The Super Mario series has come a long way since Mario first rescued Peach from Bowser’s clutches on the Nintendo Entertainment System. Mario has cleaned up an island with a sentient hose, launched himself through the stars alongside Rosalina, and possessed innocent bystanders with the help of a living hat. Let’s look back at years of Super Mario history and determine the best and worst part of each of our second-favourite Italian plumber’s adventures. (He gets second place because Luigi will always be #1 in our hearts.)
Super Mario Bros. (NES)
Best: That Iconic Mario Movement
It’s really tough to single out one thing about the original Super Mario Bros. that stands out as its best aspect. It was a triumph on so many levels: unforgettable music, distinctive character design, and the best platforming levels the nascent genre had yet seen, just to name a few. But none of that would have mattered if just running and jumping as Mario through all those treacherous environments and making those Hail-Mary leaps over Bowser at the end of each castle didn’t feel so damn good. Today, of course, playing as Mario doesn’t feel particularly remarkable, but that’s just because Nintendo knocked it out of the park in designing his movement, creating something that immediately felt so intuitive, natural, and amazing that games have been building on it ever since.
Worst: The Water Levels
Look, I appreciate that Nintendo wanted to change up the action as you traversed the Mushroom Kingdom, so I can totally forgive the presence of Super Mario Bros.’ water levels. But in a game that was revolutionary in part because of just how good the movement feels, these stages, in which you sluggishly try to avoid swimming straight into a slow-moving Blooper or Cheep Cheep, really deflate the momentum. Swimming stages have continued to be a staple of Mario’s adventures, of course, but Nintendo would tweak the movement to make them less of a drag. By Super Mario Bros. 3, you already felt like you had more control underwater, and if you scored one of those snazzy frog suits, you were really in business.
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Super Mario Bros. 2 (NES)
Best: The Four Playable Characters
Mario had to share the spotlight for the first time in this oddball sequel, and the distinctive abilities of each of his playable companions added a lot to the fun. Toad’s strength and speed and Peach’s float are cool, of course, but my favourite has always been Luigi with his floaty jump and its adorable animation. That’s my Mario brother right there! Notably, this is the first time that Luigi was depicted as taller and skinnier than his brother, rather than simply being a palette swap like he was in Mario Bros., Super Mario Bros., and the Japanese version of Super Mario Bros. 2.
Worst: Sub-space
SMB2 has this thing called Sub-space, a dark alternate dimension that you access with the potions you occasionally find. If you happen to enter at the right spot, you’ll score a mushroom for your trouble, but unless you’ve previously memorized where those lucky spots are, you’ll likely waste a potion and come up empty. Secrets and discovery are a great part of Mario games and have been ever since we first had our mind blown by warp zones in the original, but this trial-and-error method of hunting down helpful items wasn’t fun or rewarding.
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Super Mario Bros. 3 (NES)
Best: Giant Land
Like the original Super Mario Bros., this sequel is such a work of genius, a product of the creative team firing on all cylinders, that it’s extremely difficult to point to one thing as the stand-out feature. But if there’s one aspect that’s particularly indicative of the game’s excellence for me, it’s Giant Land, the game’s fourth world, in which everything is super-sized: huge goombas, koopas, blocks, and piranha plants totally shake up your sense of scale. But again, it’s not really Giant Land in isolation that makes Super Mario Bros. 3 so great. It’s just one instance of the inventiveness with which the creative team approached making this game, with each of its realms feeling like a distinctively different step of your epic journey into the heart of Bowser’s territory.
Worst: All those autoscrollers
Bowser’s airships have a real sense of drama to them. They suggest that Bowser isn’t some flailing, impotent baddie and that he’s got real military might, an empire at his disposal. But the way in which the screen scrolls at its own pace through these stages, often more slowly than you might want to yourself, feels constraining in a game that, like the original, is at its best when you’re enjoying remarkable freedom of movement. And then, just as you’re approaching the game’s climax, you’re hit with several more autoscrollers in Bowser’s world, as you face his tank fleet, his navy, his flotilla of little airships, and then another group of tanks before finally entering the challenging final castle. I appreciate the effort to make Bowser feel formidable, but these stages needlessly prevent you from speeding through, making them both a late-game drag and the bane of speedrunners everywhere.
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Super Mario World (SNES)
Best: Yoshi
Super Mario World is when Nintendo finally introduced Mario’s dinosaur companion Yoshi, who our hero gets to ride around throughout the game. He rules because he can just eat enemies Mario would have to stomp or throw a well-timed fireball at. Then, when he eats certain koopa shells, he gets powers like flight, earthquake stomps, and three-way fireballs. We love a multi-talented king, and he deserves to be the star of his own game. Which he was in the next one.
