By using this site, you agree to our Privacy Policy and our Terms of Use. Close
Frogger on 16 January 2017
Edit Thread
guiduc said:
spemanig said:

Course clear. I'll obviously give Super Mario Odyssey a chance, but this should have been a Donkey Kong game, not Mario. Mario should never be sandbox - that goes against the origins of the franchise. Mario is the linear platformer and Zelda is the explorative action game. Metroid is the best of two worlds. To focus on exploration instead of pure, objective-based platforming in a Mario game is extremely franchise inauthentic.

Strangely enough, I think the opposite of you. My views changed when Retro took over Donkey Kong - I truly felt they could build a 2D platformer and make it very exciting and fresh. On the other hand, the New Super Mario Bros. serie felt stagnant, with very few innovations here and there, while the EAD team was making excellent 3D Mario titles. Don't get me wrong, 3D World is good. But it wasn't nearly as good to me as was Tropical Freeze, with whose I bank an absurd number of hours.

I believe Mario can easily be a sandbox - collectothon game, because it does it better than DK. And now, DK does 2D better than Mario thanks to Retro. But this is preference, of course, mostly due to the fact that the last DK games were so good as 2D platformers.

NSMB felt stagnant because it was. 3DW didn't feel exciting or fresh because it wasn't. That has nothing to do with the gameplay, though. Both the NSMB and 3DW games are much better designed games than both the Returns series and the sandbox Mario games. What the latter games have over the former is a distinct sense of identity and theming that separates them from other games, especially in their respective series.

If the first NSMB had the same gameplay, but looked like Cuphead and was called Super Mario Reeltime, NSMB2 had the same gameplay but looked like impressionistic art and was called Super Mario Canvas, SMBWii had the same gameplay but looked like a super hero comic book and was called The Legendary Super Mario Bros, and NSMB U had the same gameplay, but had some other identifying theme that separated it from other Mario games, none of the would be looked at with the complacency that they do now. Same with 3DW and 3DL. If they didn't just look like copy-pasts from other Mario games, no one would care that they're linear. Even if they kept there names, no one world care.

The gameplay was never the problem - the presentation was. People love Mario 1, 2, 3, and World because they have distinct identities and turning. A standard adventure, a dream, a play, and a world. Only SMB had flagpoles. Same with the 3D games. 64 was a castle with paintings. Sunshine was a beach resort. Galaxy was space. Odyssey is clearly trying to feel like a grand and epic journey. If all of those games instead had a bunch of course-clear levels, but left the theming the same, they would have been just as well received, if not more well received because they be better games that don't recycle the same level over and over again. Even Galaxy.