Worst levels in Mario games

There's so much wrong with Yoshi himself in Super Mario Sunshine that he might just be the most overly complicated game mechanic I've seen in a Mario game. I'm happy only that one level (largely) requires using him.

•Why do you have to bring him fruit everytime you need him to hatch? Can't you just, like, hit the egg or something?
•Why are you forced to bring him a specific type of fruit at random when there's virtually no difference between the types of fruit?
•As if the requisites for getting to ride Yoshi weren't a tedious enough process in itself, why is the fruit usually placed so far away from him?
•Why do you have to keep eating fruit so Yoshi doesn't die?
•Why does only one level make use of his ability to turn enemies into platforms? Why is that a thing in the first place?
•WHY DOES HE DIE IN SWIMMABLE WATER? (the point that he is made of paint is a bunch of nonsense because he isn't vulnerable to water otherwise)
•Why can't you play as green yosh without glitches

In Super Mario Galaxy 2, you just find him, you break him out of his egg, giddy up, and boom now you can eat enemies and flutter jump at zero expenses other than getting hit. Sunshine on the other hand makes you jump so many unecessary hoops only for you to potentially lose him in some unfair circumstance. At least you can spin jump and triple jump with him.
 
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Super Mario Sunshine has quite the amount of different kinds of incompetence displayed here. I don't think Secret of the Dirty Lake is a bad level, just the physics kinda screw with you. It's a tough level, but dunno why they made it like this in the beginning of the game.

On the other hand, there's the roller coaster balloon episode where aiming doesn't work very well as rockets just seem to just offset by like 50 feet in any direction before you shoot. Look in this screenshot; you can even see how the smoke doesn't line up with where you're shooting.
Roller_Coaster_Balloons.png

Whoever decided that thing was to be put in a precision aiming minigame probably really didn't play that damn thing. It doesn't help they put you on a timer and on three cycles and then you die. At least with the trash clearing crap in Galaxy, you're permitted to retry however many times you like, you don't have to die in the process to have the game further mock you.

I think people are conflating difficult levels with "bad" levels; difficulty and poor design can correlate but I think genuine bad design is Super Mario Sunshine's Toxic Lily Pad crap as well as Yoshi Tower in Yoshi's Island DS. Secret of Dirty Lake is just a genuinely difficult level. I think the Trial Galaxies are also difficult but not really cheap. I get that a lot of the "hard" challenges in later Mario games are overreliant on length and a lot of pits to fall off, which doesn't make for a really great challenge; they wouldn't be as difficult if checkpoints were put in.
 
Koopa con Carne said:
Why do you have to keep eating fruit so Yoshi doesn't die?
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I believe their reasoning is that he's not a regular yoshi but actually made of paint.
Mario Party X said:
Super Mario Sunshine's Toxic Lily Pad
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I find it weird this one doesn't get talked about as much as Yoshi's Fruit Adventure. When people say difficult SMS level, this and the roller coaster are exactly what comes to mind for me.

WAIT OMG, THE FREAKING WATERMELON ROLLING CONTEST.. That one is badly made if you ask me... it's total hell.

Mario Party X said:
I think people are conflating difficult levels with "bad" levels;
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Like the sand bird level? It's annoying that they kind of made it so you have to die the first time, unless you're a really quick learner..
 
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Mariomaniacs said:
I find it weird this one doesn't get talked about as much as Yoshi's Fruit Adventure. When people say difficult SMS level, this and the roller coaster are exactly what comes to mind for me.
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Isn't the Toxic Lily Pad Ride basically the most infamous mission in Sunshine, though? If anything it hasn't been brought up in this thread much because it's already been talked to death.
 
I brought it up in passing. The level in of itself isn't the worst, though not good, much less great. It's just that the overall programming of secret levels and exiting to Isle Delfino lacks obvious oversight. Who thought putting in just one spawn point in a large hud map in Isle Delfino after you exit a secret level was a good idea? That toxic lily pad course requires a slow-moving boat to go to an otherwise inaccessible area way far off the map, and completing the course without dying, with or without completing the Shrine, will warp you back to the beginning. It appears to even worse than that secret course in the clock room in Super Mario 64 that spawns you in the moat if you fall off, and you have to progress all the way back to that clock room to retry.
 
Reading this topic reminds me that while I love playing sunshine, I only ever 100% it once.
 
I think I will add Extra 5: Kamek's Revenge from Super Mario World 2: Yoshi's Island. Trying to 100% this level, you almost need to know exactly where those red coins and flowers are located. At a point, you need to use a morph bubbles to transform into Helicopter Yoshi right in top of a bottomless pit, so if you can't complete anything before the time limit (which is kinda difficult with Kamek and those Green Gloves along the way), you are pretty much doomed.

There's so many stuff happening at once in this level, which make things more complicated than it should be.
 
i kinda love sunshine but what i love about it has little to do with the gameplay which is frequently incredibly frustrating in comparison. no surprise it keeps being brought up a lot here !