Worst: Lost some flavour
Super Mario World portended Nintendo’s general approach to sequels on its new, 16-bit system: refine, refine, and refine some more. This resulted in countless memorable classics, but was not without drawbacks. One reason some people prefer Super Mario Bros. 3 over its sequel is that Super Mario World filed off so many rough edges it may have lost some of its “flavour.” The movement physics feel less weighty, the various lands’ themes are a bit mundane and don’t do much to inform the level designs (what makes a level design…chocolate?), and overall the game is just too easy. (That said, fans who create custom levels have addressed that last point quite thoroughly.)
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Super Mario World 2: Yoshi’s Island (SNES)
Best: Throwing eggs at shit
As the title suggests, the star of Yoshi’s Island is none other than the green dino himself. Because Yoshi isn’t playing second fiddle to Mario, the second Super Mario World game builds around him, and he gets a whole new set of abilities he didn’t have before. This includes being able to change enemies into eggs, which follow you in a single-file line until you decide to hurl them. This factors into combat, puzzle solving, and coin collection as you throw your spawn into places you can’t reach. Who among us doesn’t want to throw eggs at our enemies without consequence?
Worst: Saving that damn baby
In Yoshi’s Island, our egg-wielding hero is tasked with delivering baby Mario across the Mushroom Kingdom. Every time you’re hit by an enemy, the baby will float away in a bubble, along with all his hopes and dreams of becoming a moderately successful plumber in adulthood. So every time you get hit by a stray koopa shell, you have to chase after Mario before he floats too far away. Sure, it’s better than dying in one hit, but then the baby starts crying up a racket and you start to doubt the life decisions that led to this dangerous babysitting gig.
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Super Mario 64 (Nintendo 64)
Best: The jump to 3D was a cultural reset
Super Mario 64’s transition from 2D sidescroller to 3D platformer was a capital-M Moment for video games. Nowadays we rarely see many consoles have a “killer app” that sells you on everything a system is about, but Super Mario 64 did just that in 1996 when it launched alongside the Nintendo 64. It proved popular 2D games like the Super Mario series could exist in 3D spaces and transcend previous technical limitations. Though the Nintendo 64 conceded market dominance to the original PlayStation by the end of its lifecycle, the system still stands tall as a symbol of Nintendo’s ability to adapt old structures into new ideas and Super Mario 64 is a key part to that.
Worst: But by today’s standards, it can feel pretty rough
But like some influential games, Super Mario 64 does feel a bit sluggish compared to everything it helped pave the way for. Even by 1996 standards the N64 juggernaut has a troublesome camera, and Mario doesn’t move with a lot of the same precision he does now, though a lot of that could be attributed to the system’s controller, which was the company’s first foray into analogue stick control. A lot of these issues were improved upon in the Super Mario 64 DS remake, which served as a technical showcase for that handheld the same way the original did for N64, but this is the way of things when something truly special is iterated on. Take it easy, old timer, the future games will take it from here.
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Super Mario Sunshine (Nintendo GameCube)
Best: Bowser Jr.
Some might say Bowser’s son is the Scrappy Doo of the Super Mario universe and that we’d be better off without him, but I say, “Those people are wrong and should be thrown in Bowser’s dungeon.” This guy frames Mario and gets him thrown into jail and forced to do community service. That’s already more hardcore than anything his father’s ever pulled off. He’s also super cute, a talented artist, and a villain in his own right. And meta aside, he’s fun as hell to play in Super Smash Bros. Thank you Sunshine for bringing this good boy into the world.
Worst: Needed more TLC
Super Mario Sunshine felt strangely unpolished for a new Super Mario game. There are lots of glitches, random difficulty spikes, and just a surprising number of rough edges in general. Even the F.L.U.D.D. jetpack system is a little clunky at times. One bit that really symbolises Sunshine’s inchoateness is its infamous pachinko level, in which Mario’s launched into a giant pachinko machine to gather red coins without falling to his death out of the bottom. Sounds fun! And it could’ve been with more iteration, but the level’s unreliable, quarrelsome physics and unavoidable-feeling deaths remind us that even Nintendo has to work really hard to make these games feel as effortlessly perfect as they often do.
