Mario = Right Way, Zelda = Wrong Way

[dschumm]

All I've got to offer as backing is some anecdotal evidence, but how's this: of the three casual gamers I know of who have played Zelda (two of them female, for what it's worth), all beat it, and they only rarely died (call it three times or so throughout the game, on average, generally around the first shadow beasts and the ice dungeon miniboss). While they haven't played Mario Galaxy, I know that at least one found Sunshine all but impossible while another thought it was too difficult to be worth playing. None of them have any ability to play Smash Bros, mostly because the most sophisticated strategy available to them is smash attacking while standing still. Only one of them is capable of recovering with any regularity - it requires jumping and then using the characters up-B, in that order, all while holding the direction of the stage. I've yet to see a casual player who was any good at Smash Bros at all, and mostly for these reasons. You can explain to them exactly what needs to be done, and they can understand that, but they can't figure out how to make the character do what they want him to do in the short amount of time they have.

Zelda is much slower paced, and can be played and beaten by seeing it as a progression of one-button tasks. Mario is faster and requires multi-tasking on the controller. That alone makes Mario a much harder game for many casuals.

Edit: To address the obvious objection - that Nintendo already fixed this with the Wii controller - I'd argue that we're not even close to fully intuitive control. From my limited observations, I think that Nintendo's done wonders for casual shooters - aiming and shooting is now achievable for even the least practiced person - but Mario Galaxy can hardly be said to use the motion controls intuitively. It's 'shake to spin'. They would have been better off letting you spin in the air by pressing the jump button again. And the star bits make the whole thing even more complicated.

Edit2: To perhaps clarify the sort of skill I'm talking about, I think that regular gamers eventually instinctualize controller functions to the point that they don't consciously think about which button they have to hit to perform a task. When we play Mario Galaxy, we don't have to go through this process: "An enemy! I want to jump on his head. Which button is jump? A! I'll press A." We think "An enemy! I'll jump on his head." Now what if you have to long-jump, turn 90 degrees, jump, wall-jump, and deal with an enemy? And what if you're rushed because you're on a moving platform or there's a wave of lava approaching or similar. This isn't that dissimilar to a lot of situations in Mario Galaxy, even the bits that you'd expect everyone to see.

Edit3: I'd be very interested in hearing from anyone who knows a casual gamer who found Zelda too difficult while having no real problems with Mario.

Edit4: First, sorry for all the addendums. Reading the above posts, I'd like to distinguish between casual gamers as gamers who only play for brief periods of time and casual gamers as people who almost never play games. I'm talking about the second sort in the above.

As to which one was better, I found Zelda more rewarding. Mario was fun, and a good way to pass time, but I found it ridiculously easy with the exception of one or two levels.

The part in Zelda where you have to put out the moving flaming caravan from horseback with your boomerang while getting harassed by enemies. If your friends didn't die at least 5 times at this part they are not casual. That stage required as much coordinated control as many of the difficult stars in SMG.