Has Nintendo found some way to make data take up less room or something? I doubt they would release a smaller main mario game simply for the reason of making it more ditigally downloaded.

Galaxy 2 was 1.3 gb^

I think you would have a really hard time finding a game that doesn't do that to some extent.

Well it's not like this is a revolutionary Mario game that cost much to make (it looks very simple). Add a little compression magic, and it's not unfeasable. Though, if they had a larger budget, I'm sure that it would have taken much more space.

Again^ Galaxy too up 1.3 GB.

Hey, my Alan Wake digial + all the DLC is something like 7.1 GB!

Music, dialogue, high quality graphics it all adds up.  Plus, with a Mario game you are re-using many of your models.

I know, right? Game's so simple, no one else bothered making a better game.

I can't justify buying this game when they don't even put the effort in filling up the disc with 20GB of junk.

BRB. Canceling pre-order.

People do need to learn what causes games to be big data size wise. Twilight princess is a huge game, but it's textures are generally aweful (though not for a gamecube game) so it's not actually very big. Skyrim's texture pack doubled the game size on PC, and those textures aren't even the highest quality you can get.

Textures at high resolution IE textures going from 1024x1024 to 2048x2048 can increase the size 10x the original (might be off but it's drastic). Uncompressed FMV's and Uncompressed audio take up a lot of space as well.

A lot of Marios Textures seem flat (not a bad thing) as in 1 color or so. This reduces the size a whole lot lot while still looking good.

Try it in paint. Paint one image all red. Then draw one with squiggly lines all over it in colors.
I just did this in paint, and the flat one was 4 kb while the one with squiggles went to 188 kb.

This is what it has come to? Yay, the game is only x Gb? Glad you're enjoying your console ;p

Galaxy did not really have an abundance of "fur grass" to my memory, at all. In fact it looked pretty flat. The graphics for that game, for Wii hardware, were awesome, don't get me wrong. The Wii basically provided the best SD graphics we've ever seen, as it was the most powerful non-HD console (being more powerful in certain areas than the original Xbox). But I'm sorry, 3D World's graphics, all in all, look a ton better than Galaxy did. Considering that they managed to stuff Twilight Princess, which honestly was a pretty big game, with Xbox-comparable graphics no less, onto a 1.5 gb mini-disc, it's no surprise that 3D World, even with all it's content, is less than 2 gb.