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New Super Mario Bros. series (Nintendo DS/Wii/Wii U/Switch)
Best: Revitalized the series’ 2D rollout
When the first New Super Mario Bros. game launched in 2006, the series hadn’t seen a new 2D side-scroller since Super Mario World 2: Yoshi’s Island, and you didn’t even play as Mario in that one. The “New” in the New Super Mario Bros. title positioned it as a resurgence of the classic Mario formula, which came as a welcome surprise because people were missing that style of game by then. In the years since, “New Super Mario Bros.” has become the default branding for games of this style.
It’s now been several years since we’ve had a new Mario side-scroller. We have all these questions about a possible 3D game after Odyssey, but it’s been 11 years since New Super Mario Bros. U. So maybe it’s also time we got a new New Super Mario Bros.
Worst: They all kinda blend together
While each New Super Mario Bros. game has distinguishing factors, like New Super Mario Bros. U’s Boost Mode that lets someone use the Wii U GamePad to interact with the environment, the series broadly lacks the same innovation we see in 3D Mario games. They’re solid, clearly meant to be evocative of classic game design, and can be fun to play with friends. But there’s a reason the New Super Mario Bros. games aren’t talked about with the same breathless fervor of Super Mario Bros. 3 or Super Mario Galaxy. They’re fine! They’re good! But that’s all they really are. Hopefully that changes somewhere down the line and we can see side-scrolling Mario games innovate in the way they did before.
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Super Mario Galaxy series (Nintendo Wii)
Best: The level design
Because Super Mario Galaxy takes place in space with Mario jumping and running around different tiny planets, Nintendo was able to play with level design in a way that felt truly special a decade removed from Super Mario 64. On top of some excellent Mario platforming, Galaxy brought new layers to getting around that gave both Nintendo and players new space to play in. Now, rather than just considering “can I make this jump,” there are scenarios in which the gravitational pull of a small planet creates some really clever design moments. It might not have had the same cultural impact as Super Mario 64, but Galaxy was still a pretty innovative spin on the formula.
Worst: The Wii Remote waggle
Super Mario Galaxy is a game I sometimes have trouble finding fault in, and even this point I don’t have too much of an issue with it because it’s such a small thing in an otherwise stellar game. The Wii’s motion controls can either feel baked into a game’s core, or bolted onto it out of obligation, and Super Mario Galaxy’s definite feels like the latter. The Wii Remote is used to gather items by pointing at them and is utilised in some levels to deal with obstacles. The motion controls do ultimately feel unnecessary, but that didn’t stop Nintendo from trying to emulate them in the Switch port.
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Super Mario 3D World (Nintendo Wii U)
Best: Four-player co-op
Between Mario Party and Mario Kart, the series has never been lacking in multiplayer experiences, but there hadn’t been one in a 3D platformer before Super Mario 3D World hit the Wii U in 2013. Up to four players can band together as Mario, Luigi, Peach, and Toad to jump through some exceptionally polished Super Mario levels. It captures the chaos of New Super Mario Bros. Wii’s co-op design in a 3D framework. It’s a blast…
Worst: Four-player co-op:
…but it’s also a nightmare. Have you ever been minding your own business navigating a level only for one of your co-op partners to pick you up and throw you off a ledge? Have you ever tried to coordinate with a group of friends who cannot, for the life of them, follow instructions without picking a fight or griefing you in one way or another? I’m not talking about Overwatch, I’m talking about Super Mario 3D World. Choose your coop partners carefully, friends, as they will colour your 3D World experience.
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Super Mario Odyssey (Nintendo Switch)
Best: “Jump Up Super Star!”
Yes, yes, Super Mario Odyssey is a joyful platformer with a lot of excellent game design to back up its hype. But when we talk about the best part of the Switch game, it’s clearly the song “Jump Up Super Star!” Featuring Pauline’s soaring vocals (as portrayed by Kate Higgins), the jazzy track serves as the backdrop for one of Super Mario Odyssey’s best levels. It’s a swinging certified banger that perfectly encapsulates the joy of Super Mario games with a catchy hook and a ton of swagger. Sucks that Nintendo won’t put it on streaming services.
Worst: The moral conundrum of possessing the innocent
One of the main conceits of Super Mario Odyssey is that Mario has a living hat companion named Cappy. Throwing the hat onto certain enemies, objects, and even human beings allows Mario to make them do his bidding. Sure, the game doesn’t sit with the implications of that very long, but you do. A wise man once asked in a since-deleted tweet what would happen if Mario were to throw his hat onto the head of a pregnant person. Does the plumber control not only the parent, but the unborn child, as well? I saw that question asked six years ago and have not been able to look at Cappy the same way since. And now, neither will you.
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