie, Nintendo was probably the worst company when it came to conflict mineral mining, something they did clean up relatively recently (albeit by just avoiding those areas rather than actually adjusting their policies to comply with regulations). Nintendo supported the extremely notorious SOPA act all the way back in 2012. Abusive and aggressive copyright protections have always been the norm for this company, and they continue to do so today.


Baby Daisy and Baby Rosalina were added to appeal to little girls who play Mario Kart, while the metals are low effort characters to give middleweight characters heavy stats. You may not like them but they did have a purpose, and they have their fans.



Very weird flex to say that you hate copy cats and then say you want a skeletal variant of Bowser playable instead.

Regardless Baby Rosalina is never a very popular character in these online communities so I'm not sure what this opinion is doing in the unpopular opinions thread.
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While Nintendo has been ethically questionable before, I think it's only gotten worse since Iwata died and Reggie left. Unfortunately it seems that even if Switch 2 ends up losing steam at some point, it's not gonna be enough of a failure for Nintendo to undergo its next course correction.
 
Cornpopio said:
Still I hope that Nintendo ditches Cup of Tea Productions (the voice acting agency they've been using lately) at some point soon. Because frankly the actors they're casting for the Mario cast are not doing that good a job at even trying to sound like their predecessors.
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I feel that Kevin and the new crew from Wonder onwards are doing a great job of filling the shoes of Martinet and the others.

I know that the circumstances regarding Samantha Kelly and Takashi Nagasako were poorly dealt with (come on, not telling the voice of Princess Peach she's not in it until the day before the game releases?), but in the case of Kevin Afghani, Giselle Fernandez, Dawn Bennet, etc. keep in mind that they've only been voicing the characters for only a year or so. Give it time, and the voices will grow on people,

Of course, change is going to bring a bit of backlash and pushback from fans, but obviously Charles or Samantha aren't going to live forever and (technically) not voice the characters forever as well. I think what Nintendo is trying to do is make sure that in the case we do lose a voice actor or in the event they wanted to retire, they can fill the role with a new person just in case that happens.

Obviously I don't know what's going on behind the scenes regarding this situation, but that's what I think may be happening in regards to the voices.
 
The King said:
Obviously I don't know what's going on behind the scenes regarding this situation, but that's what I think may be happening in regards to the voices.
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I think they went with actors who aren't doing that well so hastily because, in Martinet's case, they began to see him as being linked to Mario in a way that was a liability. Particularly after the backlash against him not being cast in the movie.
 
Xiahou Ba said:
nobody brings up the dreadful jungle music because it's like the same set of irritating notes that play on a loop for like 5 seconds for the entire song
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I kind of like that theme, at worst i'm not outright bothered by it… although it doesn't evoke the idea of a jungle or ground course at all, and i end up completely tuning it out over time. To me, it would fit better in an interstitial menu screen, a tutorial, or some other liminal area (literally, not in the creepy aesthetic sense), than as background music for proper gameplay.

I do have what seems like a similar issue with the original Paper Mario soundtrack. So many pieces sound like variations on the same annoying pastiche of a march, and whenever they run out of ideas, they use this maddeningly monotonous repeating eighth note figure, over and over again. It's half of the main melody of "March Ahead", and it crops back up in "Koopa Village", "Shy Guy's Toy Box", and arguably some other places like the sparse parts of "Forever Forest". I can't tell if it was an intentional idea for a recurring motif, or if some extenuating circumstance left the composer(s) genuinely unable to fill things in with anything more substantive (and less grating) than playing the same note on every onbeat, then again a few steps down, then the most exasperating V7–I resolution. The thematically slipshod and juvenile "Toy Box" theme just ends up sounding like a self-parody of its surroundings.

Even though i don't quite find myself annoyed by the Yoshi's Island track, it sorts into a similar mental space when i listen to it too attentively. The straight rhythm and unbroken major pentatonicity do make it quickly sound played out, and the game presents it on the same level as material that makes heavier use of chromaticity and syncopation. Though, in comparison to the hackneyed marches, i find a lot of the more complex Paper Mario music to faceplant over bad instrument samples, rambling out-of-key solos, and even jarring mid-track genre shifts; i can't help but consider Yoshi's Island to have a stabler musical foundation. But, by any chance, am i picking at a similar experience here?
 
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