Sure, there are definitely some stinkers floating around the community levels, but even the worst Super Mario Maker levels still have that iconic charm that makes this franchise so special. Being that everyone and their mother understands the Mario jump, which is, to this day, the most mechanically sound jump in any platformer, it’s exciting to create a stage that you know will be pleasurable to play. The idea that you can play-test your level at any time during your creation process allows you to make sure that the stages of your dreams can actually exist. Super Mario Maker, thanks to the rock-solid mechanics that essentially kicked off the insane journey that the video game industry has been on over the past thirty years, thankfully and obviously doesn’t suffer from this problem.
Sure, the tools are there, but good tools without actual entertainment value makes for a bland experience. The greatest barrier to entry for any creation-based title is player motiviation, and the tools have been put in place here so that making the Mario level of your dreams is actually pretty attainable. Dragging and dropping is the name of the game here, and when this is combined with a number of easy touch tools for increasing item size and position, the result is magic. With the exception of an eraser being a separate function entirely, which is likely a result of the Game Pad’s lack of multi-touch functionality, everything that you think you can do is exactly what you should. The thing about Super Mario Maker that makes its creation mode so special is that it feels like it was inherently designed to be intuitive. Of course, lots of other games have made in-depth creation possible, just look at LittleBigPlanet and the more engine-like Project Spark. 3, Super Mario World and New Super Mario Bros. Once players select a game to model their creation after (there’s no way to splice elements from different games together, so unfortunately that Frankenstein-like monstrosity you were hoping to make is currently impossible), they’ll have the opportunity to drag and drop as many pieces as they see fit. Super Mario Maker‘s creation tools give players access to literally everything you could possibly imagine from Super Mario Bros., Super Mario Bros. As someone who grew up with some of the best Nintendo games always on his television before growing increasingly annoyed at Nintendo’s practices, it’s a joy to play a game that reminds us all what made this company so special in the first place. Thinking of this fact is consistently mind-blowing: there’s a game in my living room that will let me play oodles of Mario content for years. A master-class in gameplay, level design, charm and mechanical perfection, there’s something to be said about including the framework for greatness in a game with unlimited creation potential. U on the Wii U, has been something truly special from its inception. The Super Mario Bros. franchise, from the iconic first NES title’s release in 1985 all the way up to New Super Mario Bros. Sure, a great deal of hubbub has been made over the outstanding creation tools present, and this statement certainly doesn’t discount their inclusion or the creativity they inspire in any way, but Super Mario Maker is bigger than simply a create-your-own-level title. In a vacuum, Super Mario Maker is everything that hardcore gamers could ever dream of: a game that gives us the power to play new Super Mario Bros. levels until the end of time. Could you imagine a world in which Super Mario Maker was a Wii U launch title? Had the ability to create and play levels from the greatest video game franchise known to man been bundled in with Nintendo’s brand new console, would we still be making jokes at the Wii U’s expense? We’ll never know how the Wii U’s lifespan would have played out differently had it not taken three years to maximize the GamePad, but now that Super Mario Maker exists, we can finally begin to see what Nintendo was going for when it released its new console in November 2012. The GamePad has forever been a novelty at best and a clunky toy-like tablet imitator at worst, and while the issues with the design of the Wii U’s main controller persist, we finally have a game that fundamentally would not function half as well without it. For three years, the Wii U has toiled away, boasting a number of downright outstanding exclusives on a piece of hardware that, frankly, doesn’t make much sense.